How Christianity really won in Rome

 

People often say politics and the church should not mix but often there is no choice of involvement.  It is often thought that when Rome turned Christian, Constantine just issued a decree and that was that.  Not true. There are lessons for us.

            Constantine the Great won an epic battle having seen a vision of the Chi-Rho cross and was told to conquer in its image. He had his soldiers paint the chi-rho on their shields and he crossed the Rubicon and won the empire.  His mother was a Christian, but he was a soldier and administrator. Theology was not his thing. So he called a church council at Nicea, 315 AD, to define the faith.  There, the orthodox or ancient Christian beliefs in the Triune God (championed by Athanasius) overrode Arius and Arianism, a heresy that believed Jesus was God’s Son but only a superior being, not divine or coeternal with God. (Trinity doctrine says that the Son and Holy Spirit are “consubstantial” with the Father, loosely meaning, “with Him and equal to Him at the beginning”.)

            But Arianism didn’t die out.  Constantine conferred with Arias after he had banished him. He could find no heresy, and recommended his restoration.  Well, you can’t refuse the Emperor, but on the way to attend mass, Arius died a horrible death where his bowels prolapsed and spilled out.  Constantine then wondered if Arius was indeed a heretic after all.  When the Emperor died, 335, he was baptized by Eusebius of Nicomedia, an Arian follower. Arianism continued beyond Roman boundaries until the 600’s.

            Constantine had done a good thing in summoning the Council of Nicea which canonized scripture and adopted our creeds.  But the emperor had a succession problem and anticipated civil war between rival sons.  So he gave each of his 3 sons parts of the empire and 2 cousins as well.  Civil war erupted, his sons and relatives killed one another until Constantius only remained.  Constantius took theology more seriously and adopted Arianism, using puppet church councils to banish Athanasius and ban the Nicene Creed.  Five times Athanasius fled his see, often in peril of his life, wandering in alien lands for 50 years while patiently persuading wherever he could. The Roman “pope” archbishop agreed with Athanasius, but Eastern bishops remained in the sway of the Emperor.  Now while all this was happening, paganism still commanded a diminishing 50% of the empire’s loyalty. It took many forms, chief among which was Neoplatonism.  3 years before Constantine died, a nephew, Julian, was born.  His father and brothers were all assassinated in the succession wars and little Julian was sent to Cappadocia, where his Christian teachers were dour and doctrinal.  But nearby were also banished pagan philosophers with witty, entertaining ideas and Julian secretly converted to paganism. By age 23 he was clever enough to hide his faith views. Summoned by Constantius, he passed muster but was thought to be merely a philosopher by nature. He was sent to Athens, a bastion of philosophy but alsopaganism.  He was summoned again when his brother Gallus proved to be a tyrant and was beheaded.  To his surprise Julian, a shy, celibate thinker  was given administrative duties over Gaul (Celtic forerunner of France).  Gaul was in trouble.  Those dirty, dastardly, barefoot barbarian Germans had taken advantage of civil war and crossed the Rhine to seize territory. Julian, now forced to quickly study how to be a general, routed the German Alemanni and the related tribe called Franks. They were pushed back over the Rhine River.  He then commenced to apply and interpret Roman law in a wise, learned way.  We owe the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” to Julian. In 361, Constantius died and Julian, the secret pagan, became emperor.  He restored the pagan temples and favored their philosophers.  It was an ugly time for many Christians. But the foot soldiers had found a blessed assurance in death of a Savior in the Christian faith.  They named a Christian to succeed Julian when he fell in battle with the Persians, 363 AD, just 2 years after his ascension to the throne.  And yet the war between Christian rulers and pagan ones would go on and on until Theodosius quashed a pagan rebellion in 394. Athanasiua was restored. But the war of faiths broke the political unity and morale of the Western Roman Empire, (perhaps like partisanship split democrats and monarchists in 1917 Russia or America’s present partisanship) soon to be overrun by barbarians.

