Tag: history

Mailvox: Convergence and the Presbyterian Church

A reader writes up a very informative summary of Gary North’s detailed account of how the Presbyterian Church was successfully converged over a period of 60 years.

Given how reliably organizations get captured by the left, there’s an amazing lack of curiosity about how it happens. I recently read Gary North’s 1996 book Crossed Fingers: How Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church, a rare case study of liberal takeover. North provides a detailed – at 1100 pages too detailed – case study of how the left took over the northern Presbyterian church between 1875 and 1936.

This books echoes many of the same themes of SJWs Always Lie. It’s uncanny how little things have changed, including the failures of conservatives. I’m attaching three docs: a one page summary, a writeup of lessons learned from the book, and a collection of substantial quotations from the book that pulls key points out of this monster. I thought you might be interested in other researchers who validate your SJW analysis, and am providing multiple length options depending on your interest level.

Crossed Fingers: How Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church
By Gary North / Institute for Christian Economics (September 1996)

1. The single most important cause of the liberal capture of the Presbyterian Church was the conservatives’ failure to kick out liberal heretics and impose negative sanctions while they had the chance.

2. Liberal strategies and characteristics that led to their victory:

  • Willingness to lie (they had their “fingers crossed” when swearing that they held to the Westminster Confession): “SJWs always lie”
  • Intense public calls for freedom of inquiry, tolerance, pluralism, unity while weak or assimilating power
  • Deliberate focus on institutional capture, which included the property, money, and brand prestige.
  • Long game perspective (the takeover took 60 years: 1875-1936)
  • Far superior skills at bureaucratic maneuvering, including an analog of a “code of conduct”.
  • Presence of amenable authorities (the WASP establishment, media) & outside money (esp. from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.)
  • The liberals “took care of their wounded” – anyone who suffered in the fight got a cushy job somewhere else.
  • Once they consolidated power they were willing to kick out conservative leaders like Machen.

3. Conservative strategies and characteristics that led to their failure:

  • They also had “crossed fingers” and did not themselves fully support the Westminster Confession (e.g., they rejected six day creationism). This limited their ability to call out others for heresy.
  • They were on the “wrong side of history” with slavery (i.e., took a stance of neutrality on what the Bible said about it), which weakened their moral authority, rather like modern political conservatives and the Civil Right Act.
  • Initial inability to respond compellingly to key challenges to orthodoxy: Darwinism and Higher Criticism
  • Strategy was purely defensive – nothing on offense (“surrender on the installment plan”)
  • Focused on ideas, theology and church mission, not institutions and bureaucracy, and had a very weak understanding of bureaucratic warfare.
  • Were incredibly polite, charitable, and moderate in their rhetoric – they rarely dared to directly confront heretics

4. Other lessons and implications

  • The modernists were fighting to win the war; the conservatives didn’t even understand they were in one
  • High standards people tend to lose out vs. low standards people. Key: conflict between orthodoxy and church growth mindset, stay pure but small or grow large but compromise on beliefs.
  • The more bureaucratic and complex an organization, the more vulnerable to liberal takeover (Confessional documents and hierarchical structures were perceived as strengths but were – and are – really weaknesses)
  • Confessional documents are irrelevant when faced with liars (cf: today’s US Constitutional law)
  • Presbyterian takeover pre-dated Gramsci and could not have been inspired by him
  • Presbyterian takeover pre-dated the modern political Conservative movement
  • You can’t fight the tape – the tides of history were with the liberals
  • Despite best efforts of smart but flawed conservatives, the liberals won: God preserved only a remnant and the Presbyterian church was lost
  • The winners write history; noxious liberal causes like eugenics were memory holed.

The end of civic nationalism: literary edition

Steve Sailer notes that even an SJW version of the 88 books that shaped America tends to demolish the 20th century civic nationalist construct:

I like lists, so here is the 2012 Library of Congress list of 88 Books that Shaped America. It’s not supposed to be the best books, but the most influential, with lots of non-literary works. Despite obvious biases like blacks being vastly better represented than in reality, it’s not a bad list.

A few comments:

– Benjamin Franklin wrote 3 of the 88 books. The only other author with more than one book on the list is Harriet Beecher Stowe with 1.5.

