On "You Can't Legislate Morality"

Douglas Wilson: "Few statements are as vapid as 'You can't legislate morality.' As a matter of unvarnished fact, it is actually impossible to legislate anything else."

Amen.

My father was an intelligent man; I would say, a very intelligent man. But, even very intelligent people are products of their times, and tend to absorb and echo the perceived "elite consensus", same as everyone else does. My father was born in 1927, so his "time" was the last few years of the era of Prohibition and the aftermath of the repeal of Prohibition; and in that time, the "elite consensus" was very explicitly that "You can't legislate morality." (*)

Once, when I was quite young, in trying to explain to me why Prohibition turned out to be such an abject social and legal disaster, my father even said to me, "You can't legislate morality." As I recall, I was still at that young age wherein one tends to not seriously dispute one's parents pronouncements about how the world is. At the same time, even then the claim didn't sit well with me. I don't mean to imply that as a child I rejected the claim and could offer a logical and philosophical rationale for that rejection. Rather, my attitude was more, "I'll think about this when I'm older."

And, thinking about it when I was older, yet still in my teens, I came to the conclusion that, "As a matter of unvarnished fact, it is impossible to legislate anything else." That is, all prescriptive and proscriptive law is, in fact, the legislation of some morality or other. The question is never, "Shall we legislate morality?" but rather, "Which morality, how grounded, shall we legislate?"

(*) That "elite consensus", coupled with the fact that nearly everyone in our society accepted it as Gospel, is *why* all the immoral ills currently destroying our civilization were able to be inflicted upon us by our "elites".

Douglas Wilson: How to Bonk Heads With Yourself

Mossad ... and Equal Measures

You will see people asserting, with great pretense of knowledge, that Jeffery Epstein was a Mossad "asset", and that his criminal and immoral activities were done in furtherance of the interests of the State of Israel and in contradistinction to the interests of America.

Maybe this is so, I don't know either way. But, I *do* know, as a matter of reason, that Epstein could not have done what he did, nor for as long as he did, without the active protection of *American* "intelligence services".

So, here is my point -- when you see people blaming *Israel* for Epstein, and before any real evidence is in, but excusing America on the grounds that the CIA has "gone rogue", you can be assured that you are dealing with a Jew-hater, not a seeker of truth. And certainly not a Christian, for God requires us to judge with the same measure.

EDIT (2025/03/04):

Douglas Wilson: So Jeffrey Epstein Was a Jew . . .

Commies ... and "Christian Nationalism"

Someone whom I have known for most of my life sent me a video clip of an advertisement for the leftist mockumentary "God and Country" with the assessment "ominous".  Below is my response; pray that it reaches his heart.
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I watched the clip, and my previous response was based on only what I heard the commie pretending to be a Christian say.  However, I had no idea what you thought is "ominous".  

But, after googling "God and Country", I think I understand -- you watch too much MSDNC, and they have you in a tizzy over something they are calling "Christian Nationalism" (*).  To put it another way, they have you in a tizzy over ... me.

If you'd care to *learn* something about what "Christian Nationalists" *really* say and aim for, might I suggest paying attention to Douglas Wilson.  He's a Calvinist and a pedobaptist, both of which I believe to be erroneous, but other than that, he's sound. 

"Blog & Mablog" is him reading the text of posts he writes for his "old-fashioned" written blog (also called "Blog and Mablog") -- YouTube search "Blog and Mablog"

"Cannon Press" is more a podcast, with guests and so forth -- Cannon Press (YouTube)

Also, Voddie Baucham is in the "Christian Nationalism" orbit -- Voddie Baucham SPEAKS UP About Trump, Wokeism, Growing Up Fatherless

(*) As best I understand it, it was the leftists/atheists who came up with the term "Christian Nationalism" -- both of which are boo-words to commies, and so doubly scary when paired -- and the people whom they were seeking to smear thereby decided that one name is as good as another, and so adopted it.

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EDIT (2025/03/13): 

James Talarico (whom I'd never heard of until now); "Christian Nationalists have a Heart Full of Hate"

Douglas Wilson (@ 4:13 mark): "We will look over the fact that we have an elected representative, in a pulpit, talking about doctrine; telling us what we should and shouldn't do. This is just a variant form of 'Christian Nationalism'.  He wants to be a 'Christian Nationalist', it's just that his idea of Christianity is all screwed up."

