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On July 20, 2017 By In Culture, Music, Politics

Happy AR Day! a holiday to counter Bastille Day

Twenty-some years ago my sister was in France, studying Gregorian chant with the monks at the Abbaye Saint-Pierre in Solesmes. During her time there, the 14th of July rolled around, when the rest of the country celebrates la Fête nationale, better known to us as Bastille Day. But things were quiet in Solesmes and the surrounding countryside. Curious at this lack of merriment, my sister asked why they weren’t joining in the celebrations and was greeted with faces registering shock. In a heavily Catholic region, they would never consider observing a day that marked the start of a godless revolution that wreaked such havoc on the Church, France and the rest of Europe.

There are now 359 days remaining until the next Bastille Day. As we await its occurrence, I would like to propose for that day a counter-holiday to be titled AR Day, “AR” standing for Anti-Revolutionary. After the generation of war and instability set off in 1789 finally ended with Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, many Europeans, especially those still loyal to the gospel of Jesus Christ, set about attempting to combat the ideological illusions the Revolution had engendered. This entailed breaking with the modern preoccupation—nay, obsession—with sovereignty and recovering a recognition of the legitimate pluriformity of society.

In any ordinary social setting, people owe allegiance to a variety of overlapping communities with differing internal structures, standards, and purposes. These are sometimes called mediating structures, intermediary communities or, taken collectively, civil society. This reality stands in marked contrast to liberal individualism and such collectivist ideologies as nationalism and socialism, each of which is monistic in its own way—locating a principle of unity in a human agent to which it ascribes sovereignty, or the final say.

Recognizing that the only source of unity in the cosmos is the God who has created and redeemed us in the person of his Son, Christians are freed from the need to locate a unifying source within the cosmos. Thus the institutional church can be itself, living up to its divinely-appointed mandate to preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, and maintain discipline. The family is free to be the family, nurturing children as they grow to maturity. Marriage is liberated to be itself, free from the stifling constraints of the thin contractarian version now extolled in North America and elsewhere. And, of course, the huge array of schools, labour unions, business enterprises, and voluntary associations have their own proper places, not to be artificially subordinated to an all-embracing state or the imperial self.

This pluriformity is something worth celebrating! It may sound perfectly mundane when described in the way I have here, but the fact that the followers of today’s political illusions find it so threatening indicates that we cannot afford to take it for granted. Here are some suggested readings that highlight this dissenting anti-revolutionary tradition:

  • Johannes Althusius, Politics (1614)
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
  • Guillaume Groen van Prinster, Unbelief and Revolution (1847)
  • Abraham Kuyper, Our Program (1880)
  • Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891)
  • Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (1951)
  • Yves R. Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government (1951)
  • Friedrich Julius Stahl, Philosophy of Law: the Doctrine of State and the Principles of State Law (1830)

I could go on and list many more resources, but these will suffice for purposes of our new holiday. I propose that we celebrate it by holding public readings from these and similar works. The food would consist of such anti-revolutionary delicacies as boerenkool met worst, haggis, Brazilian pães de queijo and pamonhas, and, for the sake of all those Byzantine-Rite Calvinists out there, loaves of white bread with taramosalata, Kalamata olives, and cruets of extra virgin (Greek!) olive oil.

Music will consist of mass communal singing of the Psalms, preferably from the Genevan Psalter. Additional music will be provided by (why not?) the monks of the Abbaye Saint-Pierre in Solesme! Let’s do it!

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On July 19, 2017 By In Culture, Music, Podcast

Episode 8, Fighting Musical Relativism in the Church with James B. Jordan

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In part one of this series on music, Jarrod Richey interviews James B. Jordan, scholar in residence at the Theopolis Institute (Birmingham, Alabama) and founder of Biblical Horizons.

This podcast on “fighting musical relativism in the church” is a discussion about a Christian theology of music, how to read the Bible’s musical themes, and developing mature church music.

Jordan also discusses the historicity of the psalms and how music shapes our theology.