– You can see the role of identity politics taking over as the list gets closer to the present. The last book on the list, one I had never heard of existing before now, was no doubt thrown on in panic when the list-makers realized they hadn’t checked a certain demographically sizable (but culturally insignificant) box.

– One striking thing is the lack of influence of Catholic writers until fairly recently…. This is in contrast to England, where Catholic writers, such as Alexander Pope, pop up even during eras of oppression. And America mostly lacks a literary tradition of converts to Catholicism, like Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, Waugh, and Greene in England.

– Jewish writers were not major literary figures until roughly after WWII….

– Overall, the weight of Protestants on American culture is pretty overwhelming until the mid-20th Century. So, you can see why there is such a strong urge to retcon American history with heapings of Ellis Island Nation of Immigrants schmaltz to inflate the reputations of the ancestors of today’s top dogs.

Steve is nicer than I am, so he tends to say the same thing rather more politely. Translation: American culture is a white and Protestant culture. Period.

It’s not a nation of immigrants. It’s not a melting pot. It never was. And anyone who tells you otherwise is not only lying, but is usually doing so for reasons related to identity and self-interest.

Z-man’s comment indubitably won the Internet today: Maybe they should pick the 14 that really stand out.

Not a nation of immigrants

Notice that both wages and living standards rose as immigration fell, and both have fallen as immigration has increased and gotten out of hand. Immigration does not benefit a society. It destroys and impoverishes it.

The good news, such as it is, is that those higher numbers will never be reached. The USA will collapse long before that point, most likely a few years before 2040.

But at least Americans will have the satisfaction of knowing that no one ever called them racist, right?

Even the globalist Foreign Affairs realizes that the current situation is no longer tenable.

Regarding cultural assimilation, advocates of open immigration policies often argue that there is no problem. During the last great wave of immigration, from roughly 1880 to 1920, Americans feared the newcomers would not blend in, but for the most part they ended up assimilating. Therefore, as this reasoning goes, all immigrants will assimilate.

Unfortunately, however, circumstances that helped Great Wave immigrants assimilate are not present today. First, World War I and then legislation in the early 1920s dramatically reduced new arrivals. By 1970 less than 5 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born, down from 14.7 percent in 1910. This reduction helped immigrant communities assimilate, as they were no longer continually refreshed by new arrivals from the old country. But in recent decades, the dramatic growth of immigrant enclaves has likely slowed the pace of assimilation. Second, many of today’s immigrants, like those of the past, have modest education levels, but unlike in the past, the modern U.S. economy has fewer good jobs for unskilled workers. Partly for this reason, immigrants do not improve their economic situation over time as much as they did in the past.

Third, technology allows immigrants to preserve ties with the homeland in ways that were not possible a century ago. Calling, texting, emailing, FaceTiming, and traveling home are all relatively cheap and easy. Fourth, the United States’ attitude toward newcomers has also changed. In the past, there was more of a consensus about the desirability of assimilation.

Fifth, it’s not just harder for multicultural, multireligious USicans to assimilate Africans and Muslims and mestizos than it was for Christian Anglo-Americans to partially assimilate Northern and Southern Europeans, it is impossible.

Science vs Galileo

As most readers of this blog know, the “Flat Earth Church vs Galileo” narrative is mostly revisionist history that has been completely mischaracterized by atheists who fucking love science because they believe it disproves the existence of the Baby Jesus. But what is interesting is that there was a considerable amount of scientific opposition to Galileo at the time as well, which is of course ignored by the ahistorical atheist narrative:

In 1614, when the telescope was new technology, a young man in Germany published a book filled with illustrations of the exciting new things being discovered telescopically: moons circling Jupiter, moon-like phases of Venus, spots on the Sun, the rough and cratered lunar surface. The young man was Johann Georg Locher, and his book was Mathematical Disquisitions Concerning Astronomical Controversies and Novelties. And while Locher heaped praise upon Galileo, he challenged ideas that Galileo championed – on scientific grounds.

