I’ve got to say something about what will be happening with this blog, because not much has been happening lately, and the action isn’t exactly going to be chugging for the next eight or nine months or so.  The reason being, I’m on the quad, man, and college necessarily drains away most of my writing juices.  However, I’d like to put up a somewhat longer post every month or so, and I’m tossing around doing some short “Reflections on the Psalms” type pieces every Sunday, since I’m currently making my way through the Psalms as a sort of church warm-up routine.  

I’d like the focus of the longer posts to probably be on Leftism, be it presented in theology or politics.  There are at least two reasons for this.  The first is that the topic just riles me up, and that means I have the energy to write about it.  The second is that, unfortunately, when many of my fellow Millennials hear words like “tolerance,” “equality,” “inequality,” “redistribution,” “fair share,” “the 1%,” “gay rights,” “anti-gay,” “social justice,” and all the rest of those terms, their hearts get gravitationally pulled through their esophagi to their brains, and the resultant mess is their consequent ideology.  Since I am a Millennial, and since I’m really cynical about Millennials, and since I’m being told with the rest of my peers that all these terms are great ideas, I feel an obligation, both intellectually and pastorally, to try to make a few ripples in my very small pool to try to show the emptiness of the Leftist ideology to my peers.  

I find this emptiness especially the case when it applies to theology, and this is where I think we should perhaps be most concerned.  America and the Western world in general are close to fading to that upside-down float at the top of the aquarium that dead goldfish do, and this Millennial generation will, unfortunately, probably play a significant part in either speeding or slowing that process.  It is my submission that Leftism is part of the problem here and not the solution.  

So, briefly, my first entry in this endeavor will have to do with Western society itself, since that is what I just said we should save and so it should be something valuable enough to save, right?  

The false dilemma that is sometimes posed by Leftists (I am particularly thinking of my college Intro to Sociology textbook here) is that our attitude toward the West and the rest of the world is either ethnocentrism or cultural relativism, viz., we either say that we are awesome and everybody else are losers, or we say that no society is more or less of a loser than any other.  Faced with these two options, the best choice seems of course to be relativism.  The example illustrating how relativism is cool is usually something really benign, like how in some countries people eat sushi and in another they eat pizza and of course neither is more right than the other.  It’s never something about how in some countries you can buy pop music without any legal repercussions and in other countries you get publicly scourged for buying pop music and of course neither is more right than the other.

My point here will simply be that it matters what ideology shapes your overall cultural context.  It matters whether your cultural history has been molded by Christianity, the Reformation, the Qu’ran, the Tao, Hinduism, or something else.  These ideologies aren’t going to produce equal results any more than one builder who lays the foundations with concrete and another with cream of mushroom soup.  

This is a straightforward judgment that does not imply obnoxious jingoism or condescending bigotry.  I would say this implies saying which side is up.  

There is much more that could be said about this subject, but I’m done for now.  Thank you for attention.

Soli Deo Gloria,

David