Introduction
James Lindsey’s atheistic underwear is showing again. He cares about truth a great deal, but he won’t tell us what truth is grounded in. He has been very concerned with the “woke” Gnosticism of the left, mystical knowledge of power dynamics that confuse and divide people into classes in order to capture more power – we might call it the dialectic of Sylvester McMonkey McBean, weaponizing the discontent, envy, and ambition of American sneetches everywhere. And Lindsey has rightly pointed out that there is no reason why certain factions on the right can’t employ the same tactics – what Lindsey is calling the “woke right.”
Now some on the right are suspicious of this name-calling, since it can sound like more woke-left cancel culture: call people bad names and get people to pull away their skirts in a pseudo-offended purity swoon. And both sides have a point. The people blaming the jooz for all societal ills and the Corey Mahler types arguing that blacks are inherently incapable of as much sanctification as white people really are a kind of “woke right,” or what some of us have been calling the “dank right.” Classifying people by superficial attributes like the amount of pigment in their skin or ethnic ancestry is as reckless as anything Kimberle Crenshaw has come up with.
But part of what many on the right have come to see is that you can’t fight an all-encompassing worldview (various Marxisms) with the nerf sword of vague, universal “values.” Family values, American values, and the like have been weaponized and turned into cudgels to beat Americans and their families with far too many times. Liberty and justice (to name just a couple) are real values that exist in the Triune God and incarnate in particular cultures in real time in history (or not).
What Auron & James Said
So my friend Megan Basham recently suggested on X that we need a “constitutional nationalism,” and Auron McIntire replied by saying, “While this is a good faith attempt to solve the problem it actually compounds it/ Nations are a people with a specific way of being that is captured by its constitution, written, or unwritten/ The nations defines the constitution, the constitution does not define the nation.” And James Lindsey replied: “Auron isn’t just holding out a ‘living constitution’ here. In fact, he plausibly thinks he isn’t. Fascists generally believe in the nation as an idealized extension of the people in their idealized (“specific way of being”) but unactualized state. Perfected nation as ideal magic.”
Now, James Lindsey is correct that fascists of all stripes thrive on vague aspirations of greatness. They abandon constitutions and the rule of law for an “idealized but unactualized state.” They justify lawlessness in the name of working for some utopian dream. And Lindsey is correct that it’s absolutely possible for “conservatives” and folks on the right to do the same thing in the name of some vague, unactualized American dream. But this is why I reposted Auron saying, “That way of being that Auron is talking about is their religion and culture. Good men craft constitutions like fences that help protect liberty and justice, but bad men always usurp and tear down those fences. There must be a standard behind our fences: God’s Word, Lex Rex.” Auron replied to me insisting that cultures shaped by God’s word will be different and therefore (presumably) their constitutions will look somewhat different – citing America, Ethiopia, Hungary as examples of very different cultures. Which I assured Auron I agree with, as long as we keep the Word of God as the foundation, and I said we need to do that in order to answer the James Lindseys and keep the dank right far away.
Auron said he agreed that the Word of God is central but wasn’t exactly sure what I meant. So here’s what I mean. God, in His kindness has raised up enemies that are slowly but surely cornering us into saying out loud what Scripture requires of us: where does civil liberty and justice come from? The woke left have weaponized all our vague American ideals: equality, liberty, justice, family values, etc. And if the right comes raging back simply demanding to define those ideals their way, then James Lindsey is right: if it’s just a power play, then it’s just a species of fascism. Lindsey is right: there must be a transcendent truth and order over us that we are submitting to. But “the Constitution” is not and cannot be that transcendent truth and order. At its most glorious, it is a dim reflection of certain transcendent principles of justice and liberty.
This is where James Lindsey doesn’t appear to have a category for an epistemologically self-conscious Christian civics. The Bible is not an “idealized” or “unactualized state.” The Bible is not magical or utopian. The Bible is the Word of God perfectly spoken from Heaven. While the secularists claim our religion is just another human opinion among many, the Christian religion refuses that category. This is why many Christians were martyred in the Roman Coliseums. The claim that Jesus Christ is Lord is not an idealized or unactualized reality. Our creed is that Jesus Christ is the incarnate God, and He was crucified, buried, rose from the dead on the third day, and bodily ascended into Heaven where He currently reigns as Lord of Heaven and Earth right now. That is current reality. That is actualized reality – as actualized as gravity, the laws of logic, and basic math.
So Auron is right, merely human constitutions, even the very best are merely human, and they will ultimately be defined by the people who write them and guard them. They are only as good as the people who continue to swear allegiance to them. We can and should teach and press for originalism and not capitulate to the “living document” nonsense. But it simply is true that the culture of the people is ultimately what will preserve any constitution. A wicked culture with a good constitution will not be slowed down in the slightest by the actual meaning of the words, as we have witnessed repeatedly in recent decades. We must also recognize that merely human constitutions will never be perfect or exhaustively account for every need or problem that will arise. But this doesn’t mean that every nation is left to the whims of mobs or the machinations of evil men.
Conclusion
Christ really is in Heaven, and He really has spoken in His Word. That Word, as it permeates nations, will incarnate and enculturate in different ways. Every good constitution will be a cultural artifact, but God’s Word is over all and endures forever. Our constitution actually alludes to this in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, insisting that there are other rights not enumerated in the Constitution which are retained by the people and the states. Where do those rights come from? They come from the common law rooted in Scripture and nature. Our Constitution insists that there is a law above our Constitution.
The American War for Independence was not fascist in the slightest. It was not a lawless rebellion in the name of vague humanistic ideals like the French Revolution. No, the American War for Independence was a thoroughly conservative revolution, a defensive war for liberty under law. And this principle is what many on the right are now striving to recover and articulate. It is what I believe Auron is arguing for: America is not merely universal ideas or ideals; it is not even a very fine Constitution; it is rather, a particular people in a particular place bound by loyalty to a particular God and a particular way of life. To the extent that the Constitution has been weaponized by the left, obliterated by judicial activists, and turned into the wax nose of cultural marxists, it is a functional dead letter. That doesn’t mean that we are therefore operating without law or lawlessly. Absolutely not. We are under Christ. We are under God’s law, found in Scripture and nature. This allows us both the freedom to preserve our common law heritage, as well as, as needed, revise our laws and constitutions to more faithfully reflect God’s law and apply it to our new circumstances. To do so is not to play the sneetches game at all, even if some on the right are doing that.
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