Subscribe to the Kuyperian Podcast on iTunes and Google Play.

About James B. Jordan

James B. Jordan Theopolis Biblical Horizons His father was a professor of French Literature and his mother a piano teacher and a poetess. Jordan graduated from the University of Georgia in 1971 with a degree in Comparative Literature and studies in music and political philosophy. He finished his master’s degree in systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia and was awarded the D. Litt. degree from the Central School of Religion, England, in 1993.

Jordan is the author of several books, including The Sociology of the Church (1986); Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (1988); Creation in Six Days (1999); and several books of Bible exposition, worship, and liturgy.

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On July 3, 2017 By In Culture, Politics, Pro-Life, Theology

Abortion and moral schizophrenia

Last Saturday here in London, UK, we read about the heartbreaking case of the youngest victim of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Logan Gomes. The child of Marcio and Andreia Gomes, Logan was as yet unborn when the fire struck. His mother Andreia was taken to hospital following her escape, where doctors discovered that poisonous fumes from the blaze had claimed the life of the unborn child. Logan was born while Andreia was in an induced coma, and Mr Gomes was faced with the unthinkable task of breaking the news of his youngest child’s death to his wife and the couple’s other daughters, Megan and Luana.

Just a few days previously, we read that “the UK’s largest doctors union”, the British Medical Association, “has called for the complete decriminalisation of abortion and for women to have access to terminations on demand.” The article continues, “If the BMA gets its way, medics would not face criminal sanctions for providing, or women for procuring, an abortion in any circumstances, at any stage in a pregnancy.”

That is to say, the largest union of doctors in the UK is calling for the legalisation of the deliberate killing of children at precisely the same stage of life as young Logan Gomes. The BMA (an association of doctors – people with the job of saving lives) wants the law make abortion legal for any reason whatever, at any stage of pregnancy, right up to birth.

What are we to make of this?

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On June 27, 2017 By In Culture, Family and Children, Wisdom

A Few Cheers for Worldview Education

 “To imagine oneself in the place of another [is] the only human future.” -David Dark

Upton Sinclair once quipped, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Rod Dreher—channeling a recent lecture by Joshua Gibbs—has outlined “the problem with worldview education.” As one who gets a paycheck from providing such an education, I’m aware that I’m not approaching the issue from a neutral position. But heck, I’m a worldview teacher; I know there isn’t such a creature as neutrality anyhow, so why not offer a brief defense?

To be clear, I wasn’t at the conference to hear Joshua’s lecture, so my critique is limited to Dreher’s summation, which begins:

“The problem with worldview education, [Gibbs] said, is that it closes off the possibility of wonder by providing a rigid ideological measuring stick for texts. Gibbs said it gives students unearned authority over a book. Hand them ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ they open it up, say, ‘Marxist!’, then case it aside. Hand them ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra,’ they open it up, see Nietzsche’s name, say, ‘Nihilist!’ — and cast it aside.”

Positively, I’m appreciative of the danger of “unearned authority” over a text. In my worldview class at least, we read Plato before discussing Platonism, we read Camus before discussing Existentialism. What I’m after is honesty—taking people at their word, not imposing an alien agenda onto them.

My decision to organize the curriculum as such has as much to do with pedagogy as it does integrity, however. It seems to me humans learn by approaching the world from the particular to the general. We don’t learn the “principle of sowing and reaping” and then act accordingly. Rather, we do or don’t study for a test and then do or don’t receive a good grade. From those experiences, over time, we come to understand sowing and reaping at a conceptual level. Likewise, before one identifies an “ism” associated with a person, one must do the difficult, honest work of first reading the person.

Dreher goes on:

“Gibbs was not arguing for Marxism on nihilism. He was saying that to truly encounter and wrestle with a great book (even a great bad book!), you have to enter into its world. For example — and this is me saying this, not him — in order to understand where Marxism comes from, you need to put yourself in the place of the man who hears something liberating in, ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.’ Why did Marxism sound plausible and morally righteous to people once upon a time? What does it get right about justice? What does it get wrong? How do we know?”

