This feeds off some things read recently and looking at the tea leaves. My country, New Zealand, has avoided the worst of the global financial crisis: even though we had a Leftist government in the lead-up to it, a nasty earthquake (or three hundred) that flattened our second biggest city, and we have been run by a centrist, orthodox economic team since 2009 we have grown, our unemployment has dropped, and the tide of emigration to Australia is reversing: New Zealand and Australia function as one economic market, and as the jobs are back in NZ, Kiwis are coming home to the cold and the driving rain.
Remember you can use camping gas if you have it, and also charge mobiles from laptops that have power left. #AucklandPowerOutage
— Local Auckland (@LocalAuckland) October 4, 2014
That photo was taken about 6 PM yesterday: it was about six degrees with at least 10 degrees of wind chill from a southerly howling up from Antarctica (the trouble with Dunedin is the next land due south is Scott Base)
So what does one do on a Sunday morning in a 7th floor apartment with no power and no elevator? #AucklandPowerOutage
— Ellen Pickett (@ellen_pickett) October 4, 2014
In the meantime, the indicators that one watches if you invest are going the wrong way. The milk prices are falling: we mainly export this, and if our farmers payout falls, they employ less people. The construction bubble in China is breaking. And the US financial markets are completely divorced from reality. When there is a correction (and there will be) then times will, again, be hard. Our PM knows this, and, once again, promised little, being aware that things happen, and being cautious is generally wise.
But I am not thinking as much about that. But of ideology, and of human behaviour. People respond to incentives. If you reward virtue, virtue, or the appearance of virtue, will continue. But if you reward vice, vice will increase.
And if the rewards are not there, the risks increase, and society starts to rot. One hope is that we will reform ourselves.
Men have always been the workhorses in society, and they have always been happy to be workhorses. Men worked hard, and got rewarded with a measure of societal respect and authority in their households. Women also did their part: they were virtuous, desirable and truly helpful at home. Women of yonder years knew how to manage a home, and were a positive influence on the children, both boys and girls. In this setting, everyone was happy, and the society was good for it.
Then came Feminism, which taught women that they could “take up what they did not lay down and reap what they did not sow”; that actions did not have consequences; that only masculine virtues were the only desirable virtues; that femininity meant weakness; and that rebellion against nature and against God is the fastest route to happiness and fulfillment.
The result is this unsustainable shipwreck of a society which we now have.
But I am somewhat optimistic that men are waking up, and addressing this ugliness head on. I won’t be surprised if politicians running for office are made to sign a pledge to reform our family courts, just as some of them have been forced to commit to tax reform.It took me a while to arrive at the realization, but America is still worth saving, and it can be saved. And it is the men that will save it. The feminists are too selfish and shortsighted to be entrusted with such a task.
But there is another hypothesis. God may intervene: either to bring revival, or if this is rejected, to replace the people. We forget, at our peril, that God is here, he is not silent, and he is active.
And it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
But I am the LORD your God from the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me, and besides me there is no savior.
It was I who knew you in the wilderness, in the land of drought;
but when they had grazed, they became full, they were filled, and their heart was lifted up;
therefore they forgot me.So I am to them like a lion; like a leopard I will lurk beside the way.
I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs; I will tear open their breast,
and there I will devour them like a lion, as a wild beast would rip them open.He destroys you, O Israel, for you are against me, against your helper.
Where now is your king, to save you in all your cities?Where are all your rulers— those of whom you said, “Give me a king and princes”?
I gave you a king in my anger, and I took him away in my wrath.The iniquity of Ephraim is bound up; his sin is kept in store.
The pangs of childbirth come for him, but he is an unwise son,
for at the right time he does not present himself at the opening of the womb.Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death?
O Death, where are your plagues? O Sheol, where is your sting?
Compassion is hidden from my eyes.(Hosea 13:4-14 ESV)
It is not the laws of this land that matter, but what God wants. Our laws have been unrighteous at times, unjust at times, and we should not delude ourselves that we are in any way more progressive and modern than generations that have come before. We are just more efficient at spreading memes, for good or ill.
— Greg (@FoolishReporter) October 4, 2014
It is not the fact we have legalized all ghey marriage, it is that we have made marriage a fungible contract, to be ended at will. It is not that we have legalized prostitution, but that we have made getting married young unthinkable, and institutionalized premarital fornication.
