Category: Culture

As the first season ended in “Rings of Power,” Amazon’s entrée into the cape-and-dragon genre, I found myself cheering for the Orcs. Let me explain.

Sweet Land and Godspeed present a way of life that modern Americans have by and large forgotten... being tied to a particular and unique people that all have their own stories and come from particular, unique places.

To be sure, constrained presentism exists on both the right and the left—everyone on the political spectrum bears the temptation to mine the past for present concerns. This temptation must be resisted. Our innate proclivity to tell stories and forge historical memory must coalesce with an uncompromising set of virtues necessary for the storyteller. Without these qualities, a true historical consciousness of who and what we are as a nation will fade, and we ourselves will perish.

Joshua Mitchell considers what lengths moderns will go to cleanse the stain of humanity, but the prior question is whether the reality within which humanity exists is itself stained. The only hope of doing that is to believe in a God who is perfect, without blemish or creaturely limitation, for ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’ (1 John 3:3). The only hope for politics, therefore, is a renewed vision of the perfect purity of God.

Everyone loves a good reformation until some rash soul takes a notion to actually reform something. The sons of the prophets much prefer it when their prophets are deceased. Perhaps when they have been dead for a generation or more will they cease to be objects of criticism and attack. Two generations and it is possible to buy a floor buffer for the marble rotunda. Thus it is that later generations build tombs and memorials for the prophets—prophets they would not tolerate for one skinny-minute walking around at ninety-eight point six.

Although both were consigned to insane asylums, it was Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, contends Holland, who were the true prophets of reason. They, unlike so many of their contemporaries and so many self-satisfied Westerners today, actually grasped the essential difference between paganism and Christianity. As Christianity fades into the twilight, Holland tacitly warns, we should not be surprised to find monsters that we thought long since slain again stalking the darkness that lies behind the death of God.

In this world, we are warned, we will have trouble. As “trouble” goes, a seven-day Twitter suspension is a truly light and temporary affliction. Still, it is one more small reminder that as long as we are truthful, we will not be welcome. All the more imperative, in these times, to know who one’s friends truly are—and who one’s God truly is.

I think that we would do well to reclaim this Nehemian vision of Eliot’s—rebuilding our culture through rebuilding our families. Perhaps we find ourselves reading about the means for restoring order in our chaotic time precisely because we have not heeded the importance of our homes.

For Christians to truly hold fast to what is good, to truly seek the good of their neighbors, then they must hate what is evil. They must hate the evil lies promoted by transgender activists. Out of love for others and love for the truth, Christians must refuse to speak the lies of transgender ideology.

The average person in America can sense that something has changed profoundly in the era since Obama won his second term. They might not be sure what it is, how to describe it, or what to do about it, but they know it’s there. While the market for denialism and business as usual is still big, it’s shrinking by the day as people look for ideas that will actually help them figure out how to live in today’s cultural moment.