You see, Locher was an anti-Copernican, a fan of the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, and a student within the Establishment (his mentor was Christoph Scheiner, a prominent Jesuit astronomer). Locher argued that Copernicus was wrong about Earth circling the Sun, and that Earth was fixed in place, at the centre of the Universe, like Ptolemy said. But Locher was making no religious argument. Yes, he said, a moving Earth messes with certain Biblical passages, like Joshua telling the Sun to stand still. But it also messes with certain astronomical terms, such as sunrise and sunset. Copernicans had work-arounds for all that, Locher said, even though they might be convoluted. What Copernicans could not work around, though, were the scientific arguments against their theory. Indeed, Locher even proposed a mechanism to explain how Earth could orbit the Sun (a sort of perpetual falling – this decades before Isaac Newton would explain orbits by means of perpetual falling), but he said it would not help the Copernicans, on account of the other problems with their theory.

What were those problems? A big one was the size of stars in the Copernican universe. Copernicus proposed that certain oddities observed in the movements of planets through the constellations were due to the fact that Earth itself was moving. Stars show no such oddities, so Copernicus had to theorise that, rather than being just beyond the planets as astronomers had traditionally supposed, stars were so incredibly distant that Earth’s motion was insignificant by comparison. But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a favourite of the Establishment, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem.

Locher thought much was up in the air and ripe for study. In light of the star-size problem, he thought that the Earth clearly did not move; the Sun circled it. But the telescope made it clear that Venus circled the Sun, and that sunspots also went around the Sun. Brahe had theorised that all planets circled the Sun, while it circled Earth. Locher noted that Brahe might be right, but what was clear was that the telescope supported Ptolemy.

Granted, Locher didn’t imprison Galileo. But then, he didn’t have the power to do so, nor had Galileo treacherously turned on him, disregarded his wishes, and intentionally made him look like an ass in his published dialogue. The true lesson of Galileo and the Church is not one of religion and science, but rather, the price of being proud, stubborn, and socially retarded.

Sovereignty in the UK

Great Britain has invoked Article 50 and is officially leaving the European Union:

Brexit begins! Historic moment for the UK as Article 50 letter is delivered to the EU with Theresa May hailing a ‘great turning point’ for country as it looks to forge a ‘bright new future’ outside the Brussels club. The Prime Minister signed the historic letter triggering EU divorce last night. Brexit will be irreversible once handed to EU chief Donald Tusk in Brussels today

Congratulations to the British for reclaiming their nation. This is a historic moment, every bit as historic as the Revolutionary War and the defeats of Napoleon and Hitler, despite not a shot being fired.

The EU is a stealth empire that has conquered with lies and banks in the place of infantry and tanks. It is to the great credit of the British people that they have had the courage to resist their subjugation and reclaim their nation and the Rights of Englishmen.

When the die was cast

The Zman looks at when Rome’s fate was sealed:

The die was most likely cast when the Republic began to compromise its own rules for limiting and distributing power. The system they had created was a reflection of the tribal realities of the early republic. In order to keep any one family from gaining too much power, they systematically limited the time anyone served in office. The system also forced an apprenticeship on those who went into public life. This had the benefit of making public men buy into the system. Therefore they were willing to defend it.

That meant the system had a policing mechanism to sort out enemies before they could cause trouble. An ambitious young man could not skip any steps on his way up the ladder, so once he got up the ladder, he was not agreeing to any changes in the process. Defending the system was a way to defend one’s prerogatives, but also a way to defend the system from lunatics. Verpus Maximus may be smart and talented, but he was not only going to wait his turn, he was going to do all the jobs necessary to prove his worth.

This system started to break down with the rivalry of Sulla and Marius. Sulla was the first man to hold the office of consul twice. He also got away with marching an army on Rome itself, in order to defeat his rival, Marius. Both of these acts were supposed to be disqualifying, but exceptions were made for expediency. Sulla sided with the Senate so the Senate bent the rules to serve themselves. A good case can be made that this is the point when it was all over for the Republic.

It was just a matter of time before someone used Sulla as a precedent.

The die-casting point that sealed the fate of the USA is a little bit easier to determine, in my opinion. The 1965 Naturalization Act that eliminated the restrictions on immigration by national origin is the obvious one.

