I think Social liberalism is a disaster. The attempt to be free, to be able to live as you like, has backfired. We now have so much regulation. Tolerance has taken liberty, even the liberty of conscience that Christians have always believed in, and trampled all over it. As a perceptive liberal thinker points out.
It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing. I now mostly associate that public face with danger, with an endless list of things that you can’t do or say or think, and with the constant threat of being called an existentially bad person if you say the wrong thing, or if someone decides to misrepresent what you said as saying the wrong thing. There are so many ways to step on a landmine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them. I’m far from alone in feeling that it’s typically not worth it to engage, given the risks. The hundreds of young people I teach, tutor, and engage with in my academic and professional lives teach me about the way these movements are perceived. I have strict rules about how I engage with students in class, and I never intentionally bring my own beliefs into my pedagogy, but I also don’t steer students away from political issues if they turn the conversation that way. I cannot tell you how common it is for me to talk to 19, 20, 21 year old students, who seem like good people, who discuss liberal and left-wing beliefs as positive ideas, but who shrink from identifying with liberalism and feminism instinctively. Privately, I lament that fact, but it doesn’t surprise me. Of course much of these feelings stem from conservative misrepresentations and slanders of what social liberalism is and means. But it also comes from the perception that, in the online forums where so much political discussion happens these days, the slightest misstep will result in character assassination and vicious condemnation.
I think of liberalism as a religion, and a crap one at that. If you are going to be a pagan and make your own perdition, be honourable about it. Seek wisdom: among the Pagans there are great thinkers and many who have lived lives that are noble and have seen in the shattered and broken world we have glimmers of the light divine. The Buddha, the best of the Stoics, the Analects and the Tao all reflect the laws of nature and that sense of decency is built into our bones.
As is the fact we cannot adhere to the laws we have and understand.
But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”
We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
But if, in our endeavour to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.
(Galatians 2:11-21 ESV)
In Christ, we are not of this world, and we have left the Mosaic covenant behind. This covenant was that if you kept the law — down to the last stroke — you would be righteous, and salvation would come to you. This is the promise of religion, and it would be true if we could keep it.
But we cannot. So we place regulations on regulations. We teach morality. Or we teach freedom. But in doing so we consider enlightenment is required: we forget that the hippies were taught that they could get rid of the rules on sexual morality because Buddha and drugs would turn them into the new socialist men.
That did not work. So they now nag.
The Social Justice Warriors and the saddened state of the modern American church sure would love to see the Signal stopped. But you don’t stop God. You can only ignore Him until you’re forced to pony up or get right out of His way. The struggle to move from my previous years as a ‘Churchian’ has been enough to tell me that. Yet, one tiny inkling of ‘The Mind of Christ’ and I’m hooked. The poor SJW’s don’t see that coming as an unintended consequence, do they? The Mind of Christ would be an idiotic notion to them (or, else, they would rationalize it to mean ‘tolerance’) so for those of us out here who’ve grown sick of the nonsense and disingenuous nature of the SJW as well as the notion of political correctness, to just up and find ourselves on a path toward internal strength and resolve, the sort that leads us to get more and more notion to misbehave wouldn’t occur to them as something rational to worry with.
They’re simply giving us lessons in how to be a fixed point—steadfast, unmoving, not ‘fixers’ but fixed points—and helping us learn the resolve to be fed up enough to start truly wondering: what would it be like if I served God, instead of simply claiming Him? And I will gladly use the enemy to learn about myself and learn to actually draw closer to Him.
Can’t stop the Signal. He was, is and will always be far too Holy for that.
When we see God, even a glimpse, we see just how awful a state we are in. And then we have to revise our opinion of ourselves. We cannot make ourselves better. We need to be made new.
And the death of Christ removes from us the need to do that which we cannot do: earn our salvation. If we could, he would not have needed to walk that road. Instead of following some false regulations in the hope it leads to righteousness, let us seek the mind of God.
Liberalism is a crap religion. It encourages you to make your own hell and call it good: it requires all those who see the infested hole you have made as pitiful to be silent. It will not lead to your health, but your destruction. Do not follow their precepts. Do not be them. Do not be like them.