Here, it seems Dreher is arguing contra Gibbs. Gibbs, If I’m understanding him correctly, is saying students should read the words “workers of the world, unite!” nakedly, taking no note of any plausibility structure (i.e. worldview) which may make such words intelligible and attractive. Indeed, such context would only prevent wonder, according to Gibbs. Now, I’m with Dreher here—it is worthwhile indeed to enter the man’s world, understand the given biases at play. When done well, such a worldview education doesn’t cause the student to toss the book aside; far from it! It rather opens the book up anew to the student. Making the word “worldview” synonymous with “lazy/dismissive thinking” is, ironically, lazy and dismissive.

You see, worldview education begins with the humble premise that we aren’t approaching the world “from above.” As the poet Anne Carson put it, “There is no objective place.” We are creatures, bound by space and time. We don’t offer some supposed “neutral” interpretation of a given book, painting, data point, or fact. Rather, conscious or not of our myriad prejudices, we encounter the world Christianly. Likewise, every other reader, connoisseur, or scientist comes to the world from their own particular angle.

Worldview education seeks, imperfectly no doubt, to give these angles a voice at the Harkness table. Could such an education make students arrogant as Gibbs fears? I suppose. However, does the alternative make the student any less arrogant: supposing that the texts they are reading are composed by context-less men, and that they are encountering them unencumbered by their own commitments, values, and motives? I think not.

In the end, having read countless articles by Gibbs over the years, I have no doubt that he and I share common educational philosophies and goals. Further, his fear of creating thoughtless readers is valid. I also see too many students quite willing to dismiss foreign ideas out of hand. However, training students in worldviews—teaching students the empathetic skills needed to see the world through another’s eyes—is not the problem. Indeed, worldview education is the solution.

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On June 13, 2017 By In Family and Children, Music

Musical Segregation: Questions from a Concerned Pastor

I am not a trained sociologist, though I play one at home as a father. I am constantly analyzing trends and the origination of certain behaviors and offering solutions. Thankfully, as a Christian father, sociology can be summarized simply by the study of sinful patterns; patterns that can be easily studied and analyzed.

As a pastor, I also have the opportunity to study trends and patterns in the local church. Church life is messy, and with it comes messy patterns and behaviors that only Jesus can undo. But I am not only a student of my congregation, I also enjoy studying modern church trends. In such cases, my studies will lack the gravitas found in well-funded research teams. Still, I am comforted by the fact that every sociologist is biased. He may have correct numbers, but what he does with the numbers is based on his presuppositions. How he phrases the questions determines what responses he will receive.

I set this background to emphasize that my conclusions are not flawless but grounded in my personal, ecclesiastical, and societal concerns. With this in mind, let me make the following assertion: “Churches that segregate musically are bound to segregate corporately.” I have seen it happen again and again, but beyond the anecdotal evidence, the rationale of modern trends seem to affirm that proposition. Let me flesh out my concerns with a few questions and affirmations:

First, why do we assume that children and teens need a different kind of music than adults? Why do we think that “praise and worship” provide something for young folks and not for older saints? We attempt to accommodate the tastes of Christians in different stages of life, but what are we actually accomplishing? Are we merely perpetuating society’s self-centeredness? Is ecclesiastical music shaped to fit particular tastes and styles?

Second, I have noticed that every church that has a modern flavor differs from other churches that offer modern musical flavors. So to say, “I like contemporary music,” leads to another question: “What kind?” Is Amy Grant “old” contemporary? Is Michael W. Smith “old” contemporary? Is Hillsong music “new” contemporary? We must keep in mind that we are dealing with a span of 20-30 years here.

Third, we have abandoned Psalm-shaped music. I am not advocating exclusive psalmody, but I am saying that when we abandon the regular singing of psalms, we lose gospel creativity to compose biblical hymns. Historically, psalm-centered churches produced psalm-like hymns.

