Last week I had the opportunity of sitting down with Dr. Paul Broun (R-GA). He held a fundraiser at the home of Star Parker in the Los Angeles, California. Living up near Sacramento it was a few hundred miles to go see the Congressman, but I went knowing he was traveling the two-thousand mile trek from Georgia. The event was small, I was one of the ten invited to a small wine tasting before the main event and the larger event was about thirty at most.

This meant that we had the opportunity to ask him about his positions, his views on current events, and get answers that were a bit deeper than the usual question and answer session. He touted his endorsement from Dr. Ron Paul and his record in the House of Representatives. Dr. Broun was a staunch ally of the Texas congressman’s legislation to audit the Fed and He went on to be the lead sponsor of an identical bill.

It was strange at first to think of a man running for U.S. Senate traveling to California. Here in California, we are represented in the U.S. Senate by Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein, two of the most toxic lawmakers in the history of that legislative body. I wish we had someone in California like Dr. Broun to run against them, Georgia is truly blessed. But Broun was campaigning under the idea that the U.S. Senate is now a national race. Consider what Senator Paul from the state of Kentucky has done or Ted Cruz in Texas. They have the ability to transform the national debate and build liberty-minded issues into legislative realities.

The future of the liberty movement depends on pushing our rockstars up into higher positions of leadership. Simply being a U.S. Senator is more highly regarded than a member of the House of Representatives. This is largely because there are fewer senators and they usually represent a larger number of voters. If we send Dr. Broun to the U.S. Senate we can count on his unyielding commitment to the principles of liberty. Also, as we move forward in considering candidates for President in this election and the ones beyond it, we should keep in mind that far more senators have been nominees for the presidency than representatives. Building our Liberty farm team requires us to build that team closer to the top, too.

The event was hosted by and at Star Parker’s home. I’ve been a longtime fan of Parker, she is a syndicated columnist with the Scripps News Service and you’ve probably seen her pieces for TownHall. She describes the congressman as her friend and someone who she is excited to support. Dr. Broun has used Parker’s work to combat Obamacare often recommending Star’s anti-socialist book, Uncle Sam’s Plantation.

With the way the United States Senate is split today, 52 Democrats against 46 Republicans, one senator is a big deal for those of us who love liberty. Rand, Broun, Cruz, and Lee can be the game changers on every close vote. The establishment Republicans will depend on this liberty-bloc to get anything they want passed. This means that the Republicans won’t be seeing any expansion of corporate welfare or nation building pass the Senate with Broun in office. More Mr. Smith style statesmen like Dr. Broun may even mean more filibusters. When we look at how fractured Mitch McConnell’s Senate Republican Caucus is -now is the time to show losers like John McCain and Lindsey Graham the door. Electing the congressman from Georgia will also mean that the Democrats will have some votes to worry about. Unlike squishy Republicans, this Liberty-bloc will not cave under pressure to support new taxes or spending.

The senate is sick. Is there a doctor is the house? Yes, Dr. Paul Broun.

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One of the most distressing things to me in considering the Trayvon Martin case is the sobering reality that had George Zimmerman had a badge we likely never would have even heard of Trayvon Martin.  His life, in all likelihood, would have passed unremarked outside of maybe a few local news stories and a small protest or candle light vigil attended by family and friends.

Why do I think this?  Because it happens all the time.  Police brutality, which goes hand in hand with the militarization of the police, is a pervasive reality.  Consider these three videos.

http://youtu.be/NETF7lhp0r0

There are a few things to note about these videos.  The first is that I didn’t have to search to find them.  I just picked three, but if you look at the links that come up when you watch these it’s easy to see that there are countless similar videos, some too disturbing to even watch.   Likewise with a few Google searches you can find numerous websites that track these things.  They are generally taken about as seriously and receive about as much attention as your average conspiracy theory website.

Secondly, let’s consider who the victims are in these videos.  In the first one we have a young black male being brutally beaten by a white cop, and then tazed multiple times while incapacitated as other white male cops stand around.  In the second we see a black male officer beating another black male senseless with his baton, while a white or Latino male officer stands by as backup.  Finally, in the third we see a white male officer savagely kick a white female who was handcuffed, seated, and intoxicated in the head.  So police brutality is not merely a racial thing (although I don’t doubt that a strong case could be made that black males are on the receiving end more than any one other group).

