First, I’ve seen nothing close to this past week in my lifetime of watching presidential politics.

Second, that Mrs. Palin seems to have integrity and a willingness to duke it out in the ring should embarrass the milquetoast men she leap-frogged. One may wish the type of men existed in the party who would make her choice unnecessary, but I don’t see her match among the bigshots. Maybe she is this generation’s Deborah.

Third, I’m glad she doesn’t have two last names.

Fourth, her incredible poise has occasioned a bit of navel-gazing about what a panty-waist I am at times (we’re back to Paul’s “act like men” admonition).

Fifth, other than 1980, this is the most amazing presidential roller-coaster ride I’ve seen.

Sixth, I’ve discussed the topic before, but what a particularly stunning picture of God’s providence. Behold a women who was an obscure mayor of a small village a few years ago. He raises up, He casts down…

Seventh, it is yet another humbling reminder of what Gene Veith said in God at Work:

Despite what our culture leads us to believe, vocation is not self-chosen. That is to say, we do not choose our vocations. We are called to them. … Since God works through means, He often extends His call through other people… Our calling comes from outside ourselves… Our vocations are, literally, in the hands of others– college admissions boards, medical school selection committees, employment agencies, bureaucratic hierarchies, or the person we love who may or may not choose to marry us.

I missed this the first time through; from 3/31/08.

Granting that political speeches are basically worthless, I’ll still complain about the thing that I hate most about such demagogic piles of goo: the anecdotal personal story. Nothing induces a mental stupor quite like them. To use a fictional example that we might hear from the current convention, imagine a politician at the podium:

The current debate on health care reminds me… of a conversation I had with Shirley McPhee from Solon, OH. She’s a wife and a mother with four kids. Shirley said to me: “My husband is working three jobs and yet we can barely keep our heads above water. My son Eddie has (name your ailment) and it costs us $5000 a day, and we don’t know what to do. We pay our taxes but who benefits? We need to move toward the America of our dreams!” Then Shirley grabbed my arm, looked me in the eye intently, and said: “We need universal health care now! Please, (insert politician)– make it happen!” [Crowd cheers]

This focus on storytelling is even worse in the church. To pastors and “missional” folks enamored with such “dialogue” and warm anecdotes, I say, who cares about your stories? I don’t mean that we shouldn’t know people or sympathize with the plight of fellow sinners, but the church isn’t a therapy group or an avenue for sad-sack egotism. No, we’re bound together because of Christ’s story. THAT’S what I want to hear. Christ and the apostles didn’t go around asking people to tell their stories. They went around telling people what to do. They went around preaching the whole counsel of God, commanding people to repent and believe the Gospel. That’s the Good News, that’s the news that justifies and sanctifies, present and future, for those of us who are strangers and exiles on the earth. (Heb 11:13). Tell that story. Get rid of the goo.

Preceding these depraved Stalinist hangmen was the lesser-known Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. Menzhinsky was an intellectual of sorts. Like Himmler, he let his thugs do their thing in the cellars and kept his own collar clean. Menzhinsky would recline upon a divan, legs wrapped in a blanket, and interrogate his victims in a kindly fashion. And yet, the historian Donald Rayfield noted that the “excruciatingly polite” and efficient Menzhinsky was responsible for more murders than Yezhov and Beria.

That’s an imperfect segue to this: the ongoing focus on partial birth abortions has always seemed to me a case of playing at the edges, a case of accusing Beria and excusing Menzhinsky. First, there are thousands of late-term partial birth abortions, hundreds of thousands of first-trimester abortions. Second, for the doctor who “performs” the dirty deed, maybe the other types of abortion seem more clinical and less bloodthirsty than partial birth abortion. If we focus on results, though, how are these other forms less brutal for the child? To put it another way, if an executioner gave me a choice between (a) a partial birth abortion where he’d jam scissors into the back of my neck and suck my brains out, (b) a saline abortion where he’d scald me to death, or (c) his most common method, where he’d use a suction tube with a sharp cutting edge to dismember me… Well, I think I’d ask if an option (d) was available.

Beyond people playing Frankenstein and murdering the innocent and helpless, isn’t it the case that all of these methods are barbaric and vicious? No one should get kudos because they oppose one limited and little-used variety.