Fourth, as our children continue to grow in evangelical churches where music is dispersed according to age and style, how will they and their aging parents ever come to a proper understanding of the role of music in the Church? Will they ever be able to sit together to sing? Will the college bound son ever wish to come to dad’s church during summer breaks and genuinely enjoy singing praises to God? Or will he merely tolerate it, as a kind gesture to his Fanny Crosby-loving parents?

Fifth, have we considered the consequences of dividing our services into contemporary and traditional? Are we making it easier for older saints to bless younger saints, or are we making it harder? How are we stressing unity when our churches naturally divide over musical styles? Can we fulfill Paul’s exhortations to eat and drink together?a

Sixth, is contemporary music as a category truly contemporary? “Shine, Jesus, Shine” appears archaic to modern worship services. While new musical compositions can be admirable things, many churches only use music composed by their musical team. What happens for visitors who are long-time Christians? What happens when people from diverse contemporary churches visit a church that writes their own contemporary melodies? Are the contemporary going to feel divorced from their fellow contemporary music lovers?

Seventh, does the predominant hunger for the new ever get old? In other words, what happens when millennials raise their own children who think their parents’ music is as old as an MP3 player? What happens when the world turns against the modern?

Eighth, are we teaching through our music that music divides rather than unites? Are we teaching our children that what we sing is what we like and we like only what we sing?

Ninth, will our children leave us when they find us to be evangelically irrelevant to them? Are we setting the stage for their departure by granting their generation musical style privilege?

Finally, what role does the Bible play in our church music? Does tradition provide any help in our consideration of what we should sing? Can we merely discard 1,900 years of church music for the new? Are we a better generation than our faithful forefathers who gave their lives for the gospel? Do we follow in the train of the latest trend, or the Davidic train that offered us divinely-inspired music? Does our inspiration in modern composition stem from cultural romantic tales or the gospel romance of Ruth and Boaz? Is our church music bringing our families closer together, or is it separating us? Can your 18-year-old say, “Dad, let’s sing together?” If not, is that a good thing?

We all claim our music is praise-worthy, but can our music be God-worthy if God’s people are not singing a new song together?

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  1. I am fully aware of functional/practical building issues, but here I am referring to churches that can easily accommodate everyone in one service  (back)

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On May 22, 2017 By In Culture

Why Incarnational Art is Not Enough

Incarnational Art Image Michael Minkoff over at Renew The Arts kindly commented on my previous article and he shared two articles that he had written (here and here) and I wanted to respond to those. While Minkoff makes some good points and I would agree with him generally, I want to push back a little and add some details that I think are important.

The primary point I want to make is that it is not the goal of art to incarnate the gospel. To suggest that goal for art is to misunderstand the role of art in culture and it is to steal from the Church her primary mission. Christians living in community are charged with incarnating the gospel; art is not given that job.

What is art?

I want to start with a definition of art. Art is an imaginative human work that must submit to Jesus and be for the edification of others. There is a lot here to unpack but I will focus on the imaginative side of art and argue that art works on the imagination by offering an invitation to the audience to consider an imaginative scenario or situation. For example, fiction invites the reader to imagine that specific characters and situations exist and then asks the reader to follow them to the end of the story. (This is only one example so it is important to acknowledge that different media present themselves to our imaginations in different ways, e.g. music)

Given this definition of art, it is important to note what art cannot incarnate: art cannot incarnate something directly into our reality. This is true because our creations are sub-creations, to borrow an idea from J.R.R. Tolkien. I would grant that art becomes a thing in the world when it is created—fiction becomes a story and characters—but the nature of art is still one step removed from our reality and it would be unhelpful to confuse the nature of the two. For example, if we think that Frodo is a real historical person then things will become very strange.

This is not to say that art fails to shape our world. On the contrary, art, as a human work, impacts our imagination and has a great power to shape how we see the world and understand it, but the point is that we need to be careful that we see the difference between art and life. When we speak about incarnating the gospel, we need to understand that as something which Christians do in their lives as they obey Jesus. Art does something else.

