The churches of the West are fundamentally compromised not by doctrine but by motive. Many a church has basically serviceable doctrine. They know their soteriology to the point of salvation and farther. They are perfectly orthodox on God’s nature. But then, at a certain point, the church freezes. All the muscles catch, like each tendon is festooned with hooks, holding the muscles from moving, and then the church sits down and becomes just another part of the culture. By some device or another, sanctification is mutilated, and the near-murder is taboo to even mention.

Now, this is not universal. All churches are flawed, but the flaw I’m driving towards today is not the flaw of all churches, not by any means. Nor is this flaw, even when it paralyzes a church, necessarily universal within even that institution. Many an individual, many a family, stands within these frozen churches and wonders why nobody else tries to move. He wonders why they seemingly cannot see the obvious truth. He wonders why they say so many right things but always stop at certain points, why God’s glorious law is only half proclaimed, why relationships rarely grow strong, why engagement with the culture is proscribed to certain channels, the channels acceptable and respectable. He feels, too often, thoroughly nut-bars; he looks at his wife and his children, speaks to them, and finds that they too are watching this doldrum with confusion- or, increasingly, with bitterness.

Doctrine, of course, is a part of the error, both its cause and its effect. A church is welcome to be conservative, in these circles; it is welcome to repudiate the list: female pastors, transgender ideology (especially in public schools), state interference in the church (sometimes they stood up in 2020), homosexuality, fornication and pornography, abortion. But its conservatism has a formula and a channel. Take abortion, for instance. Abortion is the socially expected outlet for Christian political agitation. Everybody expects it. But you’ll start getting funny looks if you mention Numbers 35:16 or that complicit ex-mothers are culpable for murder. Thus far you may apply the law of God, and no farther.

The church’s conservatism comes to a sharp halt when it reaches a specific line. There are thus acceptable and unacceptable ways to be Christian in politics. Abortion activism is acceptable. Calling for judicial reform on the basis of Leviticus probably isn’t. Bringing up the possibility of blasphemy laws is utterly verboten. Many individual Christians see no sense in this line and do not observe it, but the institutions do. The churches do. Why?

More, the witness of the church is sharply constrained by institutional narrative. The narrative of the ‘cathedral,’ of the conservative orthodoxy, is unquestioned in the church. You may adhere to different streams of the narrative, but you may not depart from it completely. Even people whose eyes are clear in many areas have a willingness to believe the institutional narrative on some parts of politics, to accord it any respect at all. They think ‘Fox News’ is a badge, or that the government can be trusted with a used cigarette butt. Once again, many individuals and families in these churches see right through the narrative, in one or many places if not all, but when they come to church the atmosphere requests their silence. In church, the polite thing to do is to keep to the prescribed channels of political worry, discuss some affairs of life, and drift away.

Not all churches, but too many, and the norm in the ringleaders.

The PCA’s recent interim report (which is not technically on Christian Nationalism, despite the billing) is an example of this. The really difficult questions of theonomy are brushed aside; the worthwhile challenges of non-theonomists (like national self-defense) are given short shrift when mentioned, lumped in with racism (albeit that’s a lumping certain CNers seem to be happily doing for themselves. E.g. Joel Webbon). Tellingly, the report does not even start to denounce liberalism as a whole, despite its basic hatred of God. Liberalism, the philosophy not the political identifier, is the substrate of the institution’s worldview, of the worldview which pervades these churches; they will not deny it, being its adherent.

This paralysis, I believe, rises in large part from motive, from buy-in, from participation. Doctrine is powerful, and belief is cyclic with motivation, one producing the other producing the other. The participation, in fact, is a result of long (generationally extended) false doctrine. Over centuries, men have accepted the ideas of liberalism, letting it seep in from the culture or importing it wholesale. They have not recognized or have not been willing to recognize that liberalism’s premise is the maximization of human freedom and potential, and that its definitions of ‘freedom’ and ‘potential’ were not founded in the Bible, will therefore never comport with it. They have not recognized that liberalism’s fundamental desire is the increase and guarantee of human autonomy, to make man his own god. That is freedom; that is potential; that is death.

Why the blindness?

Motive.

We cannot just blame doctrine. Doctrine does not do, and men do not hold to doctrine without reason, without motivation. I am a Christian and hold to Christianity’s truths, including the primacy of Scripture, because I love God, imperfectly but overwhelmingly (1 John (It’s short enough to read in its entirety. Go do it.)). We men build our lives into shapes that match our true beliefs, and then we force our beliefs to justify that life. We are invested, after all.

Imagine you have built your life on a set of beliefs. You have made a good life, by sensual and even relational standards. You have a decent enough house. You have the two cars you need, for job and for family. You have that family, a lovely wife and a kid, maybe two, maybe more. You have a job that provides, which you even enjoy, if not always. You attend a solidly conservative church, one with good doctrine, taking the sacraments on the regular and chatting amiably with the folks in the pews, at least until the pastor taps his watch for Sunday School to start. You work for a law firm that specializes in corporate law; your kids attend a really good public school you made sure to be in the right district for.