I would phrase that last sentence as: "He wants to impose *his* idea of 'Christian Nationalist' on the rest of us, but his idea of Christianity is all screwed up."

"Christian Nationalists have a Heart Full of Hate" | Doug Reacts to James Talarico

Liberals ... and Speed Limits

Seen on the internet -- "Conservatives are just liberals doing the speed limit."

My response --

True enough in the cases of most people.

Meanwhile, "liberals" are just unprincipled leftists. That is, "liberals" are people who subscribe to leftist presuppositions, they just don't like some of the destinations logically entailed in those presuppositions. BUT, as they have no *principle* by which to reject the logic, and thus the entailed destination, they will always eventually fold when the open leftists demand it.

In the meantime. unless your proffered alternative to leftism is Jesus Christ, then you are also just another variant of leftist.

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The late Andrew Breitbart famously said, "Politics is downstream of culture."

And, while that is true, it is incomplete. A more complete statement is expressed by my internet friend Kristor: "Politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of cult." 'Cult' is not here a pejorative, as the word is commonly erroneously used in present-day English.

Or, as as (Calvinist) pastor and blogger, Douglas Wilson, points out: "There is always a god of the system." There is no such thing as metaphysical/religious neutrality (*); there is always some metaphysical underpinning of the social system, and which will be expressed in its politics. There are always blasphemy laws, but what is counted "sacred", and thus not to be blasphemed, depends upon the underlying metaphysics.

(*) The secularist promise of "religious neutrality" was a deliberate bait-and-switch lie. The goal was not "religious neutrality", which is impossible, but rather to disarm the general Christian(ish) populace long enough to install their anti-Christian metaphysics as the organizing principle of Western societies. It worked because most people were merely "cultural Christians", who wanted to enjoy the fruits of a Christian culture, while bulldozing the orchard.

Have you fixed the Lisbon Problem?

 Douglas Wilson: "Have you fixed the Lisbon Problem?"

These pretend atheists (*) like to pretend that "The Problem Of Evil" refutes the Christian understanding of the nature of God. It does not; and they studiously avoid and ignore any and all Christian responses to said problem. MOREOVER, their atheistic "solution" to "The Problem Of Evil" is to deny that there are such things as Good or Evil in the first place.

Can you not see the absurdity of this? The God-haters want to point to the reality of "senseless" evils (**), whether of a moral or of a "natural" nature, WHEN IT SUITS THEM to use such evils as a cudgel with which to attack Christianity and as an excuse to deny the reality of God. Having done so, they shrug their shoulders at the truth that one must at least implicitly acknowledge the reality of God – and one must acknowledge that the Christian understanding of the nature of God is broadly correct, even if incomplete (as, of course, *any* human understanding of the nature of God must be incomplete) -- before one can even point to the reality of such evils.

Stripped to its core, the atheistic “Argument From Evil” is this – “God is.  Ergo, God is not!”

(*) They are not truly atheists, because they refuse to follow the logic of their premises to the inescapable logical conclusions. Rather, they are God-haters.

(**) Christianity says that God will rectify all the evils of history, that God will make sense of all evils, that not one of the evils in all of history is ultimately meaningless.

Atheism says that the very concept of 'evil' is meaningless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n16mPd60j1w

Kin, Skin, & Sin (Doug Wilson)

 Wilson is wrong on his current position that "There is no such thing as race / There is only the human race", but otherwise and overall this is a good take on all this.

Firstly, the English word 'race' isn't *about* skin-color or ancestry or even about biology; it is about different ways of categorizing things or animals or people. That for about the past 150 years (i.e. since Darwinism took over the minds of the "progressives") we most commonly use the word to denote the broad continental origins of various ethnic groups doesn't change the fact that the word is not so narrow in its designations.

Secondly, if you're distinguishing an Englishman from a Welshman, or an Igbo (called 'Ibo' in my youth) man from a Yoruba man, you are distinguishing these men based on their ethnicities -- for which distinctions the word 'race' has historically been used.