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On March 27, 2017 By In Books, Culture, Family and Children, Interviews, Theology, Wisdom

Teaching Redemption Redemptively: Theological Educators in Dialog

athens

Aside from actually teaching, nothing has aided my growth as an educator more than talking with experienced, respected teachers; particularly those in my discipline: theology/worldview. It’s hard to think of two living teachers more esteemed in the field than Dan Kunkle and Dan Ribera.

Mr. Kunkle has been the longtime worldview teacher at Phil-Mont Christian Academy in Philadelphia, PA (to learn more about Kunkle, check this out). And on the other coast, Dr. Ribera teaches bible at Bellevue Christian School just outside of Seattle, WA (to learn more about Ribera, check this out). Together, they have close to 80 years of teaching experience.

I recently engaged in some shoptalk with the Dans (Dani?). While I had high expectations for the exchange, I couldn’t have anticipated just how rich their insights would be. With permission, that conversation is reproduced below: (more…)

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On March 25, 2017 By In Culture, Film

Beauty and the Mark of the Beast

beast

“Winter turns to spring / Famine turns to feast / Nature points the way / Nothing left to say / Beauty and the Beast.” -Mrs. Potts

 

“Sleep is an image of death that is repeated every night. So the morning is the image of the resurrection. So the spring of the year is an image of the resurrection.” –Jonathan Edwards

How will the dark curse be broken? Sacrificial love. In the stunning new remake of Beauty and the Beast, Disney stayed true to this central theme. And why shouldn’t they? After all, it’s a “tale as old as time.” It’s the epical story of resurrection and the path thereunto. Indeed, the curse being broken by love is the story of all time, true as it can be.

The curse leveled by the beggar-woman in the opening scene is death, but not an immediately obvious sort of death. Those under the curse, while turned to dishware and furniture, can still move, speak, etc. Yet, they are somehow not themselves. The longer they live under the curse, the less themselves they become. It’s hard to hear Mr. Clocksworth lament, “I feel myself becoming less human” without being aware of one’s own inhumanity. Who hasn’t felt like a shadow of who they’re created to be? On a heart level, even if one doesn’t believe in the deep magic found in Scripture, who hasn’t nevertheless longed for the spell under which we live to be broken?

The only path back to life is love, and Belle—the stranger held captive in the castle—is lovely. Naturally, the creatures of the house seek to charm Belle into love. Likewise, the Beast bangs on the door, demanding a romantic dinner. Yet, their salvation can’t be secured by such measures.

Ironically, love comes when Belle is released from captivity, as she runs away from the property back to her father. In a beautiful scene on the castle’s balcony, Belle asks the Beast, “Can anyone truly love who isn’t free?” At that, the Beast turns Belle away. By the end of the movie, the Beast and the entire castle-staff die. And Belle weeps.

While Belle is good, she’s not the Beast’s good, not yet. Taking her life giving kiss—which she only offers at the end of the movie—without first sending her away would have been temporary security, but a final sort of death ultimately. On the balcony, the Beast understands a deep mystery; love will come through loneliness, Spring through Winter, feast through famine. So he sends Belle away and walks into the darkness.

In Scripture, life always comes through first choosing death. The way up is down. Commenting on Revelation, Peter Leithart makes the easily missed point that seal and mark are juxtaposed from one another. Those 144,000 people sealed by God in chapter 7 are set-aside for death. Those with the mark of the beast in chapter 13, however, are free to buy and sell goods—they feast, they live. Says Leithart:

“Those who do not receive the mark of the beast do die, but their death is a passage to renewed life. The unmarked, those sealed for death, rise again and reign with Christ. The mark of the beast rescued from immediate death, but the important things don’t happen at the beginning. We only know what the marks and the seals mean when we get to the end of things.”