            Faith is not just doctrine and scholarship but a walk with God, a wild ride, and a wrestling struggle like Jacob knew.  If a church abandons itself exclusively to doctrine, it shouldn’t be surprised if its children follow pop culture instead, like Julian. Yet we are called to defend the true faith, stand in the gap, like Athanasius. 22 years after Julian’s death, the Roman Emperor Valens lost the battle and half the Roman army at Adrianople, one of the great turning points of history.  From that point forward, the wealthy western empire collapsed rapidly, and being a Christian became a life of oftentimes struggles and terror.  That’s when you need Jesus the most.  

Andrew Jackson

 

Andrew Jackson has been rejected by many moderns, though once a hero of the nation and founder of the Democrats.  He was always a controversial figure. He was a slave owner and advocated for the Indian removal.  He was a booster of Tennessee and a land-seller of Indian territories which he had himself conquered.  But he was also a Christian, an orphan who became a brave and brash war hero, who saved the United States and adopted orphan children to give them a chance in life. Jackson’s childhood was destroyed by the Revolutionary War which pitted not just British regiments against Americans but frontier families against one another.  Jackson’s parents and brother died in this conflict.  After the war, a faction of angry Creek Indians, known as the Red Sticks massacred white settlers.  Jackson organized a group of militia members that fought and overwhelmed the Red Sticks.  Following a bloody battle, some of the homeless children were brought to Jackson and he asked the captured Creeks if they would care for a little orphan boy.  The Creeks refused saying all the child’s relatives were gone and he should just be killed too. The situation struck Jackson, himself an orphan, and he adopted Lyncoya. He instructed his wife Rachel to give Lyncoya every advantage, like their own children. (The Jacksons fostered several children along with Lyncoya.)  He tragically died late in his teen years of tuberculosis. 

            Jackson went on to be America’s hero when he organized a rag-tag group of civilians to successfully defend New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812. He spurred Washington to conquer Florida, then did the job himself. He is also charged with genocide against the Cherokees, but the true story of this is complex.  Throughout history, conquered peoples were either enslaved or killed off by newcomers.  And in Georgia, this was coming to a head in the 1820s.  Jackson preferred the Indians be made American citizens, But most Cherokees resisted.  They wanted to preserve their native culture, language and tribal identity.  DC politicians liked the idea of “protected nations”, an armchair utopia that was forerunner of the reservation system.  But the Cherokees were so many, their state-within-a-state would comprise half of Georgia.  Georgians rejected this, saying they would start a war and take the Cherokee land by force. Jackson liked many Indians but hated the tribal governments, dominated by mixed race opportunists who lorded it over the rest of the tribe and were determined to protect their own privileges. “These leaders,” Jackson wrote, “are like some of our bawling politicians, who loudly exclaim, ‘we are the friends of the people,’ but who, when they obtain their views, care no more for the happiness or welfare of the people than the Devil does.” The Georgia situation was headed for war.  Jackson followed Jefferson in advocating Removal to the newly purchased Louisiana Purchase. This idea wasn’t entirely their own.  Many tribal leaders wanted it because they worried about how to keep autonomy amid the fast-growing American states. 

            The issue landed in Chief Justice John Marshall’s Supreme Court.  Some missionaries had violated Georgia law to go into Cherokee lands to preach the gospel.  Marshall ruled that Georgia’s laws were null and void, and Pres. Jackson negotiated the release of the missionaries from a Georgia jail. Meanwhile the Cherokees were split over the notion of going to an area that would become Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Major Ridge, a Cherokee ally of Jackson’s in the Red Stick wars, got half the Cherokees to sign a treaty to move (Treaty of Eschota),  But Jonathan Ross, a large plantation owner who was only 1/8 Cherokee with no desire to pull up stakes, convinced the other half to resist.  Ridge’s Treaty Party then moved about 30,000 people to the West successfully. The Removal Act was then passed in Washington to also affect 4 other large tribes. But many Cherokees held out and hid for years. Under the Martin Van Buren administration, the federal government demanded those holdouts honor the treaty, rounded them up, and used the US Army to force move the people. This Trail of Tears became one of the worst humanitarian disasters in our history.  Of 35,000 removed, only 18,000 made it to Oklahoma. Thousands died as a result of the harsh conditions, greed and corruption of officials and private people taking advantage along the way. As a final act in this sad fiasco, the Ross followers assassinated Major Ridge and the leaders who had signed the Treaty of Eschota.  Was Jackson to blame? True, he was paternalistic towards the tribes. He had acted under the notion that, if left somewhat alone, the Cherokees and others would grow into Christianity and Western culture and merge with USA. Considering the strides of Oklahoma and the Cherokee heritage, of their present Governor, Jackson might have been quite correct.

