Don't Let the Woke Baptize The Kids
No.101: April 1, 2022
Dear Friends,
Welcome to The Square Inch 101! In celebration of the 101st issue of this newsletter, I think it may be helpful to dig up the very first issue (April 1st, 2020, exactly two years ago!) to remind us of the source of the name. Here’s what I wrote:
The name is inspired by the great Dutch theologian, churchman, journalist, and statesman Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), who famously said:
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!
That is a power-packed statement about the Lordship of Jesus Christ worth taking some time to mull over. I suggest going over it word by word. But even more, it is an inspiring call for us to see every square inch in every domain as something Jesus claims as his own. He cares about it. He has purposes and expectations for it. That means, yes, the dominating issues of our day (heavy on politics and media), but also everything else. Of course, it isn’t possible to exhaustively write about “Life, the Universe, & Everything” (as Douglas Adams puts it), so this newsletter will focus on the various “square inches” that interest me. It might be grand or it might be mundane. There is no prefabricated formula. I enjoy ideas, family, food, baseball, Montana, fishing, books, music, and much more.
I promise to try to write about those things in a lively and entertaining way.
I’m think, by and large, I’ve succeeded in these goals. I admit that sometimes serious cultural or political things have crowded out the more mundane things, so I will endeavor to balance that out a bit this year. So let me start today with some “lesser” things, and then move on to something more serious. You can skip ahead to whatever suits your fancy: the order today is baseball, Joe Biden, worship music, and the sexualizing of children.
Play Ball!
Let’s start with baseball! This coming Thursday the MLB season begins, and boy has it been a long winter. The labor dispute between ownership and the player’s union has at long last resolved, but it resulted in a week’s delay to the season.
Here are some things I’m very excited about.
The AL Central is going to be a lot more competitive than it has in recent years. Once again both the Twins and the White Sox are very good teams; we will see a revival of an old and very, very bitter rivalry! To give you a sense of that, the White Sox are hated in the Mattson household. It is against family policy to ever, ever root for the White Sox. If you can believe it, Chicago is lower on the totem pole than the New York Yankees (who are largely responsible for the fact that the Twins have the longest postseason losing streak in the history of all sports combined—18 straight loses!). In fact, the rule around here is that there is only one scenario in which it is okay to root for the New York Yankees: when they play the White Sox. So, yes, this should be a fun division race.
After an awful last-place finish last season, the Minnesota Twins could have justifiably broken the team down to “rebuild.” They did the opposite. They pulled off some amazing trades (they signed a shortstop from the Rangers and then traded him less than a day later to the Yankees!). Then they did the unthinkable: they signed the #1 Free Agent on the market, shortstop Carlos Correia. The Twins have never, ever been in the conversation for signing marquee players, and it shocked the baseball world. What a breath of fresh air for Twins Territory! We might have the best up-the-middle defense in baseball.
That’s because the Twins also signed a long-term deal with the very best center fielder in baseball, Byron Buxton. Yes, he’s been injured. A LOT. But I predict—mark my words—he plays a full season in 2022 and wins the American League Most Valuable Player. You heard it here first: he will be better than Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, and everyone else. I am excited for his season, and think it will be one for the ages for Byron.
[Update: since beginning to write this newsletter, Byron Buxton is 3-for-3 with two home runs against the Braves today in a Spring Training game.]
Play ball!
Joe Antionette
You are all probably aware that the President of the United States has been running at the mouth in very embarrassing ways. It seems like every day he says something that immediately has to be “clarified” by his staff. Supposedly it is impolite to notice that he is an ailing, feeble, elderly man who appears to not know where he is or what he is supposed to be doing or saying much of the time, but I don’t care about politeness or niceties when it comes to being the leader of the free world.
The same people who mocked Ronald Reagan mercilessly for his age are making all sorts of excuses for Joe Biden. It’s a gross double standard, yes. But more important is the reality: Reagan was lucid, Biden is not. And this stuff really matters. We are on a razor’s edge of conflict with one of the world’s largest nuclear powers, which happens to be led by an America-hating lunatic. When I say we need an adult in the room, I don’t mean the kind wearing diapers.
Was that mean? Maybe. But these are serious times.
