Dear Friends,
Yesterday “Thing 3” (our little “tagalong” who was the best idea we ever had) turned 7 years old, so we took our favorite drive through rural Big Sky Country to visit her aunt, uncle, and cousins an hour away to play with their new baby chicks. We saw the usual deer frolicking, Bald Eagles, Sand Hill Cranes, Red-Tail Hawks, Osprey, and a Kestral—sorry you don’t live here, too. But, I should remind you, Montana is full. You’re free to visit some time; we just need you to leave again at some point, especially if you’re from California. (That’s actually kind of a real running prejudice in Big Sky Country, believe it or not! I only say it tongue-in-cheek. Some of my best friends are California transplants.) At any rate, this partially explains why you didn’t get this newsletter yesterday.
It has been a challenging week in other ways, resulting in a bit of mental exhaustion. I haven’t really been advertising it, but I have been teaching two seminary classes this semester (via Zoom and prerecorded lectures) for Westminster Theological Seminary (which has a snazzy new website, by the way), and we’ve just finished the second-to-last week of class. It has certainly been a whirlwind for me, and I’m definitely going to enjoy the weekend.
I cannot promise a lengthy and sophisticated newsletter at this point, but let’s see where it goes, shall we?
Getting Dumber
I wanted to write something on the myriad events concerning race issues in America this week, but I barely feel like I have it in me. I feel like we live inside a comic book. It is “Good guys” versus “Ultimate Evil” all the way down, and both “sides” of these debates see things, well, oppositely. And, might I say, foolishly. I can’t get too deep into any analysis, but I have some scattered thoughts to share.
This week in Minneapolis Derek Chauvin was convicted of three counts for the killing of George Floyd. I believed early on, and still do, that Officer Chauvin’s actions (and inactions) constituted some form of negligent homicide, and so I am not at all surprised that a jury thought so, too. I also think the naked intimidation of the jury by Maxine Waters and then Joe Biden (his was more defensible—barely—as his comments at least occurred after the jury had been sequestered) outrageous. Nice little city you’ve got here… it would be a shame if anything happened to it… now, convict… or else. This is no way to achieve justice, which is what these people keep saying they want (Ex.23:2).
The judge thought and said that this would give Chauvin some daylight for his appeal, as jury intimidation undermines fair trials—you know, the things we use to bring about justice. I don’t believe that he will win any appeals, however, because the verdict is a reasonable one. Not precisely the one I would have chosen, but it wasn’t my job to make the judgment.
But what has dismayed me most in all this is the apparent fact that none of this has ever really been about George Floyd or Derek Chauvin. They are props in a play. Cartoon characters. Useful tools that advance a plot and narrative, of no real value in their own right. Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing his life for justice.” What kind of person thinks that is what happened? Floyd is hereby honored because he is a martyr for a cause—he is now Saint George because he threw himself on the wheel of “history” and moved it—progressed it—forward. He’s not a tragic homicide victim; he’s a hero because he advanced the narrative of systemic white supremacy. I don’t know how to put this politely: George Floyd was useful cannon fodder in the progressive assault on our allegedly systemically racist institutions; I know they think they are humanizing George Floyd, but I see pretty much the opposite.
Instantly following the Chauvin verdict, the Black Lives Matter movement had a new martyr for the cause. A 16-year-old black girl was shot and killed by a white police officer in Columbus, Ohio. The news sizzled around the world, and famous basketball player and Chinese communist sympathizer LeBron James tweeted out a picture of the officer with the words, “You’re next: #Accountability” (Note: Uigher inmates in Xinjiang were unavailable for comment).
It was irrelevant that said teenager was shot and killed while in the literal act of attempting to commit a murder with a butcher knife and that the police officer was actually a quick-reacting, highly skilled, life-saving hero. She’s a prop. A useful tool for the cause, even if just for a moment to get people stirred up.
On the other side of our cultural aisle, which must of course be 100% antithesis, I have seen nauseating non sequiturs employed to vindicate Derek Chauvin and claim that he should never have been convicted of anything. Some of it really is racist garbage, some of it is just ignorance of the legal standards, and some of it is simply the knee-jerk need to take the maximally opposite view of those people on the “other” side.
And that, my friends, is one of our most serious cultural ailments. We have lost the ability to think more than one thought. We have lost the ability to discern that multiple things can be true at the same time. We have lost the art of discernment. We have lost wisdom. George Floyd can have ingested fatal amounts of fentanyl and resisted arrest and Derek Chauvin could and should have done something other than press his knee into Floyd’s neck for four additional minutes after it became apparent he had stopped breathing. We insist on choosing between these two things in our apportionment of blame, and our apportionment is—amazingly!—what coincides with our larger narrative.
And we think our narrative constitutes reality; our perception is reality. In Carl Trueman’s The Rise of the Modern Self, he explains how modern individualism has led to people to think this about their own perceptions of themselves: if I perceive myself to be a woman trapped in a man’s body, then I am a woman trapped in a man’s body. What we are witnessing now is this idea as a society-and-culture-wide principle: our collective narrative, our perception of the facts, our spinning of the facts, actually constitutes or makes the facts. Reality bends to our perceptions. This is why everything is about social and cultural narratives instead of actual reality. This is one reason I feel the sense we are living in a comic book full of cartoon characters, not the flesh-and-blood complicated world of reality.
I find this sobering because the Bible tells us that one of the signs of cultural judgment and decline is that “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom. 1:21). There are epistemic consequences to rebellion against God and his requirements.
Almost every day someone will Tweet some ridiculous, cartoonish story about something—an egregious case of media bias; the cancelation of somebody for some tiny infraction decades ago; a school that suspends a student for showing other students that his half-eaten Pop Tart looks like a gun—and caption it something like, “Everything is getting dumber.” Those Tweets can be pretty funny, but there is also something about them that is very much not funny. What if… everything is getting dumber? What if we really are losing our minds? What if our thinking is becoming futile, in the biblical sense? What if our insistence on our own moral superiority, our virtue-signaling, our simplistic diagramming of the world in to Good Guys and Villains, our self-aggrandizing play-acting of imagined heroic narratives, is making us morally and intellectually stupid?
I think it is.
I am not excluding myself from these tendencies. Intellectuals always do that thing where they, and they alone, occupy the moderate middle with everyone else on opposite extremes. I’m a finite human being with a remnant sinful nature and susceptible to pride and virtue signaling and all the rest. But I nevertheless do see the problem, and I suspect you do as well. In a culture and society fracturing before our very eyes, it is we who must seek the “mind of Christ” (who is, after all, the “wisdom from God,” 1 Cor. 1:30), to have minds of wisdom and discernment, voices of reason, and hearts of humility and compassion.
As citizens of the kingdom of God, that’s what we are here for:
You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on a stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven. —Matt. 5:14-16
Miscellany
This is called the “human condition”:
Two PCA pastors have written a book about white supremacy and a case for reparations. It’s sure to spark some controversy. Kevin DeYoung wrote a review at The Gospel Coalition that I found helpful. Check it out.
The Toronto Police apparently arrested Captain Jack Sparrow and removed his dangerous gun from the streets:
I never thought that I would ever, ever link to something produced by Bill Maher, but this takedown of our institutions on COVID is really something. (It’s a bit off-color at places, as you might expect).
Last week I signed off with a musical selection from the great Sarah Jarosz. She’s got a new album coming out soon, Blue Heron Suite, and here’s a lyric video to one of its songs. She writes and sings lovely music.
Amen.
Love Sarah; saw her live a few months ago. Her music is going in interesting directions.
This was so good. I've shared with several friends, thanks!