This article looks at our dilema from a different perspective. I think some good points are raised concerning alternatives between the Right and the Left. For the non-christian among us, don't let the latter half of the article diminish the thoughts of the first half.
Militias on a Toot
We have a lot of guns in this country, and some folks out in the fever swamps are starting to brandish them. Of course matters are not helped any by the monkeyshines of assorted federal agencies, but the glory of a wingnut is that he is always able to make his case whether or not the raw material is there for it. We happen to live in a time of clear and increasing tyranny in our country; and so, of course, the raw material is plentiful. The humanistic right-wing underground press is therefore able to make conspiratorial hay out of it. Identifying tyranny in a time like ours is kind of like hitting the ground with your hat, but illiterate fanatics breathlessly do so anyway. The news is over a century old.
The politics of unbelieving modernity are defined by the terms left and right . What few realize is that the historic and practical origin of both terms came from the seating of representatives following the French Revolution. Those who sat on the right were the moderate revolutionaries, and those on the left were the radical revolutionaries. But they were all revolutionaries. These
categories spilled over to our country when it came time for our French Revolution"commonly called the Civil War. In that War, the Old Republic died. The radical Republicans of Reconstruction were the left-wing revolutionaries, and Lincoln was the moderate "with malice toward none" revolutionary.
Even to think in such terms as left and right is to grant the central premise of that Revolution. Right wing "radicals"Newt, Rush, et al claim to be fighting for traditional values when they are actually trying to return to an earlier phase of the Revolution. Why should we as Christians want to do that?
After the Fall, God established a redemptive antithesis in the world between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent,
between the righteousness of law and the righteousness of faith. Those we call leftists and rightists consistently misplace that antithesis, making the fundamental and undeniable division among men tribal, or economic, or ideological. Befuddled liberals
in the middle deny there is an antithesis. "We're all saying the same thing, really! Maybe we should sing 'We Are the World' a few
more times."
The center of our culture is starting to give way, as all idols will, and as one wag put it during a corresponding point in the
dissolution of the British Empire, "Everything is at sea except for the fleet." We are in this condition because we do not want a sure word from God we do not want Christ to reign over us. We love our relativism but are distressed by the fruit of it. Trying to scramble back to an earlier stage in our disobedience is no solution, no repentance, at all.
The division is not right and left. Rather the antithesis is up and down, right and wrong, biblical and unbiblical, believing and
unbelieving, good and evil. Christians are in far greater danger of being seduced by the right than by the left. Repentance is long overdue.
Douglas Wilson
http://www.credenda.org/issues/vol8/anvi8-1.htm
[This message has been edited by Dale Rabideau (edited August 13, 1999).]