Salem witch trials and Wenatchee

 

The propensity of people to be gripped by self-righteous panic has been extensively studied.  Salem witch trials, Red Scare of 1920, McCarthyism, Watergate hysteria, have all been implicated.  A major television network is running a documentary of the Wenatchee, Washington child molestation scandal that came at the conclusion of 17 day-care scandals of the 1980s and early 90s --all proven baseless. These hysterias prove an important point.  Neither science, nor politicians, nor media brought an end to the false charges.  Christians, speaking in faith did.

            In the Salem Witch trials of the summer of 1692, two young girls began acting erratically—screaming, hysterical behavior, and rolling on the floor.  Two local women were implicated as witches by the children’s screams. Subsequently, accusations of over 150 people being involved in witchcraft ensued.  The Massachusetts authorities responded with an investigative court that implicated many of them. The newspapers spurred on the hysteria and 19 people were convicted, hung or drowned.  One man who refused to plead guilty was pressed to death with heavy stones--the old English peine forte et dure, contempt of court—the only time it has been used in American history. Cotton Mather, son of Harvard College’s President, was strongly involved with the prosecution. Where was the new thing called science?  Many scientists of the day believed that indeed, witchcraft might be happening. But when Increase Mather, Cotton’s father and President of the Harvard Seminary arrived home from a trip to England, he observed the trials and was appalled that Christians would treat others this way.  He called for an end.  Thereupon, even the Governor’s wife was implicated and that caused the authorities to come to their senses, disband the inquiry, and release those awaiting trial. This was the only ‘witch hunt in American history.  In 17^th century Europe, there were 160,000 witch trials. The anxiety of the local government in MA to confess wrongdoing, make reparations, and search for truth was the singular bright spot in the affair.

            At Wenatchee, like the McMartin daycare and many others in the 80s and 90s, investigators used anatomically correct dolls and ‘dream memory’ to draw out stories from children.  Interviewer bias also influenced child testimony. When an interviewer has a preconceived notion of the truth of the matter being investigated, the questioning is often performed in a manner to extract statements that evidence these beliefs. As a result, evidence that could disprove the belief is overlooked by the interviewer. Records also reveal, that many stories were coerced.  Wenatchee filed 29,726 charges against several dozen people after a mentally disturbed foster child of a policeman said she had been raped. One case worker, Paul Glassen, criticized methodology only to find himself charged with molestation. He fled with his family to Canada.  When Pastor Robert Robertson criticized the prosecution and evidence-gathering in a town hall, he found himself immediately charged with 8 counts of molestation of his church’s children.  He was tried but found not-guilty of all counts and jurors were incensed with the prosecution’s handling saying it should never have gone to trial. Yet the state of Washington steadfastly praised the investigation.  So some Christians from Pastor Robertson’s church formed Concerned Citizens for Legal Accountability and joined by others, filed complaint with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.  Governor Mike Lowry’s hand was then forced to investigate the investigators. But when he asked US Attorney General Janet Reno for help, it was flatly refused. Eventually all those implicated, who fought in court, won.  Wall Street Journal had an expose and a 2001 jury found Wenatchee and Douglass County negligent in “record keeping” and were ordered to pay damages to falsely accused citizens.  However, many of the accused had plea-bargained and were poor or had mental disability.  Some had to fight for years to recover custody of their children.

            Science, stonewalling authorities, even judges proved to not bring down these hysteria scandals.  Christians acting in faith did.  None of the abusive authorities went to trial over their mishandling.  No journalist did a mea culpa of a false story.  Nor did any imaginative case worker or psychologist who coerced improper testimony of a child.  Nobody went to jail over that either.  The same was true for the McMartin daycare, Country Walk daycare, Fells Acres daycare or the other 14 implicated daycare centers in the 1980s. What would the world be without Christians to stand in the gap?

