11 January 2023

The Frankfurt Declaration: Its Disordered Assumptions, Deceit, and Dangers (II)

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.