It is no that we allow free speech and many to offend Christ, but that we have censored any person who speaks of truth, and silenced those who speak of beauty and honour. For without a vision, the people perish.
And our birth rate has fallen, but without people there is no economy, for the market is a human activity.
The irony is that the hope for our society is, once again, the church: the active believers, for they are not overtly flowing against the culture.
In any discussion about the future of religion in America, especially as it relates to stalled growth in churches and denominations, those outside our religious communities find one theory especially compelling. This is the idea: that young Evangelicals are frustrated with Christian orthodoxy’s strict standards of sexual morality. We’re told that these young Evangelicals will soon revolutionize our churches with liberalized views on same-sex marriage, premarital sex, gender identity, and so on. But a new study by a University of Texas sociologist finds that Evangelical Christians ages 18 to 39 are resisting liberalizing trends in the culture.
The suggestion of a shift in attitudes does sound plausible. Indeed, one of us has warned for years that conservative Evangelicals are often “slow-motion sexual revolutionaries,” adjusting to the ambient culture on, for instance, divorce in ways that have harmed our witness and compromised the Biblical message. How much more vulnerable would Evangelicals be in a culture that is shifting roller-coaster fast on the definition of marriage itself and related issues? But recent data suggest otherwise.
The research, to be fully released in September, was introduced in Mark Regnerus’s presentation “Sex in America: Sociological Trends in American Sexuality,” unveiled at a recent gathering of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s leadership summit. According to Regnerus, when compared with the general population and with their non-observant peers, churchgoing Evangelical Christians are retaining orthodox views on Biblical sexuality, despite the shifts in broader American culture.
Regnerus surveyed 15,378 persons between the ages of 18 and 60, but he focuses in particular on respondents under 40. Significantly, Regnerus did the important work of differentiating between those who identify merely verbally with a particular religious tradition and those who actually attend church weekly. A political poll that didn’t differentiate between likely and unlikely voters wouldn’t be an accurate representation of the electorate, and for the same reasons, a survey should distinguish between someone who says “Catholic” or “Baptist” when asked for a religious identity and someone who actually shows up in the pews.
While support for same-sex marriage characterized a solid majority of those identifying as atheists, agnostics, liberal Catholics, and liberal Protestants, only 11 percent of young Evangelicals actively expressed support for same-sex marriage.
Approximately 6 percent of religiously active Evangelicals expressed support for abortion rights, while over 70 percent of their non-believing peer group said they believed in abortion rights.
While a large cross-section of all Americans believe in marriage’s importance, Regnerus found that, for example, Evangelicals are less likely than most to perceive marriage as “outdated.”
Evangelical Christians were also drastically less likely to believe that cohabitation is a good idea. While upward of 70 percent of those who claim no religious affiliation or those who are “spiritual but not religious” agree that cohabitation is acceptable, approximately 5 percent of Evangelicals agreed that cohabitation is acceptable. “While left-leaning Evangelicals have received considerable media attention lately, it pays to survey the masses and see just what’s going on,” says Regnerus. “These data suggest that while a modest minority of Evangelicals under 40 profess what we might call more sexually liberal attitudes, it’s not a significant minority. Minorities can be vocal. Survey data help us understand just how large or small they really are.”
It sounds as if the USA is becoming like NZ. Going to church is a subversive activity: the right thinking, the progressive, the public religion is athiesm, with a flavour of indigenous shamanism whenever one wants to feel spiritual. If this happens, then any rhetoric the larger society has about us being (to paraphrase my Prime Minister) “the greatest little country in the world” is specious.
However, if the pagans fornicate but to not procreate, while the faithful marry and raise Godly children, this liberal project will, akin to the liberal movements of the 1930s, the Shakers and the Cathars, become mere footnotes: examples of errors not to fall into.
Let us pray that this is so. But a winnowing is coming.
___________________________
Today is the day that the Anglicans remember George Bell, a signatory of the Barman declaration and an example of how to act in evil times. .
God of peace, who didst sustain thy bishop George Bell with the courage to proclaim thy truth and justice in the face of disapproval in his own nation: As he taught that we, along with our enemies, are all children of God, may we stand with Christ in his hour of grieving, that at length we may enter thy country where there is no sorrow nor sighing, but fullness of joy in thee; through Jesus Christ our Redeemer, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