Oh, and my eyes rolled out of my head when the other day President Biden again suggested that Americans suffering from high gas prices should just buy an electric vehicle. My word, the Democrats are going to get slaughtered at the ballot box in November. “Hey, I notice you’re having trouble paying your bills. Why don’t you go buy a new car?”
Marie Antoinette, meet Joe Biden.
What’s Wrong With Emotion?
This video clip is making the rounds on Twitter, and it comes from a new critical documentary on Hillsong, the MEGAchurch:
The pleasant lady in this video clip is saying openly what critics of contemporary worship have been saying all along. The music is written and manufactured in such a way as to affect the emotions. Aha! It’s all just emotional manipulation, not real spirituality!
Now, in what I am about to say I am in no way defending Hillsong, per se, or even their music, with which I’m not particularly familiar. But I am going to defend a principle.
The criticism is deeply problematic. All of these people saying, “Aha! I told you so!” should stop and pause for a moment and think about what they are implying. They are implying that real spirituality is not connected to human emotions, not connected to the ears, not connected to the brain’s emotional centers, not connected to the surrounding environment, not connected to aesthetics in any way. Spirituality is functionally disembodied. It is something that takes place in a way that completely bypasses our corporeal existence.
Now, what does that sound like? It sounds like Gnosticism, a radical spirit/matter dualism in which material existence is irrelevant to or a hindrance to one’s spiritual life. As though being moved emotionally by a powerful chord progression hitting your ears somehow makes the experience not meaningful.
That’s a pretty grotesque theological mistake, and I find it very ironic that this criticism is coming from people who style themselves rigorous in their theology and doctrine—at least more rigorous than the folks at Hillsong. The question posed in the video, as I recall, is: “Are you crying because God is presently intervening in your life in a powerful way, or are you crying because that chord progression is written to make you cry?” I find that a very odd juxtaposition because it assumes—I mean, really, it just takes for granted—that God is not at work in a well-written chord progression. That’s very weird. The answer to the question may be, and probably often is, “Yes.” “Yes, God is intervening in my life in a powerful way right now, and he’s using this deeply moving music to do it.”
Hmm. Should I step on some toes? …. Well, what’s the fun of being a theologian if you can’t step on some toes? You can disregard the following, if you wish. But I’d rather you mull it over.
These criticisms often come from Baptists, particularly Baptists who style themselves “Reformed.” It is my view that this kind of quasi-Gnostic critique flows, however well-meaning it is, from what I believe is the Baptist’s most basic and idiosyncratic theological principle: creational things cannot be genuine means of redemptive grace. This is just conceptually built in from the beginning: parentage, being born in a Christian family (the family being the most basic “creational” institution of all), has zero redemptive significance to the Baptist (that’s Old Testament, fleshy, circumcision stuff). It does not—it cannot—confer upon a child rights and privileges in the kingdom of God. The reason they do not baptize infants is because they do not believe that “fleshy” stuff like marriage and family and childbearing has any bearing in the realm of redemption. There is a very strict nature/grace dualism at work here; redemption is just not connected to the natural world. God’s regenerative work is solely a “from the outside” kind of thing (a spiritual “zap” that occurs only if one is old enough, and not a moment before), not an “organically connected to natural means” kind of thing.
And if it is the case that God cannot even—or chooses to not—use basic creational things like families, nurture, upbringing, and environment as an organic means of redemptive grace, it makes perfect sense that he can’t use your favorite chord progression, either.
But God uses families and music and aesthetics and our senses and our emotions and our bodies—material, “fleshy” reality—as a means to redemptively “intervene” in our lives all the time. You can be critical of Hillsong and contemporary music for a lot of things, I suspect, but taking music seriously and how it affects the human person is not one of them.
Oh, and baptize your babies. They are to be considered Christians and members of God’s kingdom, by virtue of their Christian parentage (1 Cor. 7:14). I bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you? The covenant family is God’s ordinary and organic means of redemptive grace. Tell the kids they are Christians, pray “Our Father” with them, and raise them as such.
If you’re interested in the topic of human emotions and their place in a biblical anthropology, I wrote an essay on it here.
Sexualizing Kids
The big cultural brouhaha these days is a bill passed and signed into law in the state of Florida that bans teaching on sex and gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade in public schools.