But, what does ethnicity mean in a country like America? In the South Bend Indiana of my mother's youth (i.e. nearly a century ago), it mattered immensely whether one was "Polish" or "Hungarian". Or, it mattered not at all, if like her people, one was simply what is now disdained as "WASP". In my own youth in South Bend Indiana, some people just had difficult-to-pronounce family names.

The ethnicity of a black American and the ethnicity of a white America are singularly 'American'. Yet, sometimes, we do need to recognize the broadly continental origins of a person's ancestry.

While 'English' or 'Yoruba' are ethnicities, 'white' is not an ethnicity and 'black' is not an ethnicity. 'European' is not an ethnicity; 'African' is not an ethnicity; 'East Asian' is not an ethnicity; 'American Indian' is not an ethnicity. And so on.

And yet, there are recognizable differences -- generally unimportant, but sometimes critical -- between a person of primarily European ancestry and a person of primarily (sub-Saharan) African ancestry. To blind ourselves with the one leftist lie that "There is no such thing as race" is as foolish and potentially harmful as to blind ourselves with the other leftist lie that "All there is is race".

Kin, Skin, & Sin | Doug Wilson

That's why we have to brick-up the window

Douglas Wilson: Don’t Waste Your White Privilege

To change the metaphor, it does not matter how you rearrange the classroom, whenever you are done, somebody’s desk will be closest to the window.

This is *why* -- when it's not merely camouflage for leftists' own attempted power-grab -- Cultural Marxism (i.e. "social justice") is all about destroying what is, whatever it is that is.

Problem ... Solution

Problem ... Letters to Hannah: The wages of sin

I think I now (finally) understand why Mr Egerer has rejected Christianity; and it turns out to be the most common of reasons.

Solution ... Blog and Mablog: Complicity and the Christ

"I always think I am right, but I don’t think I am always right"

Exactly.

Douglas Wilson: "interviewing" himself --

Me: A critic might say that you always think you’re right. You leave no room for discussion, no room for the possibility that you might be wrong.

Me: It is true that I always think I’m right. But I don’t think I am always right.

Me: Come again?

Me: Thinking you are right is the same thing as thinking. Everyone does it. Stepping back and looking at the sum total of your thoughts, of course it would be folly not to see that you have been guilty of mistakes and errors. But while you are thinking at all, you are thinking you are right. So that is why I say I always think I am right, but I don’t think I am always right.

Me: But isn’t that arrogant?

Me: The curious thing is that out of all the people I have met who think so (and I have met a number of them), they think so. And they think they’re right. No one ever came to me in a spirit of rebuke, but with the prefatory proviso that they might be the arrogant one and I might be the innocent baaa lamb. Furthermore, I don’t ask them to. But I do find it curious that they ask me to. And so it is that I conclude, 9 times out of 10, that the goal is not to admonish and edify me, but rather to steer me.

The "arrogance" charge is almost always cynical intellectual dishonesty meant to play on the emotions of the easily-steered. It is an attempt to convince others (i.e. the easily-steered) that the view or conclusion the accuser detests is false, by the mere allegation that it is false, without making any *effort* to demonstrate *any* error.

A New Kind of New

Douglas Wilson: A New Kind of New

The volcano gods are angry!

Douglas Wilson: Babylon and the Bolshevik Buttercups

But surrounding the whole thing, there has always been a mysterious bipartisan consensus, one dictated by an imperious zeitgeist, promulgated by the entertainment complex and media, and studiously obeyed by all the politicians. This zeitgeist was enthusiastically pushed by the left and sullenly obeyed by the right, and the whole culture steadily followed after it. When it has made enough of an appearance to be given a name, it has been called political-correctness.

If you want to know what powers this zeitgeist has, look no further than the immediately honored demand—driven by hidden chthonic powers—that a hapless congressman from East Toad Flats (R-AR) be found guilty of a career-ending gaffeous blunder because someone at the state fair barbecue recorded him telling a blonde joke. The cry goes up in the village and into the volcano he goes.

So this brings us to the recent presidential election. A mistake that many are making with regard to all of this is that they are trying to interpret everything in terms of policy. Now as I said at the top, policy matters and the new president will have to institute particular policies. He will have to govern, in other words. ...

