The Woke Fantasies of a Dominionist Fool and His Blind Pursuit of Fascism

https://theaquilareport.com/wokism-and-silent-preachers-a-redux-of-hitlers-germany/

The fool speaks again. We have certainly wasted some ink responding to the likes of retired PCA minister Larry Ball, but given that his material is published at The Aquila Report it's evident that someone finds it to be noteworthy and intelligent. It's hard to imagine someone might find it edifying but given that there are still people walking around with Newsmax and Trump hats on – anything is possible.

I see he picked up on the now largely dropped narrative that banks are collapsing due to 'woke' investment strategies – a convenient if utterly misleading tact taken by Right-wing media outlets, that soon was exposed as ridiculous as the problems are wide-ranging and not limited to niche banks in Silicon Valley. Incidentally their collapse was more about being over-leveraged vis-à-vis interest rates, and indicative of systemic problems – not due to some political spin narrative dreamt up by FOX strategists.

For that matter these terms 'woke' and even something that historically has meaning such as 'Marxism' have become effectively meaningless in terms of modern Right-wing discourse. They have become catch-all terms like 'Red' under the aegis of McCarthyism. It's literally just name calling, a means to demonize the enemy and discredit them.

At this point anyone who fails to adopt a John Birch-style narrative about American history and capitalism is immediately labeled woke or communist. It's ridiculous all the more as many academics, thinkers, historians, and others haven't changed their views in the least and yet in this recent 'woke wave' they're presented as introducing something novel, something faddish in the mode of so-called Cultural Marxism.

Apart from maybe the concept of equity, nothing Ball lists as associated with Neo-Marxism has anything do with the actual models presented by the likes of Marx, Engels, or Lenin – and I'm going to guess Ball is incapable of discussing something like Marxist-Leninism, let alone Stalinism.

The truth is – and I am by no means the only person to point this out – the modern fixation on Identity Politics (what Ball is confusing with Marxism) does not flow from the ideological fonts of the Left but primarily from Capitalist Decadence, hyper-individualism, and psychology gone to seed. It is sometimes dressed up in the garb and language of the Left, but it's a pseudo-Left phenomenon at best, a fig-leaf meant to conceal unfulfilled aspirations and success within the capitalist framework. Advocates of this school wish to appropriate the power of the American system, its institutions, and its empire – not overthrow it. The likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez typify this. Despite their claims, none of them are socialists and they actually work to undermine genuine socialist politics.

Now however you define identity politics, or reckon its pedigree, I can agree with Ball on one thing – it is a threat to Christianity. But that's only if the Church lets it in, only if the Church becomes acculturated and lets down its guard – which is precisely what has happened. And for this very reason, other false ideologies like Classical Liberalism and its 'rights' regime, as well as notions like democracy, the social contract and the lexicon of republicanism have entered the Church. And worse, the mammonist system of Capitalism and its anti-Christian values have virtually taken over so-called Bible-believing conservative Christianity. And men like Ball are very much responsible for this. Is the Church in a degenerate state? Men like Ball are just as much to blame for it as are the likes of Andy Stanley and others who (in like manner) have capitulated to the ideologies of the world.

Ball seems oblivious to the fact that the Right has long pursued its own version of 'cancel culture' and today is no different. Indeed under the likes of McCarthy, large swathes of American cultural life faced censorship and elimination. People lost their jobs, businesses were affected, and lives were destroyed. Either Ball is ignorant of this reality or has willfully chosen to ignore it. I leave it to the reader to decide which is the case.

As he suggests, a sound pulpit will indeed sound the warning – but the danger isn't something recent or new. How many Churches took the firm but unpopular stand of non-alignment during the Cold War? While the Communist bloc had to be rejected as evil, the Capitalist West and the American Empire were (and are) also evil, and guilty of large-scale slaughter, theft, rape, and exploitation. Where were the warnings then? What about in the decades after? While the US grew wealthy in the 1990's, these same Right-wing folk lamented the growing decadence but were evidently blind to its sources. They decried the destruction of the family and the rise of debauchery, but failed to grasp what Ezekiel (the watchman) said about Sodom and how Judah (Jerusalem) was going down that same road of pride, fullness, idleness, and contempt for the weak and poor – a road that clearly leads to sexual judgment and reprobation.

And yet the various 'family' groups continued (and do continue) to support the ideology and ethos of this very decadence that has driven families to embrace destructive decadent lifestyles and in order to maintain them – they sell their souls, and sacrifice their families and marriages on the altar of these idols. The Evangelical embrace of feminism, divorce, and psychology is closely wed to this tale. While I'm sure Ball would decry these things – it is certain he doesn't understand the forces at work and what has led these ideologies to arise and infiltrate the Church.

Ball decries the accommodationism of German Christianity during the Hitlerzeit, and indeed it's a sad tale. But Christians were excited about his rise because they had confused German kultur with the Kingdom of God. Germany had been brought low in the aftermath of WWI, and with the collapse of the Hohenzollerns, the nation had no grounding. Weimar represented not just economic hardship and collapse, but social confusion and decadence. Hitler made Germans proud again, built the country up – made Germany great again.

