Ron Burns (alias Thabiti Anyabwile) recently wrote “Overturning Roe v. Wade isn’t worth compromising with Trump, my fellow evangelicals.”
The thing about this statement that makes the bile rise in Christians’ collective throat is the belligerent hypocrisy of it. Because Ron’s erstwhile position was open favor of Hillary — a ruthless socialist, mass murderer (by endorsement of infanticide and other means besides), and one of the most prolific criminals of the past century — for POTUS! Oh yeah, and he also expressed favor for Bernie — a Jew and avowed Communist who takes the position that Christianity must be barred from public life and essentially treated as illegal.
So right out of the chute Ron confronts us with a thesis born either of a less than lucid mind, or of a cunning malevolence intent on incitation of the same.
But it gets better. He continues:
Of course, the travel ban’s core aim is to exclude potential visitors and immigrants from majority-Muslim countries, an intent at odds with Christian views of religious freedom.
Problem: that is a meaningful critique only if we are defining the Christian view as religious pluralism. Which is but another way of saying moral relativism. Which, by its implicit unification under the god-state, must be described either as Caesar-worship or functional atheism. It is the view taken for granted by all the schools of humanism. But the one thing it cannot be called is ‘the Christian view’, as it defies the first and second commandments and repudiates the Lordship of Christ openly.
Never mind that it also militates against the “No king but King Jesus” position of the American founding, which in each of the colonies was specified as precluding all but the Protestant faith.
Sessions’s memo takes us back toward the policies that gave us the mass incarceration of black and brown citizens.
About that – the drug codes that have Ron’s kente cloth in a bunch aren’t a product of the Trump era. In fact, they were largely implemented at the behest of the Black community at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in the 80s, and sustained throughout the Clinton and Obama eras.
Moreover, Sessions’s memo cannot take us back to something we never left. Mass incarceration of Blacks and Browns isn’t going anywhere so long as we retain a vestige of law. Even if the prohibition on drugs were lifted (and for the most part, I think it should be), it won’t ameliorate the ethnic disparities in incarceration a whit. Because Black and Brown crime rates are just higher across the board. From murder (even serial killing) all the way down to traffic violations (even parking tickets). And to object to that imbalance is nothing but a demand that OTWs be arrested, arraigned, and sentenced on an extreme curve, placing them above the law. No, the discrepancy is a universal constant so long as we retain any semblance of actual law.
And how do we calculate the moral damage and accountability of the harm done to the legitimacy of the presidency itself nearly every day on Twitter and as a Russian collusion investigation continues?
This is just barking at the moon in chorus with the antichrist mainstream media. Trump’s Twitter career, brash though it sometimes be, is in the vein of Teddy Roosevelt’s fireside chats and all Reagan’s comedic chestnuts. Aside from the common touch of his witticisms, the thing which the MSM objects to in it is his use of it as an end-run around the media monopoly.
And ‘Russian collusion’? Seriously? By this point that CNN trope is on par with Nibiru, hollow earth, and lizard men. Even the top apparatchiks promulgating it are on tape confessing it as “a big nothing burger.” Which amounts to confession that they made the whole thing up.
And in light of the certified reality that Hillary and the DNC whom Ron so fancies are hip-deep in collusion with any number of foreign governments betrays the fact that Ron’s outrage is also entirely contrived. I mean, really, from Arab oil financing and Latin American cartel money, to conspiring with Mexican officials, to the Council on Foreign Relations, to the UN, to AIPAC and the Israeli government, collusion with foreign entities is pretty much the core of Democrat (and GOP leadership) sentiment and policy now. Globalism is, in fact, their creed.
Ron is like the devoted Walmart customer who pulls over to upbraid the kid selling lemonade on the corner for his predatory business practices.
He concludes with these words:
Indifference to other moral issues and forms of suffering call into question one’s understanding of the faith and one’s claim to be a Christian. I can’t tell the difference between true and false Christians, but God surely can. He knows who belongs to Him and who will inherit the kingdom of God. They are the righteous ones whose faith leads them to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and visit those in prison (Matthew 25:35-36).
You get that? If’n you don’t read the Bible through the prism of liberationism, the lake of fire awaits you.
See, Ron, your suggestion that those strongly concerned with the mass murder of children are therefore indifferent to all other moral issues and suffering is just absurd. Even if one were to somehow agree with your tortured Marxist reading of Matthew 25:35-36, it is apparent that slaughtering babies by the tens of millions is orders of magnitude worse than our declining to allow Muslims to colonize America. It’s also far and away worse than the “oppression” of all minorities.
Of course, we don’t for an instant grant your humanist reading of the text. To ‘feed the hungry’ and ‘give water to the thirsty’ does not mean state welfare nor state monopoly of resources. It means charity. To ‘welcome the stranger’ does not mean an abolition of borders and universal citizenship. It means ambassadorship, commerce, and trade, and presupposes the distinction of ‘strangers’ as such. To ‘clothe the naked’ does not mean reparations. It means a tithe for the poor and upcycling resources for those in need — especially in your own community and among your own people. To ‘visit the sick’ does not mean Obamacare or any other communist scheme. It means literally to visit and pray for your sick members. And to ‘visit those in prison’ connotes no demand of special treatment for Blacks and Browns, nor even any primary focus on inmates in general; even if ‘prison ministries’ are often justified on this basis, it means foremost that we must not abandon those imprisoned or targeted for the faith.
Everything that the Scripture holds forth as calls to allegiance and personal devotion, Mr. Burns imputes to politics and services dispensed by the state, or coerced thereby in the church and business. And all with distorted objectives, besides.
The defect in any given syllogism is typically spied either in one of its propositions or in the conclusion, and threadlike, the whole unravels with a tug. But the incongruence of Ron’s thinking is so total that no tug is required. He has simply presented us with an unspooled bundle from the outset.
Perhaps the funniest thing about Ron’s ramblings here is his characterizing the overturn of Roe as “compromise.” Because the reversal of Roe would actually be the greatest expression of consistency Christians have achieved in the political arena for decades.
Look, there are lots of things on which Christians can and must critique Trump, but Ron has chosen to critique him at all the points where he is impervious to critique. Because Ron is attempting to critique him from the Left and Trump cannot be credibly critiqued from the Left, only from the Right.
And in casting all his Antifa blather as a new litmus test for Christian communion, Ron has inadvertently identified himself as the one outside that communion.
| Tweet |
|
|
|
