““No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other.”
Matthew 6:24
A way to see the modern culture war is to understand that while God is not a Republican, Satan certainly is a Democrat. The Democrat party is through and through a party of antinomianism and state worship; there isn’t a single issue upon which they don’t simultaneously exonerate men of sin and elevate the state over God. Republicans are happy to point this out but that’s as far as they go. The two are like warring siblings who run away from home and the Republicans only go down the street whereas the Democrats have gone to another town, gotten on a bus there, and left the state. Yes, the one is certainly better but neither intends to follow the will of the Lord.
Republicans, you see, will acknowledge god – that’s with a little “g” but not the Biblical God of Scripture who commands the universe and even, gasp, the civil magistrate. They like god, the Republicans do, but not as God the definer and ruler of all things. Men are mainly fallen, not totally depraved, their reasoning goes, and this flawed theology throws wide the door through which the leftist marches. If men aren’t truly dead in sin then they can help themselves. Alas, this is the hill the left is always prepared to die upon because they know they must. God’s radical authority and man’s fallen nature are the two areas that the Republican Party quickly concedes and then wonders why it keeps losing all the battles downstream. The right’s weak-sauce theology – specifically on the authority of God’s word/law and understanding of total depravity – is its Achilles heel.
But this, like with the left, is a mistake born from the deepest of the deep insofar as theology goes. Its genesis is, indeed, found in Genesis. Chapter three…with Eve obtusely chatting with the talking serpent about the reliability of God’s word. That alone should help us understand the insanity of it all. A serpent shouldn’t be talking, much less asking theology questions. Questioning God, you see, is unnatural. Questioning our understanding of Him is not. The conservative movement’s fatal flaw is not in their open humanism but in their subtle polytheism. If the left flies proudly the flag of humanism, the right flies that flag too…albeit a little lower and with a hint of embarrassment. What the left champions in all that rage of revolutionary fervor, the right sneaks through back doors like a mistress. The left saunters down the road openly, hand in hand with the love of its life. The right nods at her with shame in the early morning light as he passes on the street.
The issue is, as always, the question of questions: did God really say? And not only that but what exactly did He say and how much authority does He have when He speaks. The right is a Maginot Line in the defense against tyranny because it has swallowed the poison that is the myth of neutrality. While it believes in God (so it says), it accepts without disputation the humanist belief that the separation of church and state means that there is a moral law over God. The operating premise of the modern church-state separation myth is that what is moral and good can be arrived at outside the word/law of God. If this is true then God is not God insofar as He’s a kind of cosmic manager whom the Universe put in charge. God is, if the myth of neutrality is correct, and the separation of church and state is real, merely a very powerful celestial hall monitor. The Republicans who fight for cultural renewal but accept the separation myth are like personal trainers taking a client on a run but stopping for donuts and ice cream. The chubby fellow needs to run exactly because his diet is terrible. Likewise, our culture is dying exactly because we don’t believe the Lord’s word/law. Democrats say, “The word of the state is perfect, reviving the soul…God must stay out of it.” The Republicans counter with, “The law of the Lord is mostly perfect…I know…I know…it’s religion and you don’t believe it, but it’ll really help us live our best life now if you listen.”
Until America realizes that the culture war is a theological dispute, Satan will continue to run over the flimsy earthworks of Republicans like Hitler overran the French. The battle is epistemological and revelational. If the defenders of the word of the Lord don’t truly believe that God’s word/law is absolutely authoritative, there’s no other way this can go. The power of faith is exactly the power of God working through His blessings of His obedient people. But His people go at the left with arguments from expediency rather than with the full commitment to His word. It’s like a soldier marching into battle, gun at the ready, but without any ammo.
The intellectual weight of the myth of neutrality is lost to us in an age of philosophical nihilism and narcissism. The Republican party accepts as fact the founding of the country as a constitutional republic but omits the reality that this is/was only possible to a people who understand that only God is ultimately sovereign. If God “shares” sovereignty with the state, which He must if, in fact, He can’t enter the halls of government, then the state is ipso facto a co-god of God. The meaning of Matthew 6:24 is lost to us for the simple fact that we want two masters – god and state. This is what it means to be the modern republican who says, along with the atheist, that there is a separation of church and state.
The man who says that his politics are informed by his faith, or guided by his religion, but that the two are wholly separate is saying that God may give advice, but not commandments. It’s to say that there are ethical laws that exist outside of God to which men and government appeal. Such is the sorry state of the contemporary religious right. Such is the foundational reason for the odd phenomenon of the left’s claiming of the moral high ground for their immoral crusades. To read the right-leaning news is to see writer after writer wrestle with the ludicrous fact that the Democrat party is always making moral arguments to support their policies. It puzzles them exceedingly. Abortion, taxes, regulations, trans propaganda for kids in schools…you name it and the left comes at the subject from a moral position. The so-called right fights back with feeble swings. They spend most of their time trying to explain why they aren’t bad people for opposing the allegedly moral thing the left is on a tear about. They’re always on the defense, not because they’re stupid – although the result is the same – but because they’ve unwittingly accepted as true the central lie of history. That lie, again, is that God didn’t really say.
If the Republican party would take seriously the fact of the biblical separation of powers rather than the humanistic one, it would regain the initiative. There is no authority except from God (Romans 13:1) and all that exist have been established by Him. The state is His creation and, according to Romans 13, has the job of being God’s avenger…that is, punishing the criminal who has directly violated the rights of another citizen. The church is the bride of Christ whose job is to build up the saints through the preaching of the word, prayer, sacraments and fellowship. The church is not the state and the state is not the church. The gospel is advanced by those who are sent to preach the good news of salvation by faith alone. The church and state are separate, therefore, because God has made them so; they are both under God and given divine mandates. The state must punish crime as defined by God (Romans 13:3-4). It has no power to define for itself what is good and evil! The Republican who accepts as a matter of doctrine the humanistic philosophy of the state – that God must not enter the halls of the capitol – rejects the word of the Lord. Republicans are weak because they’re like Adam. They stand idly by as the Tempter assaults the integrity of God’s word, not objecting to his evil premise, and this leads to them nibbling stupidly on the fruit when it’s passed to them.
Make no mistake: the greatest evil in the world is questioning the integrity of God’s word. If God didn’t really say, then there is no truth that’s transcendent and authoritative. That Republicans have accepted this foundational lie is why they’re losing moral arguments to morally insane people. The way back is to repent of our polytheism and once again boldly proclaim the sovereignty of the Lord and His word/law.
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