Speech given to the Plano Young Republicans (just north of Dallas, TX) on Wednesday June 27th, 2024.
I want to thank Isaac Laster and the Plano Young Republicans for inviting me to come speak. Despite my silvery hair color, I promise I am not a Boomer. I am firmly GenX, which means I wasn’t parented, I didn’t grow up with a phone, and had real friends with whom I actually spent all day every day. With these friends I foraged for food, baseball cards, and ultimately, truth. It was an existential existence in the 70s. We had Jimmy Carter and Star Wars.
We thought being nice to the Central Americans by giving them the world’s greatest civil engineering project would keep them there.
We were wrong.
We had an old-school space adventure about princesses, pirates, good guys and bad guys, and that had laser-sword carrying, Kurosawaesque Nazirite priest-warriors who were the enforcers of a grand civilization. We thought the sheer cultural force of that would continue a struggling but still-somewhat-existent traditionalist paradise.
We were wrong.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the lesbian-witch Western deconstruction that is Lucasfilm’s “The Acolyte”, but if you haven’t, it is almost drinking game worthy – if you are apt at seeing middle-school-level anti-traditionalist signaling.
But I digress.
Just to gauge the temperature of the room, and if you don’t mind outing yourself as an enemy of the State, how many here are Christians?
Thank you, the stealth drones did get that on video and the death squads are right outside. So…since this is the end, let’s make this a rager!
The question we face today, and that which I want to discuss tonight, is this:
Should man be governed? And what is the Christian’s role in that?
I did not ask “Should mankind be ‘nannied’”. That is something completely different, and has been discussed at length by those who speak of the “Longhouse”. Let’s pour one out for our friend Lomez. No, I ask, “Should man be governed?”
Isn’t that the age-old question? The Bible didn’t consider it a question, but a post-fall fact. Let us consider Genesis 9, and know that I take this as literal truth; but even if you don’t, this IS foundational:
9 And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. 2 The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. 3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. 4 But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 5 And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.
6 “Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.7 And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.”
Now, this is the bedrock of Western Civilization, whether you are a Christian or not, for it is the basis of order. Why was this passage needed, and what does it say?
Interestingly, it is organized in a CHIASM. That means it begins and ends with the same idea. What is that idea? That of “being fruitful and multiplying”, and interestingly the chiastic center is “I give you everything.” For now, let’s hold that thought.
What is the prior event that led to God making this covenant with Noah? That’s right, the Flood. Why was there a flood? Well, God wasn’t happy with the people. What led to that displeasure? Adam’s sin. His breaking of the Covenant God made with him. And what was that about? If you remember, Adam, instead of protecting and cherishing the gift of a right companion that God made for him, treated Eve as a kind of science experiment.
No? Remember, Adam was right there when Eve took a bite of the forbidden fruit, as he immediately took one as well. Adam, the impression is, was using Eve as his royal taster. Hardly the role for a treasured wife.
So, the whole idea is that man is sinful. That doesn’t mean he is as bad as he possibly could be, but it does mean that, let’s be honest, mankind does exhibit the propensity to be awful. People in and of themselves are flawed. Sin is an idea from archery – of missing the bullseye (they didn’t call it a bullseye back then, just a “mark” you aimed for). We are arrows incapable of flying perfectly straight.
But, back to the passage, this chiastic message of the institution of government:
We are to fill the earth, so much as it can hold – and it can hold a LOT – with people. Yet, what happens when people start rubbing shoulders with other people as this filling occurs? Does the propensity to sin go up or down? Hint: just remember your last experience on 635 during rush hour.
So, people are flawed, they are sinful. That sinfulness increases with population and population density. What is the solution? God says to Noah:
6 “Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.
Who is the second “man” in this? This second “man” is the instituted state. Man must be governed. The Apostle Paul expounds on this reality in his letter to the church in Rome:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities… 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, 4 for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the swordin vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.
Now, for my libertarian friends in the audience, let me encourage you to take a deep breath. I was once a libertarian, though when I was walking the halls of Mises & Hayek, dinosaurs roamed the earth, and in reality the libertarian movement was much more aligned with paleoconservatism. Ron Paul, for instance, is not an anarcho-capitalist. Hans Herman Hoppe, who wrote the proto-Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvinesque “Democracy: The God that Failed” was the last gasp before those seeking the spread of the freedom paradise that is Mogadishu, took over the helm of Libertarianism.
And this brings us to the paradox of liberty: for man to have freedom, he must be governed. Sinful man isn’t so sinful that he cannot recognize the capable among the throng, or too sinful to occasionally see that something is “wrong”, but is too flawed to be left completely to his own will.
For the rest, please go to my article at American Reformer:
See my dedicated page for other pieces here: