You can't be a Conservative if you aren't a Christian

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You can't be a Conservative if you aren't a Christian

May 7, 2023

Conservatism contains the term "conserve". The question, naturally, is what are we trying to conserve. 1950's ethics? Victorian England ethics? What about the living word of God and the teachings contain therein? For The King!

Key text:

* Mark 7:1-8

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Transcript

(music) Don't think I will even ask you to make Jesus Lord of your life. That's the most preposterous thing I could ever tell you to do. Jesus Christ is Lord of your life.

Whether you serve him or not, whether you bless him, curse him, hate him, or love him, he is the Lord of your life because God has given him a name that is above every name so that the name of Jesus Christ every knee shall bow and tongue confess that he is Lord. Some of you will bow out of the grace that has been given to you and others will bow because your kneecaps will be broken by the one who rules the nations with a rod of iron. And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible.

(music) Mark chapter 7 verses 1 through 8. The Pharisees and some of the scribes gathered around him when they had come to Jerusalem and had seen that some of his disciples were eating their bread within pure hands, that is, washed for the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, thus observing the traditions of the elders. And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they cleanse themselves. And there are many other things which they have received in order to observe, such as the washing of cups and pitchers and copper pots.

The Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread within pure hands?" And he said to him, "Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching us the doctrines, the precepts of men, neglecting the commandment of God you hold to the traditions of men.'" Welcome to the For the King podcast, where we proclaim the edicts of the King namely and chiefly that Yahweh reigns. We appreciate you spending some time with us today, listening to this podcast.

I am joined with Bryce. Bryce, how are you doing this morning? I am doing fabulous. How are you doing? That's good.

That's good. I'm doing well. Feeling good.

It's beautiful. I love that spring has sprung. I don't know.

I've just been feeling really good. I always feel better when the sun gets out and things warm up. I don't know if there's something about the darkness and the lack of light in the winter that kind of drain you coldness.

Right. But yeah, I'm feeling good that way. We wanted to start with Mark 7 here this morning, talking about this, you know, why you must be Christian if you want to be conservative, as you can see in the title.

And we started with this text specifically for verse 8, but we can kind of see the backdrop here that they're requiring Jesus's disciples to do certain things that they were accustomed to doing that were taught to them. And Jesus, you know, rebukes them with something from the book of Isaiah. I forget where it's exactly at.

I don't know if you know Bryce, but basically concludes saying, you know, you don't actually know me. You're teaching things that, you know, are just the traditions of men. They're not, they don't actually have any authority in other themselves because a man in and of himself has no authority.

So that's kind of the backdrop for this episode. Let's keep that in our back pocket as we move forward that a man in and of himself has no authority. So if we're going to conserve anything, we have to conserve something that actually has authority.

And what might that be, right? What do you think? What actually has authority? Yeah, I think obviously it's got to be, you know, the teachers from the 1850s, you know, are founding fathers, right? Is that the right answer? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

We need to whatever basically whatever came out of the Victorian era of England, because, you know, that's just that's kind of where the West really found its peak and pinnacle. We need to, we need to always be trying to return to that, right? That's that's kind of what I'm saying. Yeah.

Yeah. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't sound right.

That doesn't sound right. Yeah, we can't be, uh, what does, uh, I'm sorry, what? I was going to say the real question is where did they get some of their righteous things from? Exactly. Yeah.

So it was, it was just from medieval Europe, uh, right before the Reformation. Right. Dude, no way.

Wait a second. I'm sorry. It was from St. Augustin.

Let's know. No way. They get that out of here.

No. Wait, what if it actually came from the, the written word of God? You feel me on that? Wow. So, I mean, we're just, we're being rhetorical, but people want to push back.

They have some kind of, uh, um, time period that they idolize as, you know, uh, when, when humans figured it out in some respect in terms of, you know, when we think about conservatism, we're talking about conservative values, um, the way that conservatives run things, but those don't come out of thin air, folks. You know, that's, that's, that's the huge point of today's episode. That there's not some golden time period of human discovery, um, that we're looking back to.

What do you think about that, Bryce? Yeah, I think that's really good. I like, I want to bring in a helpful distinction here that you have like this sort of, it's, it's a referential conservatism, which it's a conservatism that has reference to a specific time in history. So if you're a conservative man today, you might read Winston Churchill, you might read some of Abraham Lincoln and then, oh, wow, you're actually, you're conservative.

That's what that means because you hold to a tradition from a time that's previous to yours. So clearly you're conserving something, right? You're a true conservative because you've read these men, but actually true conservatism is not referential to a specific time in history. It actually has reference to a high authority that is never changing.

So that is what true conservatism is. Like you find vestiges and remnants of this all throughout good, godly, conservative, even American writers where they're appealing to a higher authority. And in fact, that's what the founding fathers did.

They appealed to those who had already endowed these inalienable rights. So they appealed to a higher authority than themselves. Exactly.

Yeah, that's good. You look at these ancient writers and they're always, I mean, the medieval mind is appealing to unalterable truths. That's where these values and things come from.

And honestly, they're pretty much ubiquitous up until the enlightenment. And then humans started to come up with ideas that are extremely progressive and that we're moving forward and we can kind of throw off what humanity has been doing for thousands of years. I think that's where a lot of this heart comes from.

It's definitely Satanistic. We see in the garden Satanists tempting them to be progressive in a sense, to progress forward as humans. We don't want to be listening to what God's commands are for the garden.

We want to, well, let's move forward. You can become like God. Let's progress.

And then Adam and Eve sin and humanity actually regresses. We fall into sin and then we start dying. That's kind of the lie here of like the progressive lie.

But I mean, mainly we don't even want to speak to that lie, although that's kind of what most conservatives think they're fighting. They're bucking against that. They don't want to progress forward and abandon true good things.

Usually they want to return to, like we kind of started off saying, some kind of era or time period that they kind of view as the beacon of conservatism. And that's a mistake. That's a massive mistake because in Mark 7, we see that the traditions of mental, no stock.

Jesus doesn't recognize it as authoritative. And neither should we. We should only recognize God's word and the principles therein as authoritative.

And we base things on that moving forward. Yeah, that's what Paul says in Thessalonians that we need to hold to not merely handed down traditions of men, but we need to hold to the right traditions, the right doctrine that God has given to us. We contend for the faith that was once and for all delivered to the same.

That we hold fast to the traditions, as Paul says in Thessalonians, that the apostles have handed down to them. So for us, what is our tradition? Well, our tradition is fundamentally the Reformed faith from Paul, the apostle, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, all the writers of the New and Old Testament, all the way to where we're at today. That is our tradition.

We hold fast the word of God. That's what God has authority. And upon that, we stand.

So help me God. This is where we stand is on the word of God as our sole foundation. Exactly.

Political philosophy for theology, for political science, for environmentalism, for, you know, you name it, music, anything. This is our sole foundation. Exactly.

This is how we build society. Yeah. That's good.

So maybe let's start giving some really poignant examples of what we would call out, me and you, Bryce, as that kind of like cuckold conservatism, the kind of like you're selling the boat, you know, you're not actually conserving anything. So one thing that comes to my mind would be let's think about public education. You know, this is that's not a conservative thought.

Public education is never ever something that Christians have engaged in until very recently. But now you'll hear like conservative thinkers, like for instance, Ron, you know, Ron DeSantis is like, we're going to defund all the woke ism and all that. Yet he still, you know, supports and thinks he's helping, you know, Floridians out by keeping the public school socialized in the state funds it, the state runs the education, that kind of thing.

So that's not a conservative thought. That's actually one of the 10 tenants of Marxism is that public schooling is a necessity. So when you hear a conservative say something like that, you know, that is a guise of, you know, 1990s conservatism or 1950s or I don't know what, wherever that would have came into the main track of conservatism.

But that's not a conservative thought. Right. Any thoughts there, Bryce? Yeah, I think that seems to be fundamentally right.

Like we're, you know, you can't look back to these previous time periods and say, Oh, that seemed to work out. And then you get upon it because all of the the holes in that ship are just going to keep getting larger and larger as you go throughout history. Yeah.

Even particularly with the whole public education, you know, mirage that it's actually educating your children. The whole point of education is to build character. But that's not how we're educating in our schools.

Even Robert Louis Dabney, a Virginian theologian, a Southern theologian, he was vehemently against the public education that was starting to come into his day, saying that one, it's an abomination to God, but also to that soon he prophesied, soon that the Bibles and prayers, he says, would be taken out of public education. Yeah. Because that's the only necessary consequence when you have a education that is public.

The parents are given the authority, the parents are given the books to teach their children. Now, if you have a bunch of parents together who have disagreeing opinions, well, guess what? The public education is going to become pluralistic. If you're being caught in a pluralistic environment, then that seeps out into all of the environment in which all these children go, all the careers that they will eventually build, all the families that they will begin to mold and beyond them will seep into absolutely everything.

So you have one hole in that ship and then now you have a thousand holes in that ship and it's beginning to sink. Exactly. And that's why, you know, America has been falling so quickly is because our holes in the ship have been multiplying like crazy.

Yeah. That's a good point, Bryce. Yeah, Dabney was very prophetic in that and saw straight through it.

So again, that's not a conservative thought. He was saying that in the 1850s, he recognized the liberalness, the progressiveness of secular education. But now conservatives think that they're very, you know, as long as you take critical race theory out of the school, then it's very conservative to believe in public school.

No, it's not actually, not at all. Another thing that came to mind is just dress code stuff. Conservatives used to think that it was straight up whack to wear underwear in public.

Right. But now bikinis, right, that's a very normal thing. And you'll see a lot of conservative people that they won't talk about that.

Right. There was just, I don't know if you saw this, Bryce, but Dennis Prager, right? So Prager, you know, it's conservative outlet, very conservative, right? He just, him and I think one other guy just like completely publicly defended the use of pornography as a man. Right.

Oh, that's not a conservative thought. That's very progressive and liberal and wicked, you know, evil. So we see this, the sexual ethic being pushed down the line from quote unquote conservatives, slowly but surely.

So even just dress code stuff. It used to be weird to wear underwear in public, but now bikinis are accepted by, you know, most conservative people I know and most Christians I know, which are supposed to be conservative, but that's still very normal to wear a bikini, you know, even in Christian circles. That's bad.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the sexual ethic in our society is really what drives, that's what makes men these collared, chained and leashed puppy dogs. That's what makes them able to bow down to all these women and let women rule the society. Yeah.

Another governing principle that Dabney brings up, you can get this book, it's called Dabney on Fire. Zachary Garris added it. It's very good.

But one of the things that he brings up is the first being mainly parenting and education, which we just talked about, but now he talks about feminism and how much feminism is on the rise and the effects and entailments of that. This all really began when women were given the right of suffrage. Yeah.

But that's not our government was never set up to be a democracy. Women were never supposed to be given the right to vote. Abigail Adams was completely wrong when she kept writing to John Adams to, you know, remember the women and, you know, that first feminist, a lot of conservatives like to point back to Abigail Adams and say she was a thorough and true patriot, but actually she was sowing discord amongst America because now what do you have with feminism? Now you have women running around in bikinis telling men what to do.

Yeah. No, what women need to be doing rather is putting on more clothes, going in their kitchen and making their man a sandwich and stop being so loud. Now, that's what women need to be doing.

They need to be raising families. They need to be submissive to the husbands. That doesn't mean husbands aren't supposed to love their lives.

It doesn't mean that husbands aren't supposed to sacrifice for the wives. But what it does mean is that women need to stop going into realms that they are not allowed to go into women, not be CEOs. They should not be managers.

They should not own their own companies. Women owned businesses are an abomination to God. Yeah.

Like these are just obvious facts. When you read throughout the scriptures. Yeah.

Particularly Isaiah chapter one, you know. Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, those are really good points, Bryce.

And I guess, you know, why did Bryce just say all that some of those points? Well, because we get our conservatism, what are we trying to conserve? We get it from all these things from the word of God. So whenever you're thinking about an issue, you don't go first to sociologists. You don't go first to the traditions of men.

You don't go to the scientists of the day or the philosophers of the age. You go first to the word of God and determine whether or not women, whether or not to vote, you go to the word of God and determine whether you should wear a bikini. Right.

I mean, so those are some of the women's sins, but you go to the word of God before you defend pornography and the objectification of women. Because that's really all wearing a bikini is. It's just objectifying women.

Right. It's funny that they think they're being freed by that. Like sexual, sexual licentiousness is freedom when actually it's slavery.

You're now being enslaved to men treating you like an object. It's pretty funny. Like their reasoning is funny, is what I'm saying.

So, so again, that's the main point. Why are all these things brought up? Why secular education? Why all these things? Because you'll see conservatives defending them and they've historically always been a liberal progressive thought. It's not a conservative thought.

So, I mean, that's just, that's huge, huge for me thinking about this topic. It's to see big names totally like, like Jordan Peterson. He did a, he did an interview with the guy from the blaze.

That's, that's gay. I forget his name. I don't know if you remember Bryce, but do you know his name? I can't remember, but Jordan Peterson, you know, a bastard of conservatism is talking to a gay guy about, you know, selecting, you know, a designer baby and a surrogate mother and having a freezer full of breast milk to feed this, this baby in a two man gay household.

Right. I mean, a conservative thinker endorsing that, giving that man a platform and the guy that's from the blaze, the blaze is, you know, a quote unquote conservative outlet and he's gay and he's leading a conservative outlet. Yeah.

So you just slowly see this, I think this, they call it the Overton window that slowly shifts where the super far left people are saying one thing, but the, the people that are quote unquote conservative, the tone of what conservatives can say is set by the left rather than by the Bible rather than by God's word. So don't, don't take your conservative talking points based on how far the left will let you go. Take your conservative talking points of what you're trying to conserve from the word of God as we've been harping on the whole podcast.

So I mean, what do you think their advice? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think that's, that's absolutely right. Because when we look at the Bible and we go to Genesis and we see the man supposed to be working and keeping in the woman's roles, uh, uh, founded as a help meet to the man to assist him in his mission.

You know, when you have two men in a relationship like that, that is not God's design. So do we think that God would bless a quote unquote family like that? Like, is that going to be a blessing to those children? Like there's a reason why two men cannot produce a child. So again, like, when we, like you're saying, Rocky, when we go back to the word of God, there's no room for something like that.

That's an abomination. If anything, Sodom and Gomorrah is a declaration of God's cursing of that sort of family structure. Exactly.

So, and it goes, all these things go back to the family. Your view of the family will tell whether you're a conservative or if you're a liberal. So if you have that position on the family, that two homosexuals can raise a child and they can be, they can raise godly children.

Then you are just, you are a flaming liberal. That is what that is. God, you will literally curse that lineage.

And that is a, like, you know, the Bible tells us that pure religion is to visit orphans, you know, to love the widow and the fatherless. Like, that's what these children are. Like we need to be loving children who are raised in homes like that because they are not getting a blessing.

They are not being blessed by God because of their irreverent, ungodly, supposed dad and dad or mom and mom. So it is fundamentally a hatred for one's neighbor. And even though they might say that we're hating them, in fact, we're actually loving them according to biblical standards.

We want God's design to be what every single person is following in line with. Exactly. Well, amen, Bryce.

I think those are some good applicable points. Maybe you're challenged on some of that. But as conservative Christians, so main point of this episode, you cannot be a conservative if you're not a Christian because Christians believe in the word of God.

And if you're going to conserve anything, it ought to be something that actually has authority and not the traditions of men. That's the main point. So go to Matthew 7 and look at what Jesus is saying there and match that up with and consider that, you know, what Jesus is saying there in Mark 7 with what we see today being taken away by vain philosophies that are created by men, not by God.

So that's our challenge to you today. Think about anything in your life that might be more liberal and progressive than they are conservative. Yes.

That's a huge, huge challenge today. Hope you took something from this. Bryce, do you have any last thoughts before closing out here? Yeah, just, I mean, I just want to reiterate your point.

Just the word of God is always the governing principle for how you are building your family. So do not look too necessarily to your parents to figure out how you should be parenting. Look to the Bible.

Yes, you can raise them from your parents. You should honor and love your mother and father. Learn from them, but ultimately let the word of God be your governing principle.

That's good. That's good. Well, thanks Bryce for joining me.

As always, we end with the doxology, 1 Timothy 2 17, the king of the ages of mortal invisibility. Only God be honoring boys forever and ever. Amen.

Solely. Deo. Glory.

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