1. They’ll adopt more conciliatory language.
2. They’ll keep doing the same thing.

All talk, no action. Methinks NARAL has little to worry about. The machinery of death rolls on…

Liberalism wants us to “set aside our differences,” as if our differences don’t really matter as much as the things on which we can all agree with liberalism itself. You can almost define a liberal as one who demands that others reach his conclusions from their premises. -1/4/96 column

[O]n issues as contentious as abortion, there is no “middle.” When you try to find one there, you only make both sides distrust you, because both sides agree on one thing: that there are principles at stake. Faced with clashing principles, [Bob] Dole chooses neither. …When Mr. Dole compromises, he gains nothing for his side, if he can be said to have a side. He merely gets the Democrats to settle for three-quarters of a loaf, in exchange for giving him part of the credit. -7/23/96 column

I don’t know if Obama’s schtick is cynical demagoguery (see Clinton, Bill) or simple inanity. “Common ground,” in his parlance, is just another word for pro-life surrender. Oh, you’re free to carp on the sidelines, but don’t even think about running out on the field with your helmet on. The game’s over. The Supreme Court told us that years ago when they ushered us out of the Dark Ages.

The life issue is pretty much binary: dead baby or live baby. How are you going to find common ground or compromise on abortion? Saw kids in half, maybe? That’s no worse than what’s being done now. Or maybe allow half of those intended for the slaughter to live and half to die? As morally odious as that sounds — it’s like an old Star Trek morality play! — it would represent the kind of “three-quarters of a loaf” success the pro-life movement hasn’t achieved in my lifetime. I’m not pushing it as feasible or moral, but just noting that even such a repugnant idea as this would actually represent an improvement on the current situation.

It’s not the type of compromise the Left would ever entertain anyway. No, the machinery of death will continue to run. On that there will be no compromise. Amid the soaring rhetoric about healing, the abortion mills will faithfully grind, day after day. NARAL and Planned Parenthood will continue to cut their checks to politicians like Obama to keep their blood money safe. Parents will continue to murder their offspring with the indispensable help of this support infrastructure.

Good-faith compromisers on the pro-life side will just have to settle for getting the credit for seeking “common ground.”

You are arrested by a religious pilgrim whom you have put up for the night “for the sake of Christ.” You are arrested by a meterman who has come to read your electric meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who has run into you on the street, by a railway conductor, a taxi driver, a savings bank teller, the manager of a movie theater. Any one of them can arrest you, and you noticed the concealed maroon-colored identification card only when it is too late. p10

…that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; …that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp… [W]hat normal Russian at the beginning of the century… could have believed, would have tolerated, such a slander against the bright future? …[W]hat had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great… [and] totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century– in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared– not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims. -p93-94

Here is one vignette from those days as it actually occurred. A district party conference was underway in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.”
For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause rising to an ovation” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.
However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform and it was he who had called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first.
And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks. At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium, where everyone could see them?
The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter …
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a business-like expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.
That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed the Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:
“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!” p69-70

Sex worker. What a term! Norm MacDonald, whose vulgarity clouded clever satire, nailed the new morality back in 1997 (and yes, all but the punch line really happened):

In San Francisco last week, a birthday party for one of the area’s leading political figures, attended by the city’s Mayor, Sheriff, and members of the board of supervisors, culminated with a performance in which a dominatrix used a razor blade to carve a satanic star into the back of her male partner, then urinated on him, before finally sodomizing the man with a liquor bottle. After learning of the incident from press reports, San Franciscans expressed shock and outrage that the liquor bottle was not recycled.

Environmentalism is one thing, but the precincts of liberalism that glory in their irreverence and acceptance of degradation are way too precious to deal with anything implying condemnation. This gets the Tolerant crowd downright offended, angry, even violent. That’s not what they mean by free speech, pal. It turns out that the world has its own Puritan (impuritan?) streak.

“Sex worker” seems so bland, so inoffensive, so legal. And of course, the whole point is to muddy the waters and soften the blow. Consider:

How the faithful city has become a whore sex worker. -Isa. 1:21

“You have played the harlot sex worker with many lovers; and would you return to me?,” declares the Lord. -Jer 3:1

Not quite the same, eh?

Even we Christians cringe when hearing “harlot” and “whore” used in their Biblical sense. They aren’t meant for polite company any longer. But isn’t that another mark of our worldliness?

The broken wrist is the least of this church’s problems. It reminds me on old Jerry Seinfeld stand-up bit:

So they’re showing me on television the detergent for getting out blood stains… Blood stains? … You got a T-shirt with blood stains all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem right now…Maybe you oughtta get the harpoon out of your chest first.

Because of all this, my current response to phone solicitors is to immediately say, as politely as possible, “I’m not interested, but thank you”… click. I frankly have never come up with a satisfactory way of dealing with drop-bys. Have you?

Salesmen who practice hard-sell techniques will tell you that they it this because it works, and in the end they build businesses and help people. I wonder though about the vast number of people that they irritate and whose work they disrupt to get to that point.

Enlighten me, readers!

The mustached Producer [of the show trials] knew each of them very well. He also knew that on the whole they were weaklings, and he knew, one by one, the particular weaknesses of each. Therein lay his dark and special talent, his main psychological bent and his life’s achievement: to see people’s weaknesses on the lowest plane of being. And the man who seems … to have embodied the highest and brightest intelligence of all the disgraced and executed leaders… was N.I. Bukharin. Stalin saw through him, too, at that lowest stratum at which the human being unites with the earth; and Stalin held him in a long death grip, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, letting him go just a little, and then catching him again. -A. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago vol1, “The Law Matures, p. 412

HT: Pastor Timmons.

Anyway, there’s a stirring scene in the last film where Elrond presents the Narsil sword to Aragorn, saying: “Put aside the ranger. Become who you were born to be.” I reminded a young friend yesterday that is something we men need to remind ourselves of often, to step up to the plate. As Paul tells the Corinthians:

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. -1 Cor 16:13

Stalin and Hitler shared many attributes. Both had alcoholic fathers. Both were involved in underground subversion. Both were eccentric, fanatical, paranoid, cunning, ruthless criminals. And yet, for all their shared traits, I think Hitler was, at core, a nut. Stalin was not a nut. And that perhaps explains his enduring fascination for me, perhaps more than any other non-Biblical historical figure.

Robert Conquest’s standard The Great Terror is a good starting point to learn about Stalin. There are the biographies of Volgonokov, Radzinsky, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen, Animal Farm, Darkness at Noon… the worthwhile books go on and on. Solzhenitsyn’s rapier-like Gulag Achipelago, especially volume 1, provides revealing insights into The Friend of the Working People’s character, as does a keen chapter from The First Circle describing an encounter between the old dictator, circa 1950, and his secret police chief Abakumov. Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom is a harrowing and sadly forgotten journey of a Soviet technocrat through collectivization and terror. Malcolm Muggeridge’s upward journey from leftism began with his own experiences in early 1930s Russia, recollected in his riotous autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Time. David King’s sadly out-of-print coffee table book, The Commissar Vanishes, is an Orwelllian look into the dangers of owning even pictures of Enemies of the People. It also shows ongoing falsification of photographs and history itself (for example, this infamous photo of Stalin, Molotov, and “the bloody dwarf” Yezhov). Imagine being part of the team who brushes out a body and replaces it with background! There are some great photographs in the book, including a particularly sinister NKVD group photo entitled “Murderers.”

On a lighter note, there is the singular East Side Story, a slow but truly odd 1997 documentary on the genre of Eastern European musicals. It includes vignettes from several American-inspired Soviet musicals of the 1930s, including Stalin’s favorite movie, the happy-go-lucky Volga Volga (I have the full version- alas, no subtitles!). Released at the height of the Great Terror, it is said that Uncle Joe saw it a hundred times and even gifted a copy to FDR.

If they appear on Turner Movie Classics, don’t miss the dreadful Mission to Moscow and North Star. These wartime films were created by major studios at FDR’s behest as tokens of friendship toward our Soviet allies. Both are among the worst things Hollywood ever released. The first is just a wonder to behold; the falsehoods are astounding. It even pleasantly spins Stalin’s loathsome prosecutor Vyshinsky, he of infamous lines like “I demand that dogs gone mad should be shot - every one of them!” Meanwhile, North Star, written by Lillian Hellmann (who is skewered in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals), features a happy, well-fed collectivized village. The depredations of Ukrainian villages fresh in his memory, the defector Kravchenko said that the film “drove me to helpless despair.” “Why, why,” he asked, “did these Americans insist on fabricating a paradise and locating it in my tortured country?”

None of these works, though, answered questions I’d long pondered about Stalin. How did a man sign off on thousands of executions of innocents and then attend the cinema that same evening? How does he send millions to dreadful camps, destroying lives and families? How could he lovingly prune his roses and sing along to musicals and yet casually deport entire civilizations? How could he imprison and shoot members of his own family? His charm was considerable (he charmed even enemies like Churchill). That he charmed the dilettante FDR is no surprise. Nor was his appeal to leftists, including Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Paul Robeson. The ongoing fascination of leftists with Utopian thugs from Stalin to Mao to Che is well-chronicled — hilariously by Muggeridge and in more scholarly fashion by writers like Paul Hollander. (It’s hard to imagine now, but pre-WWII Russia was admired by progressives and the avant-garde. Fellow travelers went to faraway Siberian towns to build socialism. The motherland supposedly offered equality to all races. And if a few million were crushed by the Bolshevik bulldozer, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.) Furthermore, Trotsky and his followers said that Stalin was a clever politician but an intellectual lightweight. But how did that explain the mordant wit of his epigrams? His diabolical cleverness is seen in this exchange with the Spanish war correspondent Mikhail Koltsov:

Stalin: “How do they address you in Spanish? ‘Miguel’ or something?”
Koltsov: “Miguel.”
Stalin: “Don Miguel, we honorable Spaniards thank you for your excellent report.”
Koltsov: “I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Stalin.”
Stalin: “And do you own a revolver, Comrade Koltsov?”
Koltsov: “Yes, I do, Comrade Stalin.”
Stalin: “And you are not planning to shoot yourself with it?”
Koltsov: “No, Comrade Stalin. I never even thought of it!”
Stalin: “Well, that’s excellent, Don Miguel! All the best, then, Comrade Koltsov.”
(Koltsov was afterward arrested and shot.)

So these were all vexing questions. But then this decade saw the release of two magnificent books by Simon Sebag Montefiore that have finally begun to answer them. The Court of the Red Tsar (2003) is a fascinatingly detailed look at the intricacies of Stalin’s court after his ascension to power. Young Stalin (2008) covers his early period through the 1917 revolution.

Born in Georgia of the southern Caucasus, Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili ended up in religious schools. The teenage boy was a promising poet who abandoned his Orthodox faith at Tiflis seminary (though he fondly sang Orthodox hymns with his cronies once in power). He went underground around 1900, and never truly resurfaced until 1917. It was during this time that he took his revolutionary name Stalin (man of steel). Young Stalin was always on the run, working his network of terrorists, criminals, sympathizers, party members, and lovers. Two illegitimate children resulted. It was one long period of robberies, agitation, and executions, always matching wits against Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) agents. As young Joseph put it: “To choose one’s victim, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed.” It was said that Stalin had an uncanny knack for instantly knowing Okhrana spies. Periods of exile interrupted this existence (such relative Tsarist leniency would not characterize the Bolshevik regime). One such exile was a four-year interval in the netherworld of the sub-Arctic Siberian taiga, where he could catch fish in the bitter cold and break off frozen, raw bits of flesh to melt in his mouth. It was perhaps the happiest time of his life.

Montefiore argues persuasively that Stalin never left the paranoid world of the criminal underground after the Revolution. He shared Lenin’s pitilessness. Lenin would send his Georgian disciple to the areas most in need of vicious repressions in the Civil War, whereupon the shootings would soon begin. After Stalin rose to power, war was continued against “rich” peasants and supposed double agents, industrial “wreckers,” and “hostile party elements.”

Aided by the archives, Montefiore explodes the idea that Stalin was an intellectual non-entity. He was a crucial figure in Bolshevik circles long before the revolution, and indeed was Lenin’s right-hand man for a time after it. He was a man of action with a will to power, a man after Lenin’s heart. Stalin was a voracious reader and autodidact. His preparedness and intelligence intimidated even his smartest underlings. Ruthlessness and brilliance is a bad combination.

Soviet Russia of the 1930s was one of the most bizarre and horrific periods in all of history. Peasants were herded into collectivized farms, with millions killed in the displacement (food was still exported during the resulting famine). The political show trials in the Hall of Great Columns featured witnesses and defendants beaten to ensure that all went smoothly. The Western press at the time predictably bought the lie. These sham trials featured those the maestro most despised; many were left pathetically groveling for full communion again with their beloved party. (Solzhenitsyn noted that at Yagoda’s trial, when he begged his life, “a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall… and while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.”)

The revolution devoured its children during the Great Terror of the late 1930s. Longtime allies were rounded up and shot, including Stalin’s own in-laws. Former paramours were imprisoned along with the wives of his magnates. He executed the wife of his devoted attache. Scores were settled with old Bolsheviks like Kamenev and Bukharin who patronized or offended the young Stalin. Even most of his secret policemen were tortured and killed after serving their usefulness.

The gulags swelled with untold millions throughout the thirties. These chains of inhuman labor camps, the “sewage disposal system” to use Solzhenitsyn’s term, were put in place by Lenin just as Solzhenitsyn said long ago, back when it was still commonly said that Stalin had corrupted “pure” communism. As the archives show, this is completely false. Lenin was worse than his detractors thought. (As a sidenote, the ruthless Molotov knew both Stalin and Lenin well, and thought Lenin the more severe of the two. For example, a letter from Lenin to Molotov shows how Lenin used the famine of the early 1920s… “Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition. … [P]ass a secret resolution of the congress that the removal of property of value, especially from the very richest lauras, monasteries, and churches, must be carried out with ruthless resolution, leaving nothing in doubt, and in the very shortest time. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this “audience” must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.”)

Montefiore has summed up the dictator up this way: “Stalin is one of those subjects that one never gets bored with. He was incredibly complex and subtle, both diabolical and terrifyingly seductive.”

Mr. Montefiore needs to finish off a trilogy with a biography of the (underserved) 1917-1929 years!

“One morning just before the October [1917] Revolution,” recalls Anna Alliluyeva, “there was a ring at the door. I saw a smallish man dressed in a black overcoat and a Finnish cap on the threshold. ‘Is Stalin at home?’ he asked politely. … After a brief conversation, Stalin and he left together.”

Just days later, these scruffy, diminutive figures [Lenin and Stalin], who now walked the streets of Petrograd disguised and unrecognized, seized the Russian empire. They formed the world’s first Marxist government, remained at the peak of the state for the rest of their days, sacrificed millions of lives at the pitiless altar of their utopian ideology, and ruled the imperium, between them, for the next thirty-six years. -Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin, p332

The reason given by these young evangelicals is that they aren’t “single issue” voters. They’re pro-life, but they also believe in “social justice.” What is social justice? Well, it’s pop-culture speak for the use of taxpayer money to “fight” poverty and AIDS, to “protect” the environment, etc. In other words, it’s the same old, tired liberalism. (To digress, I’m convinced that popular culture inculcates this propaganda more effectively than the usual suspects in the mainstream news media. It’s the subtle, liberal premise on MTV, VH-1, afternoon talk shows, movies, and Comedy Central that, with endless repetition over a period of years, work its magic on minds already untethered by discernment. This, along with churches no longer preaching the whole counsel of God and discipling the sheep, is what has led to the rapid acceptance of sodomy over the last 20 years. The shift in even the last 10 years has been incredible. What a damning lack of love we show by acting as if this is cultural advancement.)

I’m not a single-issue voter, either. I won’t vote for someone who is pro-abortion, but the role of government and the rule of law is also critically important. There’s a reason why a government that historically saw its main goal as providing for the common defense now regulates (via the EPA) the gallons-per-flush for your toilet. That particular power wasn’t enumerated in the constitution, but it didn’t come from nowhere either. It was an accretion on prior interventions in the market. Similarly, government funding of Planned Parenthood didn’t come out of the blue either. It was another layer of plaque buildup on top of prior unconstitutional prerogatives assumed by our government. If we get to the point in this country reached by a few European countries where it’s a “hate crime” to speak the whole counsel of God in matters of sexuality, you can be sure that that won’t come from nowhere either. It will follow other “plausible” and “sensible” government meddling in related matters.

Henry Hazlitt, whose Economics in One Lesson should be read by all, noted:

This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

That about says it all for liberalism. My late father defined a liberal as “someone who likes to spend someone else’s money.” Well, another definition might be: “Someone who always — always — overlooks secondary consequences.” (In Ohio now, we have a group pushing a ballot issue to force businesses with more than 25 employees to provide seven mandatory sick days. Now isn’t that a fine prescription for making Ohio, already one of the worst business climates in the country, more competitive, especially in this era of expanding inflation and high gas prices? Pity our small business owners.)

Here’s what I say to young, wavering evangelicals:

• Barack Obama is another in a long line of empty-suit, vote-buying demagogues peddling phony hope for power. (McCain is a vote-buying demagogue too, but that’s a matter for another time.)
• If you think abortion a negotiable issue — should a mother be allowed to kill her offspring? — then examine your heart. You’re out of line with what the church has always believed.
• Liberal social justice is a violation of the eighth commandment. Sure, you spend a few trillion and you’re going to manage to help someone. But who’s really benefiting from it? Politicians, lawyers, and special interests, that’s who. And who’s paying the price? Taxpayers, the poor people who live around bums, drunks, and crackheads, and the bums, drunks, and crackheads themselves. African missionaries like David Wegener and my pastor can tell you the effects of foreign aid in Africa. A better answer is the exact opposite of what the social justice movement offers, namely property rights, the replacement of public “safety nets” that enable bad behavior with private charity, the return of vagrancy laws, discouragement of sodomy instead of handing out rubbers (Planned-Parenthood style), and, most of all, the gospel of Christ. The abortion movement is flat-out evil; liberal social justice is flat-out stupid and counterproductive (and that’s a charitable take).
• Liberal social justice (and that includes the environmental movement) is an enemy of freedom. Value your freedom to live and worship. The government already takes half of our income on average, and there is some truth in the idea that every dollar spent by government is a dollar of our freedom. That’s one reason why, for example, many families don’t feel they can afford to have mom at home, because politicians in Washington — especially the ones who prattle on about “working families” — think they know how to spend our money better than we can. This arrogant attitude is well demonstrated by a U.S. senator in favor of a 1990s tax hike who said something to the effect of “well, if we don’t do it, people will just go out and buy more VCRs and TVs.”
• The Christianized version of liberal social justice offered by the Rick Warrens isn’t a new reformation of Christianity; it’s the same candy-coated spirituality offered by the social gospel movements of the 19th and 20th centuries that decimated the mainline churches.

Yawn. The feminist hits keep-a-comin’ with this series; we heard this routine last time. Maybe it’s time for Disney and Walden Media to pack it in with this series so someone serious can come along in a decade and do Lewis right.

At least it avoided this dialogue from Walden’s “family film” The Bridge to Terebithia:

Leslie Burke: I seriously do not think God goes around damning people to hell.
Jesse Aarons: Why not?
Leslie Burke: He’s too busy making all this! [opens her arms, gesturing to creation, music swelling]

Someone at National Review (back when it was much better) once posited a rule that any organization that is not explicitly conservative will drift leftward over time. I don’t know if Habitat really had to drift too far. I do know this: Not one dollar of our money will be sent to organizations like Habitat or Susan G. Komen.

Most tourists visit Moscow to see the ballet, the Kremlin, and the churches. There weren’t any Stalin tours when I was over there a few years ago. Requesting such from a Russian would prompt a suspicious retort: “Why would you want to see that?” They were amused, even proud, that a foreigner would be interested in their recent history. However, it was their history, and maybe it was still too fresh. They were ready to move on.

Reminders of Stalin were therefore more of the “if you know what to look for” variety: the “wedding cake” skyscrapers, the House on the Embankment (adorned with a Mercedes symbol of all things), the Lubyanka, the grand but unrenovated subway where Stalin spoke during German bombings, and Red Square of course.

And then there was the New Tretyakov gallery. It housed an incredibly interesting collection of Soviet art, including huge portraits of the mustachioed Friend of the Working People. After communism fell in the early 90s, Muscovites didn’t want monuments of Lenin and crew prominently displayed about the city, so they took them down (Stalin had been removed many years before). These dark reminders, including the Dzerzhinsky statue that ominously fronted the Lubyanka before being famously toppled in 1991, were eventually moved to a courtyard adjacent to the art gallery. The unkempt courtyard was coined the “Graveyard of Fallen Monuments.” Someone apparently decided that it was too good of a fate for the statues of Bolshevik monsters, and so gulag sculptures were added here and there.

What a motley sight it was a few years ago, another odd and yet moving spectacle of Russia. Alas, it sounds like less of it remains today.

There are some really bizarre places in Russia. Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, for one. The modern part is where the glitterati who didn’t make the Kremlin Wall were buried: Yeltsin, Khruschev, Raisa Gorbachev, Mayakovsky, Orlova, Stalin’s second wife, cosmonauts, generals. Even Solzhenitsyn’s censor. Pictures do the totality of Novodevichy Cemetery little justice, but to give you an idea, check out this, this, this, this, and this. There was one particularly hideous grave featuring a bald man’s head jutting almost horizontally out of a rock formation. Alas, I cannot find one picture of it; ours must not have turned out.

Individually these graves at Novodevichy were all quite appalling, as the English might say, and emblematic of man’s boastful pride. The haphazard landscaping at the cemetery added to the bemusing quality of it all.

Don’t miss Novodevichy Cemetery if you go to Moscow. Hopefully you will leave it wanting the humility of a simple marker.

[W]hy are literate American Christians running away from sola scriptura at a time when searching the Scriptures (especially using computer technology) has never been easier? On this point I am offering my opinion, but there is good evidence for it. I believe that the lack of gospel preaching has allowed churches to fill up with the unregenerate. The unregenerate are not like “newborn babes who long for the pure milk of the word” (1Peter 2:2). Those who have never received saving grace cannot grow by the means of grace. Those who are unconverted have not drawn near to God through the blood of Christ. But with mysticism, it is possible to feel near to God when one is far from Him. Furthermore, the unconverted have no means of sanctification because they do not have the imputed righteousness of Christ as their starting point and eternal standing. So they end up looking for man-made processes to engineer change through human works because they have nothing else. Those who feel empty because of the “pragmatic promises of the church-growth movement” … may need something far more fundamental than ancient, Catholic, ascetic practices. They may very well need to repent and believe the gospel.

I sometimes wonder where pastors who don’t preach the gospel (or the law) regularly think that people are going to hear it. Certainly not from Joyce Meyer (who isn’t a “pastor” anyway) or Joel Osteen. There’s an arrogance behind it, a “we’ve moved beyond the cross” mentality. Compare that to the formidable R.C. Sproul’s observation that although he has studied the cross of Christ for over 50 years, he still feels that he is “barely scratching the surface of the meaning and significance of [it].”

Dewaay helpfully wraps up the article:

Perhaps the best antidote to rejecting sola scriptura and going back to Rome would be a careful study of the Book of Hebrews. It describes a situation that is analogous to that which evangelicals face today. The Hebrew Christians were considering going back to temple Judaism. … The key problem for them was the tangibility of the temple system, and the invisibility of the Christian faith. Just about everything that was offered to them by Christianity was invisible: the High Priest in heaven, the tabernacle in heaven, the once for all shed blood, and the throne of grace. … But the life of faith does not require tangible visibility (Hebrews 11:1). The Roman Catholic Church has tangibility that is unmatched by the evangelical faith, just as temple Judaism had. Why have faith in the once-for-all shed blood of Christ that is unseen when you can have real blood (that of the animals for temple Judaism and the Eucharistic Christ of Catholicism)? Why have the scriptures of the Biblical apostles and prophets who are now in heaven when you can have a real, live apostle and his teaching Magisterium who can continue to speak for God? … Why have only the Scriptures and the other means of grace when the Roman Church has everything from icons to relics to cathedrals to holy water and so many other tangible religious articles and experiences? I urge my fellow evangelicals to seriously consider the consequences of rejecting sola scriptura as the formal principle of our theology. If my Hebrews analogy is correct, such a rejection is tantamount to apostasy.