Notice that in both cases, it was abandoning tradition and loosening vital restrictions that proved to be the fatal act.

Mailvox: the necessity of Christianity

Stickwick had some thoughts about the IQ-related video I posted yesterday.

I found the Rushton video interesting. During the Q&A, someone astutely asked Rushton why the difference in terms of societal output between whites and higher-IQ Asians. Rushton said the answer is not known, but he’s wrong. The answer is well known amongst historians of science: it’s Christianity.

Pearcey and Thaxton, in their book, The Soul of Science, explain in great detail that it was the ideals and assumptions of Christianity that led to science and thus greater technological advances.

These ideals and assumptions include:

  •     Belief that the universe was created and ordered by a transcendent, rational mind
  •     Belief that the universe is lawful and knowable
  •     Belief in the reality of the physical world
  •     Belief that the physical world is of value
  •     Viewing physical work as noble, as a divine calling
  •     The Biblical admonishment to test claims
  •     Viewing the study of nature as a proper form of worship
  •     Belief in linear time
  •     Belief that mathematics forms the substrate of the physical world

Every non-Christian culture lacks at least one, and usually several, of these, which are all necessary for the development and advancement of science. This is why the intellectually advanced Greeks, and the technologically advanced Romans and Chinese, did not develop science, while the “backwards” medieval European Christians did.

The implications are obvious:

  1. If progressives are ever successful in completely secularizing the West, we will be relegated to second-world status.
  2.  If Asians, with their superior IQs and self-discipline, ever become Christian in sufficiently large numbers, they will eat our lunch in terms of scientific and technological advancements. 

This is why any efforts to make America and Europe great are doomed unless they are centered around Christianity.

Socialism still doesn’t work

One of the many reasons I am so skeptical of “self-correcting” science is that humans quite observably learn absolutely nothing from history, even when logic, theory, evidence, and experience all line up conclusively in harmony:

Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments.

In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country.

In a statement, the government said the bakers had been selling underweight bread and were using price-regulated flour to illegally make specialty items, like sweet rolls and croissants.

The government said bakeries are only allowed to produce French bread and white loaves, or pan canilla, with government-imported flour. However, in a tweet on Thursday, price control czar William Contreras said only 90 percent of baked goods had to be price-controlled products.

We shouldn’t be too contemptuous of the Venezuelans, though. They fell for socialism. We fell for feminism and civic nationalism. All three concepts are equally stupid, as all three fly completely in the face of our current understanding of the relevant sciences as well as thousands of years of written human history.

Decline and fall

In a single family. A Virginian inadvertently chronicles American genetic decline:

My people are pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater. I am Frederick Venable Reed Jr, my mother’s maiden name being Betty Venable Rivers–a cousin marriage, which some will suggest explains a lot. The Venables were prominent in the gentility of Southside Virginia.

Why is this of interest, if indeed it is? There are reasonable people today who believe that traits such as politics, way of life, occupation, talents, and intellectual bent are genetically determined. Some time ago I found an interesting study showing that families–those studied were English–maintained distinguishable traits for many generations, suggesting that these were innate. For a generation or two similarities might be explained by children copying their parents. Over many generations, it would appear otherwise.

I wondered whether this would hold for my own family. It seems so. The first mention of Venables was of Walter de Veneur at the Battle of the Ford in 960. He did nothing astonishing, but I think that just being mentioned by name would suggest membership in something similar to the upper middle class. The name is baronial, from the town of Venables, near Evreux, in Normandy. In France, it morphed into various Latin and French forms such as le Venour, or Venator, or Venereux, becoming, after the clan came to England with William of Orange, Venables-Vernon. (Spelling was not an advanced science in those days.) These never sank into the lower classes nor rose to produce dukes or earls, but several barons, members of Parliament and such. Upper middle class. Honorable mention. Respectable, but not important.

Richard Venables is recorded as having purchased land in Virginia in 1635. The Venables became a distinguished family, of the ruling class but without doing anything to get them into textbooks. They were in the House of Burgesses. In 1776 Nathaniel Venable founded Hampden-Sydney College, which provided schooling for many of Southside’s leaders.