While so-called woke ideology (whatever that's supposed to mean) represents a threat in some capacities or manifestations, the greater threat is the fact that growing numbers of Christians are affiliating with and embracing the ideology of fascism – so poignantly exemplified by the likes of Donald Trump. In fact in 2020, Trump could have moved the US into a dictatorship with relative ease and his followers would have overwhelmingly approved – and yet the man is so clueless and stupid, he had no idea how to do it, though it's something he clearly finds desirable.

If Ball wants to draw analogies between the German Church in the 1930's and the American Church today – then he only needs to look in the mirror. It's hard to emphasize just how blind this sort of commentary is and yet there's nothing unique in what he offers. One can encounter a dozen similar commentaries on a daily basis without even trying. It's like there's a veritable sausage factory spitting out this worthless filth on a daily basis – fomenting confusion, anger, and deception.

And like all such commentators, he falls prey to pronoun confusion – which I find somewhat ironic given the cultural obsession with pronouns. Like his Evangelical co-belligerents and the sodomite freaks that seem to be everywhere at the moment, Ball can't even keep his own identity straight. It's not 'our' culture or 'our' country. We Christians are citizens of another Kingdom, but sadly his Theonomic Reconstructionism has muddled his thinking on this point and its poison has rotted his faculties in the realms of ethics and historical interpretation.

Ball has it all wrong. He's chasing something that doesn't exist, a smokescreen that simply obscures the cultural rot of so-called American Christendom. All of its heresies have gone to seed but the husbandmen can't figure out what has happened and as such the people are starving. Neo-Marxism is a farce, a fiction, a caricature. For the Church, Dominionism is the elephant in the room and it's the heresy Ball champions and the delusion that clouds all his thinking.

The enemy isn't at the gates. The enemy has long been inside the city and has set up his banners in our meetings – the American Flag being one of them.

And expository sermons? I guess he doesn't get around much. One is hard pressed to find those in these dark days.

And though Ball would reject the line of argument, not a few authors have touched on the McCarthyite nature of the anti-woke crusade of Florida governor Ron DeSantis – someone I'm guessing Ball appreciates.

One need not agree with these commentators on all points but the historical record testifies clearly that men like Ball are blind to what is happening and what their own movement is about. DeSantis is leading a crusade of 'cancelling' out detractors, and subjecting them to the same kind of witch hunts Ball believes the 'woke' crowd is pursuing.

They scream 'indoctrination' but that's exactly the program DeSantis is pursuing. You have to learn the approved glory-narrative of American history and we're seeing the kinds of purges and book bannings seen under German fascism. This is not to defend the sodomite filth that's being put in schools – undoubtedly another pernicious form of indoctrination. But Christian kids don't go to such schools – or at least they shouldn't be. There are other types of filth out there – spiritual filth and while I'm not too concerned about Church kids falling prey to the bile-inducing wiles of transvestites, they are likely to be seduced by the ear-tickling world-affirming rot produced by the likes of David Barton, Jordan Peterson, or Tucker Carlson – all the more if their parents embrace the same.

It's worth stating again - the K-12 public schools are cesspools and no Christian should send their children to them or work within that system. I'm not letting colleges off the hook but I think they belong to a different category of conversation as they are attended (ostensibly) by adults. State or secular colleges are anti-Christian to be sure (as are virtually all sectors of society) but the interaction is quite different or should be. The fact that so many Evangelical children apostatize in this context is less about what these schools teach and more about the failure of Christian parents and certainly the Church, and the often truncated gospel it preaches.

The elementary, junior high, and high schools attended by children and teens are explicitly anti-Christian and yet what the Right is trying to do is no solution – if anything it only muddies the waters even more, and sows confusion. Believing Right-wing lies about America is just as ungodly as it is to impose a race or sex-dominated interpretive grid on its reading. Christians aren't interested in hagiography and whitewash (or lies) though this is what the Christian Right seems to want. I expect lost people to be lost and the fact that this mammonist culture is under judgment is not surprising in the least. I am far more concerned about the willingness of the Christian community to embrace lies and reject Biblical teaching (or distort it) in order to maintain some idolatrous narrative about 'their' nation and engage in the disgusting spectacle of attempting to baptize its long history of theft and murder.

Those who choose to deny or ignore America's past are embracing fantasy – the same kind of myths that the Nazis embraced. In the name of freedom they are destroying freedom. At the same time those who see racism under every rock and insist the entire purpose of the nation was to implement and perpetuate institutionalised slavery have also fallen prey to a form self-serving deception – again destroying freedom in the name of freedom. Both of these extremes must be rejected and the ugly and complicated truth must be explored – not for the nation, but for the sake of the truth itself.

But you see, that doesn't sell, it doesn't whip people up and so the political class will never be interested in such honest investigations. And you can't build a cross-adorned Tower of Babel through such methods either. Though Ball and his ilk would scoff at the notion, that's what they're chasing after and even if they were to succeed, that kind of cheap counterfeit is all they would be capable of producing. That's what their ancestors made and history has exposed it as a sham. And it ended with its own leaders and people turning on one another and eating each other – literally in some cases. Christendom didn't commit suicide in 1914 but in 1618. It simply took a few centuries for the full implications of it to be worked out. What's happening today is not isolated and the lack of historical perspective is being used and manipulated by all parties involved.

See also:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/03/desantiss-educational-policies/

https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-clash-of-protestant-intellectual.html

https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2017/03/dominionist-scripture-twisting-on.html

https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2021/01/evangelical-smoke-and-mirrors.html