It’s obvious why the mark of the beast is so attractive; it offers immediate salvation. That is, it gives one the sustenance and safety needed to see another day. To be clear, the things the mark of the beast allows one to obtain aren’t bad in and of themselves. On the contrary: food, drink, life—these are good, but they are by nature gifts, and gifts aren’t gifts if ripped from the giver’s hand. They must be received, not taken. Love requires as much. In the end, there is a feast for those who refuse the mark of the beast, but only through famine. There is resurrection, but only through death. Seeking the Kingdom apart from the cross is not only counterproductive; it’s satanic (Mat 4:8). So, we seek the seal of God, not the mark of the beast, come what may.

Upon her return, Belle brings more than tears to the ransacked castle; she brings new life. From her lips comes resurrection, breaking the curse once and for all. In a grand celebratory feast, she dances with her lover who is now, at long last, transformed into who he was always supposed to be. When the Beast sent Belle away, he planted the painful seed of death. At the dance, we see the fruit: life.

Beauty and the Beast and Revelation have the same counterintuitive message: if you want to save your life, lose your life. Don’t choose a forced, immediate redemption. Instead, wait for the day the Savior will return from the Father’s house to defeat the persecutors at the door. Because on that day, we will all be raised back to ourselves again—humanity fully restored. At that grand banquette, there will be no doubt: the dark curse is broken under the foot of sacrificial love.

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On March 21, 2017 By In Culture

Why Good Christian Art is Not Enough

A common charge against Christian art (especially Protestant art) is that it fails to be good art. The infamous movies of recent years – God’s Not Dead, etc. – support this claim. We even make these claims about ourselves (see Leithart here and here). Christians are apparently just plain bad at art. And this is a problem because it means that nobody will read or watch our stuff, and that means we will fail to impact the larger culture. We respond to this problem by making loud laments and asking for good Christian artists. If only we had Christians creating good art then we would have a real impact on the culture. People would actually watch our movies and read our books.

Or at least, that is the story we tell ourselves. But is bad art really the problem?

On the contrary, I would argue we have a bigger problem. We have slipped so far in our understanding of culture we think the solution is we need better Christian art. But that is just another symptom of the real disease that has taken hold of us. We have made an idol out of art and we think we just need to clean the idol a little more. The real problem for Christians is that we need to understand the proper place of art in relation to the gospel and not elevate art beyond its true position.

The first step in recovering this proper relationship is to see the gospel as the spring from which all other cultural work comes forth. It does no good to try to get fresh water two hundred yards downstream; you have to go to the source. The gospel is the source. The church in its work and ministry is proclaiming that good news and that is where true cultural change is happening. If we mess up the message and content there, then everything else downstream will be a wreck. This is why we have lame Christian art: we have lame churches preaching a lame gospel. A restoration of the preaching of the gospel is the first step in making good Christian artists. (more…)

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On January 24, 2017 By In Culture

Feminism as a Self-Defeating Movement

Feminism (1)

Is modern feminism a self-defeating movement? How the Women’s March in DC reveals the inherent weakness of state-sponsored feminism:

On January 21, more than one million women marched as part of the Women’s March on Washington and in cities across the country. Many marched in response to the election of Donald Trump over would-be first female president Hillary Clinton. The march has inspired a flurry of social media activity over the weekend. Commentators have pointed out the various philosophical contradictions that the Women’s March represents: like excluding pro-life groups as anti-woman (Washington Times), the idea of gender fluidity against a gender-exclusive march (Feminist Current), and the threats of violence and anger by a crowd proclaiming peace and love (Matt Walsh).
Missing from the discussion is how this movement has further enslaved men and women under the heel of “the man.” For all of its so-called progress for women’s rights, the movement now called feminism is increasingly indebted to the benevolence of a government sugar daddy. This is revealed in the many, many homemade posters created by marchers. While they touch on a number of issues like equal pay, reproductive rights, and the increased sexualization of women – each keystone point of modern feminism is heartily undermined by their own “ball and chain” in their arranged marriage with the state.