The Cavalier society of Tidewater was perhaps the high point of American civilization. The people were extraordinarily literate, steeped in the thought of the Enlightenment, imbued with a profound and kindly Christianity. From them came the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, the Lees and Custises. It is hard to imagine any modern politician, or his ghost writer, writing either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, the latter being the framework, enduring until perhaps 1960, of an entire nation. The Virginians did.

All that illustrious lineage, and now Fred is reduced to denying human biodiversity in defense of the members of La Raza Cosmica with whom he cohabitates. It rather reminds me of the women who are ferociously proud of their blue eyes and blonde hair raising their brown-eyed, black-haired children. They have proven themselves wholly unworthy of their heritage by virtue of failing to pass it on.

Fred writes: “The facial resemblance to the men in our line is strong. So is the character and cast of mind.” When the former disappears, the latter usually will as well. As Le Chateau likes to say, physiognomy is real.

See, that’s precisely the problem, Fred. They’re not your children’s people. You’re the end of the line. Whatever comes after is not that pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater of which you are so proud.

Indeed, if my experience is any guide, people will very likely tell your grandchildren that they have no connection whatsoever to the Cavaliers and they are lying if they claim they do.

Not even pretending

The God-Emperor has unmasked the lawlessness of the Left’s pretense at the Rule of Law, and in doing so, is building a strong case for acting outside of the Left-dominated deceptively titled “justice system”:

His basis for doing so was an extraordinary interpretation of the right to travel and the freedom of association, which before, has only been associated with U.S. citizens,” Barnes continued. “Every court decision in the 200 years prior to this has said that people who are not citizens of the United States, who are not present within the United States, have no First Amendment constitutional rights. The Constitution doesn’t extend internationally to anybody, anywhere, anyplace, at any time. Instead, this judge said it did, as long as you had a university here who wanted to assert, quote-unquote, the foreigner’s rights, or you had some physical person here. In this case, it was one of the leading Muslim imams in Hawaii; he wants to bring over various family and friends from the Middle East.”

“The Hawaii judge’s decision says he has a First Amendment constitutional right to do so because he’s Muslim. It was one of the most extraordinary interpretations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment ever given, which is that because these are Muslim countries that were banned where the issue of terror arises from that that meant they had a special right to access the country and visit the country,” he said.

“As long as there is somebody here that wants them here, no president can ever preclude them from coming here. He basically gave First Amendment rights to everybody around the world and gave special preferences to people who are Muslim under his interpretation of the First Amendment,” Barnes summarized.

“So it’s an extraordinarily broad order. Its legal doctrine has no limits. If you keep extending this, it means people from around the world have a special right to access the United States, visit the United States, emigrate to the United States, get visas to the United States. There wouldn’t be any limit, and the president would never be able to control our own borders. It would be up solely to the whim of a federal judge who effectively delegated it, in this case, to a Muslim imam in Hawaii,” he contended.

Barnes noted that the judge did not “cite any prior decision” that has ever established this astonishing new quirk of the Constitution.

“Just last year, the Supreme Court implicitly said the opposite, when they said your right to association does not include a right to bring foreigners into the United States, in the Din decision,” he pointed out. “Now, there were several concurrences, so the binding precedent of that has been left open, but he does not even reference or mention or discuss the decision. He doesn’t even mention the statute, the main statute that gives the president the right to ban any alien from the country, for any reason the president deems appropriate, for any temporary time period, that the president yesterday cited in his national speech. Like the prior Ninth Circuit decision, the Hawaii judge never mentions the decision at all.”

“So there’s no real legal precedent. He’s taking three or four different concepts that have been applied in completely different areas of law, that only ever have historically applied to U.S. citizens, and he’s magically adding it to foreigners and acting like that’s always been the case when it’s never been the case,” he said.

There is no way to pretend that what these courts are doing is in any way compatible with democracy, law, tradition, history, or even Western Civilization. What we are witnessing is a literal breakdown of civil society and a descent into structural lawlessness. This has been a long time in the making, but it is becoming increasingly impossible to even pretend that there is a coherent or meaningful legal structure of any kind in the United States.