Women's treatment in Islam

 

Much has been noted about Muslim harsh treatment of women. Some of it derives from various and old tribal cultures and is not specified in the Quran or Haditha.  But close study by historians say it derives principally from Arabia, Persia and the Prophet himself.  Arab life before Mohammad was tribal and mostly nomadic.  90% of Arabs were nomadic (Bedouins) and the other 10% settled, raising primarily spices, dates and other fruits. The Red Sea is a tectonic boundary which spawns volcanoes which are a souce for gold near Mecca. Desert clans are small and close-knit, defending resources.  But they fight over more than waterholes and camels.  The Arabs took great pride in their women’s beauty.  Their language is close to Hebrew and gained alphabetic writing early, but most Bedouins had little use for reading and disdained it.  Thus poetry and eloquent stories, especially about their women and war was their passion.  The desert winds made beauty fleeting, however, and the constant struggle for survival made for a lot of drudgery in women’s work.  10 minutes of romance and a lifetime of drudgery. Women’s prime value was in having children and thus men fought to the death for their wives.  Yet women were not partners but chattels.  When a man died, his estate contained his wives for the heir. 

            In this culture, Mohammad was not unusual.  He arranged marriages to gain allies, took in a couple widows of loyal followers as an act of mercy, and engaged in betrothal to Aisha who was 6 years old. He was wealthy so he had 10 wives.  But they quarreled and were demanding of him and Mohammad seems to have soured on his harem, saying in the Haditha that he had seen heaven and few women were there, maybe one in 1000 makes it.  The Quran allowed 4 women in polygamy, and has advice about beatings and other treatment.  His first wife, Khadija, was Jewish, who faithfully recorded the visions of the illiterate Prophet, but her fellow Jews poked fun of him and his strange new religion.  Hence his distrust of women’s faith. Mohammad died in Medina and accomplished some astounding things.  Where Arabs had been idolatrous and worshipped sacred stones—like the Black stone of Mecca’s Kaaba—Mohammad had created a new religion from visions, borrowed heavily from Judaism and linked to Jesus.  Before Mohammad, other Arabs had noted that their cruel feuds and culture seemed low-life compared to Greco-Romans and Persians, and seemingly needed a new faith, but what? This religion was simple and stressed its spread by any means possible, though we don’t think he had designs of world conquest during his life. Yet under his faith,  Arabia went from tribes to a nation.  He left no successor except Abu Bekr who led prayers in his place in the mosque.  The leaders voted Abu Bekr Caliph of Islam over the protest of Ali, Mohammad’s cousin, leading to the major Sunni-Shiite split in Islam to this day. 

            Some Syrian Arabs were resisting Byzantium and another Arab tribe wanted to invade Persia.  The two empires had exhausted one another with war the previous century, and the Arabs found the looting easy. There are a host of reasons why the Arabs kept winning, but soon they had overrun the Persian empire. [Understand Persian Empire to extend from the Indus Valley of Pakistan and Afghanistan through Iraq to Syria and then north to the Caucus Mtns.] Persians were a former nomadic people too. Leaders had mistresses they used as public escorts while wives stayed home and were required facial coverings when they went out in public.  The Arabs adopted a lot of Persian government and culture in order to rule and seem to have adopted this regime with the wives as well. Proof that headcoverings were adopted from Persia is that Muslim women didn't wear them until about 100 years after Mohammad.

    While this follows fundamentalist Islamic rules, modernists have vacated the escorting of women outside the home and even head covering. Apart from the Persian Gulf and 3rd world areas like Afghanistan, most Muslims are monogamous.   

Woke theory and Classical Liberalism

THE ECONOMIST, A BRIT PUBLICATION WITH AN INTERNATIONAL STAFF HAS TURNED IT’S BACK ON THE DEMOCRAT LEFT. Wokeism is a threat and violates the principles of classical liberalism, they say. Amazing—a publication that has always seemingly to been run by lib Democrats is now turning against them! But they explain their split. Classical liberalism (in which they pride themselves) believes that human progress is found in debate and reform, individual dignity, open markets, limited government, and separation of powers.  To an American, this sounds a lot like Conservatism.  How indeed did anyone who believes such things ever start sounding like the LDP of Canada or hate Trump like a lib Dem? And from that perspective are now appalled by the Left?