Now I present you a question: are you willing to disrupt that? Pull your kids out of public school. Find a different job. Tell your friends at church about the change and feel like you’re guilting them (or actually reprove them). Or be silent and wonder. Wonder what else can go wrong, what other part of your life is built on a shaky foundation.

If I build my life on certain premises, if I build a life integrated with institutions and practices that are justified by those premises, I take my life hostage to my values. When those values are good, this presents no danger; it’s even a benefit, as a motive to righteousness. When those values are flawed, though, I find myself in the dilemma which faces much of the public-facing church, its grand institutions and the men who man those institutions.

Modern America has a plethora of deeply compromised institutions. God’s law is unwelcome in schools, public and private; in colleges and universities, limited even in seminaries (because they are staffed by the college class, the intelligentsia); in government jobs and government as a whole; in industries connected to the government; in law and in medicine; in corporate life generally. When it’s implemented in any of these, it’s implemented typically as a veneer, some chaplains and buzzwords while the institution grinds on, inimical to justice. Tyson Foods, for instance, which can simultaneously feature in books on Christian business practice (on a Christian college’s curriculum) and force its employees to be test subjects for an ineffective, dangerous pseudo-vaccine.

The notable men of the church (meaning the actual church, not the mockeries which masquerade, like Osteen and the PCUSA and the pope) have skin in the game. Their children go to public school. Their jobs are with institutions of secular society, places that do not welcome thorough-going reproof. So too for many parishioners, because we should not blame the leadership without acknowledging that a pattern of poor leadership rarely rises except from a similar pattern in those they rule. (Though, as Iserbyt discusses, it can also be induced in the populace by encouragement from outside.)

Every parent whose children go to public school has a motive. He can go two ways with this. On the one hand, he can realize the wickedness of public schooling, turn away, and take his life hostage to a better habit. On the other hand, he can continue the inertia his parents, colleagues, and church-friends give him. He can send his kids to public school, or a private school run on similar lines (but hopefully somewhat behind on the demolition process). Then, five years later, when he’s asked to recognize that public school is wrong, it’ll be like pulling nails. That recognition now requires him to acknowledge he’s been hurting his children for five years- and I can imagine few deeper pains.

Christ foresaw this danger. “If your right eye causes you to sin,” He said, “tear it out and throw it away” (Matt. 5:29). We take ourselves hostage to our mistakes. We bury ourselves in them. We make any recognition of our error immensely painful because it requires uprooting some part of our lives, condemning ourselves for sin in an area we had perhaps been self-congratulatory about, admitting our error to those around us, condemning all our associates who do the same, and facing the possibility that we’ll have to do this again. It’s much easier to stick to the soteriology and the justification and the comfortable shell we’ve built, a thing hopefully not damning but certainly paralyzing, than to venture forth into the maelstrom waters of sanctification.

A proof of this comes to us from the remarkable antipathy the institutional church has expressed towards theonomy, towards political theology which threatens their liberal presupposition. Consider how many lives are deeply tangled in our present governmental system. It’s not just voting, taxes, and the post office, after all. The government is near pervasive in America. You’ve talked about it to a friend, probably, formed some opinions. But that’s a superficial connection.

More substantial is when you get a government job. Or your company works with government regulations- and it’s your job to enforce them.

Far more widespread even than the government’s extensive employee rolls, however, are public schools. Every kid in public school is a hostage the parents have taken for their premises, if they had other choices. Those parents cannot be thoroughgoing on their political theology without recognizing they’ve put their kids into the care of a state hostile to God. The same goes for a university education. How many are willing to recognize that the degree they got isn’t just limited, it’s actually a sign they have sat at the feet of the apostate and the heathen, that their learning was all predicated around premise hostile to God?

The church is paralyzed by bad doctrine, but it holds to that bad doctrine- and refuses to let go of it- because the church’s elders and leaders and members and attendees are as a pattern bought in to the system which God’s law condemns. They would have to pluck out their eye, cut off their hand, and own themselves much closer to the ‘chief of sinners’ than they would like to be. And if they do it without a similar move in their peers, they will have to choose between guilty silence and condemning those whose congeniality and even approval they are used to.

(I do not say I am immune to these errors; I am not. But I stand without this particular investment, and so I speak of it as something outside myself. I have an eye to pluck and a hand to strike off, have found that already in my life, but not this eye or this hand.)

The church must turn from this evil. We must, as a people and as individuals, choose to put God above ourselves, above man (Acts 5:29). We stand mired as deep, in a way, as the church did in 1517, or nearing that point, with our eyes stubbornly shut against the call of sanctification. If we keep those eyes shut, we bring shame to the name of Christ (1 Cor. 6:5; Tit. 2:8) and mutilate ourselves. Worse, we mutilate our children and our brothers in Him (1 John 3:10; Rom. 14); we do not have that love which is a sign of the true church (John 13:35). So we must strike off the errant hand; we must snatch forth the questing eye. It will hurt. It will agonize. But it is the only path of faithfulness. Our motive must be Him and love of Him; before that motive, all our lesser motives must fall, freeing us to take up the doctrine He calls us to with ever more truth.

Then, then the church will move as an avalanche, and be God’s help to the valley below, all the brokenness of the earth (1 Cor. 15:26).

God bless.