But don’t let that distract you from what is really going on. What is really going on is a gigantic collision between the insiders and the outsiders. Nothing is more obvious than that the decree went forth from the zeitgeist that Trump was to be thrown into the volcano, as so many before him had been, and the villagers refused.

In case Gentle Reader is unaware, Wilson was/is a NeverTrumper.

All Lies Matter

Douglas Wilson: All Lies Matter

Arguing with Lewis

A very good essay from Douglas Wilson: Principalities, Powers, and Pecksniffs --

... It turns out that overweening conceit in rulers requires a strong theocratic restraint.

If there is a court of appeal past our human government, then in principle I have admitted theocracy. If there is no court of appeal past them, then I have just made them god. Having made them god, I discover that I am still in a theocracy, but instead of a loving Father, the theos of this system is corrupt and grasping, mendacious and low, and full of flatulent hubris. Requiring government to remain modest and within the bounds of sanity is therefore one of the most profound ethical requirements that has ever been promulgated among men.
...

Why are we so afraid of theocracy? What might happen? Might we go on a rampage and kill 50 million babies? Yeah, that would be bad. Better not risk it. Might we set up a surveillance state, with camera clusters pointed in every direction at all the intersections? Right — theocracies are terrible like that.

The real reason why our current rulers want us to react violently whenever we hear the word theocracy is that petty gods are always jealous of their position, and dread any talk of a Lord who rose from the dead.

There is *always* a "god of the system"; and if that god is not the Living God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, then perforce it will be something that is opposed to God ... and to human liberty.

Curling Up Under the Blanket

Douglas Wilson: Curling Up Under the Blanket

We live in a generation that is totalitarian in principle, having accepted all the basic totalitarian premises. Denying the Lordship of Jesus Christ drives you to those premises — for if Jesus is not Lord, then there is a vacancy that men will always want to fill. ...

We started by believing, as we ought to have done, that every man had a right to his own cabbages. We have ended by believing that every man has a right to his own truths. That ends with goons coming from the Department of Agriculture to seize the cabbages, and not one minister of the gospel in ten can explain how all such events are connected.

So that people can see them

Douglas Wilson: In Which I Paint With Some Bright Yellows --

First, whenever we get to that elusive and ever-receding “hill to die on,” we will discover, upon our arrival there, that it only looked like a hill to die on from a distance. Up close, when the possible dying is also up close, it kind of looks like every other hill. All of a sudden it looks like a hill to stay alive on, covered over with topsoil that looks suspiciously like common ground.

So it turns out that surrendering hills is not the best way to train for defending the most important ones. Retreat is habit-forming.

This brings us to my second goal this morning, which is to highlight the principle. ...

...
But I am not trying [to] equate anything here — I am simply trying to illustrate how a believer’s conscience ought to work if he is employed by a government that tries to sin grievously through the instrumentality of a godly magistrate. This is just how I paint illustrations, with bright yellows and gaudy greens. I do that so that people can see them.

Douglas Wilson: Benedict and Beza Options

But that, though a nice statement of the problem, does not answer the problem. We need a solution to the impasse created by political polytheism, which is what under-girds our incoherent system of pluralism and diversity. Schizophrenia doesn’t work for cultures any more than it does for individuals.

So all these questions can be answered, I believe, by emphasizing something that all politically-engaged Christians should get tattooed on their frontal lobes — facing in, so that they can see it all the time.

Political process is not neutral. Administrative process is not neutral. Procedures are not neutral. Constitutional law is not neutral. Nothing is neutral. Everything we do corporately in the body politic is an expression of our foundational faith. That faith will either be the true faith — what I have been calling mere Christendom — or it will be an attempt to build a great skyscraper civilization on the foundation of our watered-down secular concrete.

The “rule of law” is not some “pure neutrality,” an ethereal gas that enables a bunch of members of different faiths and religions to bond together in the same society. The rule of law is actually a codified expression of certain aspects of our Christian inheritance. It is part of our legacy and heritage for a reason. It came from somewhere. It grew and developed in some countries and not in others for profound religious reasons. The rule of law has no evident authority apart from the authority of a transcendent God.