No, police brutality is a power thing.  It is the result of a culture that says that some are above the law.  A culture of intimidation that views officers not as the agents of the people, hired to protect and serve, but as the hired thugs of the state, free to use whatever means necessary or preferred to carry out the will of the state, usually motivated by a financial incentive (i.e. traffic stops, the war on drugs, etc.).  The kind of men we see in the videos above are not just a few bad apples, and they didn’t just have a moment.  As mentioned above these kinds of events happen routinely, and it is not uncommon for those who engage in such brutality to keep their jobs or be hired by another force.  Further, the ability to carry out the sustained beating of an unarmed person, to hear bones cracking, screams, pleas for help, to witness the body of a teenage boy convulsing under electrical shock when he is already incapacitated, the willingness to kick a woman in the face for a minor offense—these are not typical human capacities.  I’m not saying that humans are not naturally capable of great evil—we surely are.  But most of us simply would not do these kinds of thing.  This kind of behavior is developed.  It requires de-sensitization.  It is developed by an internal culture that winks at violence and corruption, that begins to find a thrill in violent encounters, that finds its self-worth bolstered by being outfitted with greater and greater authority and more militaristic equipment and assignments.  Permanent SWAT teams create police-soldiers.

But perhaps more disconcerting than the internal culture prevalent within so many law enforcement agencies is the external culture that tolerates and even celebrates it.  I watched in horror a few months ago as the city of Boston was literally taken over and shut down by the military-police complex in a search for two (and then one) teenage boys.  Armored vehicles with gun turrets drove through the streets aiming at anyone they pleased.  The right against unreasonable search and seizure was wholly suspended as families were forced out of their homes at gunpoint—women and children with military rifles pointed at them simply because they were there, in their homes.  Businesses were forced to close as citizens were told to stay in their homes.  And despite the fact that all of this proved wholly ineffective and the suspect was found by a regular citizen just outside the militarized perimeter moments after the lock-down was lifted, the nation celebrated all of this.  We took a sort of perverse pride in the lengths that the state would go to to “keep us safe,” never noting the irony that our safety came at the expense of the law, at the expense of any semblance of liberty, and at the end of a gun barrel.  Nevertheless we lauded the effort as nothing but heroism and congratulated ourselves on a job well done.

Similarly, when it came out that an armed and violent criminal was eventually just burned to death in a cabin because it was taking too long to try and capture him there was no outrage.  Once again we cheered.  We got the bad guy.  But at what cost?  Of course Dorner was an evil man, and of course it’s hard to have much sympathy for him, but this isn’t about sympathy.  It’s about precedent.  It’s about a police department that shot two innocent people in a moving vehicle and then essentially said, “oops sorry about that.”  It’s about a police department that decided it was up to them when to just kill someone rather than make every effort to capture him and put him to justice via a trial.

These and countless other examples from Waco and Ruby Ridge to the purveyors of raw milk who routinely have their homes invaded and property destroyed, to the kids walking down the street who don’t look right and end up the victim of an armed man’s god complex tell a story of a growing lawlessness in our culture.  If the politicians aren’t bound by the law (and we know that’s been the case for a long time), and their armed enforcement personnel aren’t bound by the law, the law has effectively ceased to function.  It is now just another tool for the manipulation and coercion of the populace, to be used as a pretext for abusing those already in a position of relative weakness, those who are already at a power deficit, while the powerful, the elite remain impervious to its strictures.

And so we return to Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.  I am convinced that neither I nor most of the rest of the population have enough knowledge to really understand fully all the rights and wrongs of the way things ended up.  But two things do stand out to me.

One is that Zimmerman behaved foolishly by following Martin after he was told not to.  At some level his behavior seems to have been provocative.  But more than that, as others have noted, Zimmerman may well have been acting and thinking as he thought a cop would.  He evidently greatly admired the police and aspired toward law enforcement himself.  Could it be that his aggressive behavior, his unwillingness to let it go and to leave the situation alone, came down to his perception of what it meant to be involved in law enforcement?  Provoking and then responding with overwhelming force?  I don’t know, but it seems like a real possibility.