Opponents of the bill bizarrely style it a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, even though that is not remotely a reasonable interpretation of the law. It is, we are told, a direct assault on the LGBTQIA+ community (Don’t ask what those last two letters are for; they keep adding things and I can’t keep up). The law is hateful, bigoted, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
Now the Walt Disney Corporation has strangely entered the fray. Strangely, because the bill is popular, and because they are a day late and dollar short. The bill is now law. What do they possibly stand to gain by making a stink about it now? The answer is that they are absolutely beholden to the most radical segment of its corporate constituency; they just cannot not jump when Woke, Inc.™ tells them to jump. They don’t want to find themselves on the “wrong side of history,” would they? So they are being forced to virtue signal about diversity and inclusivity and so forth, and in doing so they are demonstrating utter disregard for their shareholders, because there’s about to be a big backlash. It’s dereliction.
It is actually quite shocking, if we were still capable of being shocked, that the corporation most known for its contributions to children’s entertainment would suddenly become a vocal proponent for sexualizing children. And that is what it is, by the way: sexualizing children. Five, six, seven, eight, and nine-year-olds do not have natural consciousness of their sexuality, and these people are proposing that we drag all the burdens from future teenager-hood and puberty and lay them on these poor kids beforehand. No matter what these woke parents say, none of them have “trans” or “gay” or “non-binary” grade schoolers. They have foisted these categories on their kids. They have sexualized them. I believe it is child abuse.
And that is what “educators” are insisting they be allowed to do to your children. Let that sink in for a moment.
I want to address that, but let’s not leave Disney quite yet. Christopher Rufo of City Journal has been on a tear recently, exposing Disney executives and their agenda. Please, please read about it here. He acquired teleconference video from an internal Disney event in which executives make clear their agenda. Among other things, their aim is for 50% of their characters to comprise “underrepresented” communities, by which they mean the LGBTQ+ community. They are unabashedly seeking to normalize the sexualization of children.
But, why? Why does Disney and a massive cohort of teachers want to sexualize your kids? Are they all just perverts? That’s a tempting conclusion, but it isn’t particularly plausible. A guy by the name of Josh Daws wrote a Twitter thread the other day that I think hits the nail on the head. Please go and read it here. And then come back.
Are you back? Okay. I found that illuminating. If you read The Quarter Inch a few weeks ago, I shared a very long essay by “Helena,” a young woman who spent years transitioning into a man. If you read that in conjunction with what Daws is suggesting, it all clicks into place. All of the elements of the agenda he identifies are woven throughout her first-hand account. The terrible self-image of being a part of the “oppressors” (white, cisgender, heterosexual), followed by the possibility of choosing a new, privileged (i.e., oppressed) identify from a smorgasbord of options, followed by pitting the child against their regressive parents and relegating them to enemies of all that is good, the flight to the warm embrace of radicals whereupon the child is further radicalized, and on and on it goes.
They want to divorce your kids from you and take custody, fashioning them into “little revolutionaries” and would-be social justice warriors. This is what Black Lives Matter means by undermining the “nuclear family structure,” or at least this is one of the chief means for obtaining that aim. This—not personal perversion—explains why they want the liberty to indoctrinate children at such young ages into their sexual alphabet soup. In this regard, on further glance, this is not at all unrelated to my seemingly random foray into the question of infant baptism just now (I didn’t plan this, by the way). It is not a good time—and never was—to insist that our kids are in some kind of identity limbo until they get old enough to “decide for themselves.” Does that sound like a sacramental doctrine capable of withstanding the current cultural assault? Hmm. I don’t think so. Either we baptize them into their rightful community or the Woke will baptize them for us.
Yes, it is a disgusting and perverse agenda. But it is also deeply religious and political. There are people who scoff and laugh at the notion that there is something called “Cultural Marxism.” But I don’t think it is a matter of debate. It is right in front of our noses, and apparently Disney wants to be its official propaganda outlet for children.
I suggest we all reconsider that Disney+ subscription and plans to visit their theme parks. And if you are a stockholder, for goodness’ sake, show up to shareholder meetings and speak up. This is your company. Ever think of that?
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!
As a Reformed Baptist for most of my life I never heard this rationale or such a dismissal of created, fleshy things. Fascinating article though in every regard.