            The answer to this puzzle is that America and Europe have fought different battles.  Europe began with the confessional state and forced belief.  Spain and Italy had the Inquisition, Calvin’s Switzerland had death for dissenters, and everybody had pogroms for the Jews.  Free-thinking intellectuals were at war with the confessional state throughout the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. Why did the churches behave so autocratically, especially during the Middle Ages?  Well, they learned it from the barbarians who came in the 4^th to 10^th century. Historian Will Durant relates stories of how, even after a surge of barbarians, the Roman citizens still had skills, but the barbarians rejected good physicians preferring magic, rejected good Roman Law in favor of trial by ordeal.  But most tellingly, could not be converted to better practices. They became nominally Christian, practically pagan.  The fire of Christian faith in Augustine, Patrick, Ambrose, and Jerome grew into a sort of dim, illiterate magic even though Europe became Christian.  When one possesses a strong God, dissent is not threatening. Jesus just let disbelievers walk away.  When one believes in a weak God, one must squelch debate and crush dissent.  It carried over. In modern Europe, polls have shown that more people believe in trolls, spells and fairies than the Christian faith.  Hence the French Revolution wanted “brotherhood” while the American Revolution wanted Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  When the consensus of brotherhood (the population or ruling elite) chooses rights they ascribe government as the author.  When they think morality, they think of something fuzzy, personal and hard to define.  A European thinks they are free because the government gives them the right to wear a tee shirt with an obscene hand gesture. An American thinks of freedom as freedom of opportunity, endowed by the Creator which cannot be taken away.

            The 13 colonies,were every bit as much confessional states as the British back home, and equally divided.  But the Great Awakening, a Christian Revival, swept the colonies in the 1740s and everything changed.  It became apparent to most people that finding peace with God was imperative in the harsh wilderness.  And that there were many versions of Christian belief (and others) but each person must work it out to come to grips with not just their faith but with their mission in life. British historian Paul Johnson says that America solved the dilemma of unity vs. tolerance by insisting on a common ethic of public behavior but allowing freedom of religion and free speech, Liberty, for the individual. Johnson, a Catholic, says this has changed American Catholics into a people who concern more with personal belief than Papal dispensations. Thus free speech was not a goal or ideal but a right secured by the Divine.  So while Europeans were happy that Jefferson wrote, “the loathsome combination of church and state” as a root cause of evils, they were tepid over complete religious and speech tolerance.  The upshot of the Bill of Rights was to permanently establish certain rights as bedrock to the American way. Hence others—atheists or Buddhists--could subscribe to America and be in unity with a melting pot nation. Nowhere is this more apparent than the enormous migration of Jews to USA.  Other countries might claim they were welcoming, but in America you get Rights!

            Comes now the woke-o locos.  They arose from an academic society that came up with a vague, malleable theory of racism associated with society’s structure and it has leftist, socialistic goals. Contradictions, for example: if the socialist goal is a universal public education/indoctrination, isn’t the insistence that Afro-Americans attend failing inner city schools a racism structure? Wokeism appeals to the usual alienation of youth and is encouraged by administrations of colleges. (Leftist university administrators outnumber moderates and conservatives 13 to 1)  None of these have to answer for what they create. Since those youth have now arrived as workers and leaders, they demand woke speech, woke business, and strident journalism, Democrat Party rule, and corporations.  Long term, this won’t survive.  No other system of business beats capitalism, but the woke-inistas won’t allow capitalism.  Math classes now have to talk to students about gender choice. Loss of freedom of thought will bring innovation and science to a halt. Weaponizing social media will only drive the opposition forces underground to foment civil war against this new status quo.

            Classical Liberals of Europe see all the evils of the confessional state in the woke movement—imposed orthodoxy, expulsion of heretics, book burning and creeds.  Actually, that’s rather amusing beecause both groups start with a godless premise.