The second thing that stands out is what I started with.  If Zimmerman had actually been a cop I have a hard time believing we would have heard about this story.  Yet in a sane world, had he been a cop he should have been held to an even higher standard.  Police are given training to defuse tense and violent situations, and invested with a veritable monopoly on the use of force in public society.  They ought to be held to the strictest levels of accountability in the use of violence precisely because they are naturally in a position that without that kind of oversight lends itself to the abuse of power and corruption.  Yet what we see today is just the opposite.  A citizen who at least was able to make a case that he killed in self-defense (albeit perhaps preceded by foolish and provocative behavior) is being crucified in the media, in pop-culture, even by the federal government.  And yet story can be piled on top of story of abuse and even murder by law enforcement officers just over the period of time since Trayvon’s death and it goes unremarked on by the media and unnoticed by the population.<>cервис продвижения рекламы

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Last week we lost one of the titans of American history writing, Yale’s Edmund Morgan. His publishing career spanned an incredible sixty-five years from his first book (1944) to his last (2009). His topics ranged widely across colonial and Revolutionary American history, but if you have read anything by Morgan, it is likely The Puritan Dilemma, his biography of John Winthrop, still often used in history survey courses as a model of historical writing.  An atheist, like his famous Harvard mentor Perry Miller, Morgan nevertheless took the Puritans’ religious ideas seriously. Morgan saw history as a craft rather than a vehicle for ideology or polemics, and he was simply one of the best academic prose stylists America has ever produced. 

What book of Morgan’s might I recommend to start with? You won’t go wrong with any of them, but I particularly admire Morgan’s trilogy of Puritan histories, The Puritan Dilemma, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea,and The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, a book I recommended in an earlier post on the “Best 5 Books on the Puritans.” Miller and Morgan were perfectly, if ironically, placed to lead a mid-20th century renaissance of Puritan studies – when two Ivy League atheist professors insisted that the Puritans were weighty thinkers worth studying, you somehow knew they had to be right.

Although it is more demanding than most of his other books, I still regard Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia as his masterwork. Here Morgan showed (in a provocative thesis challenged by a number of subsequent historians) how the labor system of early Virginia was surprisingly non-racial, until the debacle of Bacon’s Rebellion in the 1670s convinced Virginia planters they could no longer safely depend on white indentured servants as their primary workers. Economic and social practicalities preceded the rise of virulent racism in Virginia’s turn to slavery. It was the epitome of explaining change over time, a task which historians consider the core of their work.

Morgan was especially good at counter-intuitive history, showing a skeptical generation of intellectuals that the Puritans were formidable thinkers (and had loving families, to boot). American Slavery, American Freedom showed the civil rights era that racial inequality was entwined with the soaring ideals of the American founding – yet it did not have to be that way, he implied, if racism did not precede slavery.

Morgan once wrote an essay, “Cultivating Surprise,” for the magazine of the Huntington Library on his historical method. They re-posted part of it last week.  It is a glimpse into the methods of a historical genius, offering wise words for any writer.

If you have studied any part of history enough to be curious about it, enough to want to do some research, you already are aware of the generally accepted views, the orthodox views, the controversies among the experts in the field, what is taken for granted and what is in dispute. You want to learn a little more about some question, and you go to the source materials that are presumably the foundation of the orthodox views. You come across something that you had not known about, something that surprises you a little. Cultivate that surprise. Do not say to yourself, “Oh, I didn’t know that,” and go on with your reading. Stop right there. Ask yourself, Why did I not know that? Is it contrary to what I had been led to expect? Is it because I did not know enough? Or is it because the people who crafted the orthodox interpretations did not know enough? Or perhaps their angle of vision was limited by what came before….

I could cite…examples of cultivating surprise from most of the books I have written. But I want to offer a couple of other pieces of advice. First, and probably most idiosyncratic, try to forget philosophies of history and theories of historical causation: Marxist, Straussian, postmodern, or whatever. You probably have one, conscious or unconscious, but try not to let it get in your way. Cultivate that surprise when the documents don’t seem to support your views. Next, try to keep your research and your writing together. Don’t wait until you think you have entirely completed your research before beginning to write. As soon as you begin to see connections between things that you had not noticed before, start writing what you think you have found out about them, even if these writings seem fragmentary. Don’t get too systematic. Don’t make elaborate outlines with headings and subheadings. Don’t spend a lot of time arranging your notes. Stop stalling and start writing.

