Providence lobbed the American Church a softball when it came to Covid. Did it rise to the occasion? No, the episode exposed a metastatic spiritual cancer, a real ugliness, and it revealed a reigning ethical system antithetical to the New Testament. The rotten harvest of a generation of Right-wing Dominionism came to bear in the selfishness and avarice we witnessed. The survival of the fittest ethic of capitalism and the sociopathic mercenary ethics of Libertarianism contributed to the deaths of over 1 million people – just in the US. These false social systems and ideologies have been deeply established in the minds and hearts of American Evangelicals due to an aggressive programme of false teaching that has been in place now for more than a generation. Covid exposed the rotten heart of the larger Evangelical movement – of American Christianity in all its mammon-loving repugnant splendour. Many Church leaders (including the supposed and farcical tyranny-resisters of The Frankfurt Declaration) have blood on their hands.
It was and is a disgraceful episode. As I have repeatedly
pointed out, the rise of Trump in the context of the Tea Party and Christian
Trumpism combined with the Covid episode was a watershed, a turning point for
American Evangelicalism. The last decade has taken the Evangelical movement off
a cliff and I don't believe there's any coming back.
In the end, the Frankfurt Declaration is falsely framed – a
series of disingenuous non sequitirs,
and false dilemmas all built on a false premise.
These questions that are asked concerning totalitarianism,
civil rights, and tyranny are not genuine questions, but begged ones. The
argument is already assumed and thus once again the document is disingenuous.
If one doesn't accept the Right-wing assumptions they make, then one is hardly
bound to accept their framing of such issues and questions – let alone their
conclusions.
And let's be candid, such declarations do not grant clarity
or help the Church in the realm of discernment. They are in fact schismatic and
increasingly we're witnessing these figures equate their political positions
and issues – with the gospel itself. If you don't agree with them on these
points, your Christianity is suspect. If you don't accept their framing of the
issues, you're flirting with heresy. Call me a heretic then. Coming from this
lot, it's a badge I would wear with honour. The fact that Bible-believing
Christians might come to other than Right-wing conclusions is out of bounds –
let alone the notion that we as Christians should reject not only the
Left-Right binary but the entire system and the wicked foundation upon which it
is built. This is the system they are wed to and have flourished within.
John 18.36 is the foundation for the pilgrim and stranger
exhortations of the New Testament. This document on its face rejects this
teaching in its call for activism and its assumption that the state is to guard
and protect 'our liberties', or that we have some kind of political and civil
rights, and these are (contrary to the New Testament) 'God given'. We have only
one 'right' – that is to take up the cross and bear witness. We obey. Our
obedience is nowhere tied to some notion of 'rights' vis-à-vis the state or
society.
Needless to say, they can't even imagine that someone might
take many of their premise-statements as true (to a point) and yet frame them very
differently and reach rather different conclusions. More could be said about
the resistance to tyranny narrative
taken historically and the implicit call to and threat of violence contained in
the document. There is no direct or overt call to arms but I would argue it is
implied and the inevitable result of such reasoning. Always concerning, such a
call is particularly troubling given the present political climate.
The Bible is not the guiding epistemological force to the
statement. The Bible is simply the packaging or vehicle for what are
Enlightenment-rooted Right-wing views about the state, individualism, liberty,
rights, and mammon. And these errors are also often combined with narratives
about the United States, its origins, notions of proprietary control over its
government, and the question of resistance to the state. The latter point
remains a living contradiction within the ideological framework of such
thinkers. The nation was born in blood and civil disobedience which as
conservatives these people have traditionally resisted. As conservatism is
being shed for a more raw and sharp-edged Right-wing ideology (which often
overlaps and appropriates the language and symbols of conservatism), the call
to political resistance and violence is coming to the fore. This is clear
enough for all to see and yet it also marks a break with conservatism. Caught
on the carousel of revolution and counter-revolution, and pushed culturally
into embracing various anti-liberal permutations (which are
counter-revolutionary in terms of 1776) – this movement has become almost
schizophrenic and since it is not of God, it will be undone.
To put it simply, none of these views, no matter how much
they dress up the language with Scriptural quotation are Biblical in the least.
This is New Calvinism's Far Right wing run amok.
As I've written repeatedly, the response to Covid was all
wrong. The leaders of the American Church failed. The wrong questions were
pursued and the entire issue was framed in error. The churches that just
quickly bowed to state mandates without qualification were wrong as were those
who (for mostly political reasons and under the aegis of its reasoning)
rejected any attempt at mitigation.
This is but another sad chapter in the Evangelical collapse
of the twenty-first century – a collapse in which New Calvinism is increasingly
playing a part.
Personally I find it rather amusing that the original Frankfurt
Declaration was a socialist document issued in 1951 specifically condemning capitalism.
All things considered it is probably of greater value than what these men
produced in 2022.