Female Dependence on “The Man”

Independent women are a treasure to the church and the world. Let no one deceive you to believe that somehow a woman is intrinsically defined by her relationship to a man. But one must ask, what is independent about demanding the government to pay for your every whim and fancy? Birth control, abortion, and even tampons are described by marchers as fundamental entitlements of each and every woman. To a large degree, these entitlements are a present reality for the overwhelming majority of women in America. So why march? They march because of the threat of infidelity by the new administration. Feminism in its marriage to the state is awakened to a new husband in the Trump administration.

Is this the progress envisioned by women’s rights advocates? Begging a man to preserve their rights and entitlements? Or was feminism intended to be a movement of equality and independence where women held their own apart from the goodwill of men? Perhaps feminists once imagined a country where they reclaimed their own personal sovereignty and retained their individual rights apart from the dictates and handouts of the State? Instead, modern feminism has anthropomorphized the state, that is changed it into the form (morphé) of man (anthropos). In Trump, they discover how this man-state is not always amiable. Their dependence on the state dropped them into the most vulnerable section of Alexander Tyle’s cycle of history, the chamber just before bondage.

In demanding a Hegelian “god walking on Earth” state, the roots of feminism become their own undoing.

“Big Brother” & the so-called right to privacy

The most controversial of women’s rights are related to the right to privacy. This is how the U.S. Supreme Court described abortion in the 1973 Roe V. Wade case that has now led to the death of millions of women in the womb. Yet is feminism a principled approach to the right to privacy? Can a movement that gives ascent to the surveillance programs supported and defended by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have any real claim to a principled idea of privacy? At the same time does the paper thin case for abortion as a “privacy right” jive with the licentiousness of modern feminism? We are led to believe the lie that feminism is a movement to protect the private sexual behavior of women. This is contradicted by how the goals of sexual liberation lead to their increased exploitation and objectification in the public sphere and in media. From raunchy female comedians like Amy Schumer to the vagina hats at the DC march, feminism in its modern context has abused the right of privacy to define women as sexual objects.

vagina head

The real right of privacy of the 4th Amendment is sacrificed at “Big Brother’s” altar of privacy from moral censure. The cost is the politicization of sex at the expense of a woman’s dignity. Abortion itself represents the sad contradiction in the feminist idea of privacy: a woman strapped down, legs in stirrups, and vaginally invaded.

“Uncle Sam” and equitable pay

A historic argument against female domesticity was the robbery of a woman’s labor in childrearing.  The “cult of domesticity” is maligned as a patriarchal attempt to enslave women. As women joined the workforce they certainly faced an uphill battle in receiving equitable consideration for then male-dominated positions and the pay disparities were considered a form of oppression. Modern feminists insist there is an ongoing battle in this arena related to a “pay gap.” Some argue that the pay gap is as large as a twenty percent disparity between men and women. This twenty percent pay gap is seen as a massive injustice demonstrating the continued tyranny of misogyny in a patriarchal culture.

But what if the threat to women’s income in greater than the income disparity and greater than twenty percent? If we are concerned about the twenty percent loss that some may experience, how much more should feminists be concerned about the even larger cut that Uncle Sam is taking from women?

14939_I_Want_Your_Money_UncleSamFederal and State income taxes coupled with payroll taxes add up to a fifty-percent tax rate here in California. A rate that increases as women raise their pay. So that if the pay gap ended today – Uncle Sam would take an even bigger chunk away from women. Perhaps these taxes are the simple shards from breaking through the glass ceiling?

Do modern feminists not see how they feed the beast of their own demise? They created a culture that abdicated individual responsibilities for government dependence and constitutional protection for moral ambiguity.

This is why they hate Trump. He’s a bad husband. He’s unfaithful. He’s a bad daddy. Not only is he creepy, but he threatens to put the children out on their own.
Modern Feminism created its own crisis: have they ditched “oppressive” patriarchy for a tyrannical national patrimony?

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