@ThomasSKidd on Twitter

Thomas Kidd is a contributing scholar to The Kuyperian Commentary. His newest book is Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots, published in 2011 with Basic Books.

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“Getting married is dangerous,” writes Rich Lusk. ^a Marriage is an intrinsically risky endeavor. And as laws in our culture reflect more and more a debased understanding of this sacred covenant, entering into marriage becomes even riskier. It does not take long to realize that ideas have consequences, and those consequences become a reality quickly in a marriage.

Whether a marriage implodes catastrophically or deteriorates slowly over time, it is no sight to behold. It is painful, and if children are involved, the pain is doubled.  But is this the picture we are to expect in the local church? Should divorce no longer shock us? In other words, have our expectations become the same as the expectations of those outside the covenant community?

Famous Divorce Statistics

I lost count of the dozens of times that I have heard pastors and parishioners alike quote the famous statistics on the Christian divorce rate. These numbers are used to put the fear of God on young couples contemplating marriage, or to enforce the time-tested method of guilt manipulation to get men to get their act together. Sometimes, of course, these are just numbers thrown out to indicate just how far the Church has been corrupted by the present culture.

“50% of all Christian marriages end in divorce” is the claim I’ve often have heard for the last 15-years. While the numbers can sound alarming, I just simply cannot believe they are true. And I have reason for my skepticism.  The first reason is that I do not believe the famous Barna numbers are theologically accurate. Notice I said “theologically.” They may be accurate, if you wish to accept the Barna Group’s categories, but if you dig deeper you may not begin with the same assumptions.

Barna defined a “born-again” Christian as someone who has “made a personal commitment to Jesus and believe they will go to heaven because they have accepted him as their savior.” The definition is purposefully vague; it says nothing about baptism, church attendance, or Bible reading. Another important detail is that Mormons are also added to the mix among Catholics and evangelicals. Orthodox Christians have rejected any non-Trinitarian expression as legitimately Christian in the creedal sense. According to another poll by the same group:

 15% of born again Christians deny the resurrection of Christ; 28% believe that Jesus committed sins during His life on earth; 34% believe that if a person is good enough he can earn a place in heaven; 26% believe that it doesn’t matter what faith you follow because they all teach the same lessons; and 45% believe that Satan is a symbol of evil rather than an actual being. In other words, many of these “born again Christians” are not born again at all. ^b

I understand that Barna’s purpose was not to theologize over the definition of a “born-again” Christian, but by not differentiating he left a gigantic door open to abusive generalizations that skew the dependability of the final data sample.

When the pastor of an evangelical church, who affirms the basic tenets of the Christian faith, decides to employ the Barna Group as a source for an anecdotal illustration, he is applying the statistics to the wrong audience.

Bradley Wright, who did extensive research over these numbers, concluded that the number was actually around 42%. ^c He also added that “worship attendance has a big influence on the numbers. Six in 10 evangelicals who never attend had been divorced or separated, compared to just 38% of weekly attendees.” The 8% drop may not seem much, but it does bring down the magnitude of the 50% number.

Barna’s number may prove accurate if we are to make the “born-again” category to include Mormons and Jesus-Seminar followers, and the vastly un-churched “born-again” population in America. ^d However, were Barna to treat “born-again” believers as adherents to the Apostle’s Creed, my suspicion would be that those numbers would decline dramatically. These footnotes are rarely, if ever mentioned in these discussions. If pastors knew these facts it would alter the way they apply these numbers.

Is marriage in good shape in America? No. Have churches failed to protect and defend marriage as a sacred covenant between man and woman? Yes. But to use these numbers and assume that the Christian population is just as prone to divorce as the non-Christian population is a misguided conclusion.

Uri Brito is the founder of Kuyperian Commentary. He blogs regularly at uribrito.com

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1. Edited by Uri Brito. The Church-Friendly Family, 81  (back)
2. John MacArthur, More Divorce Among Believers?  (back)
3. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/2011-03-14-divorce-christians_N.htm; that is an 8% drop  (back)
4. The Jesus Seminar followers have a long tradition of denying just about every claim made by Jesus in the New Testament, especially as it concerns his physical resurrection from the dead  (back)