There is *always* a "god of the system", and if that god is not The Living God, then it's going to be some idol ... and there is going to be at least one demon inhabiting the idol, just waiting to feast on human souls.

Michael Egnor: Christian county clerk sent to jail for her opposition to gay marriage

Michael Egnor: What's the difference between a clerk not enforcing gay marriage law and a president not enforcing immigration law?

Michael Egnor: What's the difference between a clerk not enforcing gay marriage law and a president not enforcing IRS law?

Michael Egnor: Why are the President's myriad and persistent refusals to enforce law treated as discretionary, but a clerk's refusal to issue a marriage certificate deemed worthy of jail time.

Michael Egnor: What Judge David L. Bunning got wrong

Who stands where on the victimization totem pole?

GayPatriot: "So, we had to purge all Confederate Battle Flags because Dylann Stormdoor was a southern white supremacist; can we please ban that horrible rainbow flag now? Or does gay privilege trump white privilege?"


Douglas Wilson: Pretty Sure It Is Not You

Pretty much sums it up

Millions Severed from Got No Secrets to Conceal

'Science!'

Douglas Wilson: 3 Reasons the Campaign on Planned Parenthood is Winnable -- Pastor Wilson shares a short description of some of the 'Science!' being done on murdered babies. He gives the description in plain English and in sciencese (personally, the sciencese affected me more than the plain English)

The results of the above research, incidentally, were published in Science. That particular vile experiment was done in Finland, but it was funded by “the Lalor Foundation in Boston,” the “New York State Department of Mental Hygiene,” and, get this, the “Association for Aid of Crippled Children,” also located in New York.

My mother was used as a human guinea-pig -- here in America, in the 1930s -- in ways not too different from what the pre-Nazis and Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s. AND, it was funded in large part by the Shriners. Now, I'm confident that the rank-and-file men who were Shriners had no idea that the monies they raised to help crippled children were being put to such perverse ends; but the people at the top, the people making the decisions, the people working hand in glove with the "Progressives" in Indiana's government and its medical corps, knew.

Render Unto Caesar

Douglas Wilson: Children of the Rainbow -- "As Voddie Baucham put it memorably, if you render your children to Caesar, don’t be surprised when they come back Romans."

People frequently quote the verse (*), "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" without thinking about the context.

Now, for sure, the overall context is that some Pharisees (and partisans of the Herodian dynasty) were trying to set a trap for Christ: they say only two answers to the question they posed him, both of which they could spin to his condemnation. His answer was to expose the question's false premise on which rested the dilemma by which they thought to trap him..

However, *that* is not the context to which I wish to draw Gentle Reader’s attention, but rather to a sub-context of that overall context.

What did Christ ask them? He asked, “Whose image does this coin bear?” What he didn’t ask explicitly - for in the context of people who live and breathe the text (even if not quite the spirit) of Scripture - it is always implied: “Whose image do you bear?”

So, here is how they understood has answer to them: “Here is a coin; it is marked as being the property of Caesar. And here is you, who are marked as being the property of God. So, if Caesar demands what is his, give it back to him. But do not give him what is God’s.”


(*) and frequently, just the first half; I think we can expect this frequency to increase in the near future


Edit 2015/07/05:
The Other McCain: What Education Teaches

Swimming the Ohio

I had, myself, long noticed the sort of internal incoherency of much of the criticism of Protestantism by many Catholics (and some Orthodoxen) of which Wilson speaks.

Douglas Wilson: -- "The charge against the Protestants is that we build no civilizations, and when it is pointed out that we built a very great one, the response is that it is quite a wicked civilization, now that we mention it, full of characteristically Protestant sins. You don’t ever do this, and besides, you do it so badly that it blackens the sky above us.

In short, we are not being critiqued — which we, being sinners, could stand a lot more of — but are rather being steered, which we could stand a lot less of. We are being gamed. If we teach no church history, we are Gnostics. If we teach a distinctively Protestant approach to church history, we are bigots. It turns out that the only solution to these internal contradictions lies on the other side of the Tiber, or the Bosporus. No, no, I reply — it lies on this side of the Ohio. And if you never thought of the Ohio in religious terms, then maybe that’s your problem."