The news is not always bad. Here is some good news: people in California are moving closer to a potential secession from the U.S. and A.
An article entitled “CalExit” by Brion McClanahan, appearing at LewRockwell.com for July 27, 2017, gives us the encouraging details. The California Attorney General has given the “green light” for the collection of signatures with the goal of a “secession ballot initiative” to be ready for the 2018 general election.
Of course the secession of California, in the near future, is still a long shot. A recent poll shows that only about 32% of Californians favor secession. But that is up significantly from just three years ago, when secession was favored by only 20%. They are moving in the right direction.
Of course the right direction is really the left direction. Most of the pro-secession sentiment in California comes from the left. For the left, secession is immoral and illegal–until it isn’t. If people with a rightward bent want to secede, it is supposedly because we are “neo-Confederates” yearning for the return of slavery. When the left want to secede, it is because they are too virtuous to put up with deplorables. Well, guys, whatever. We are just proud of you that you are thinking about seceding.
The irony, of course, is delicious. God is sometimes called the Supreme Ironist. This might be one example of how He moves history in the direction He wants, meanwhile having a giggle at our expense as He does so.
The movement toward the break-up of the United States should have happened because Christians were reading the Bible, taking it seriously, and beginning to realize that covenantalism was God’s will for the world–that is, each nation making a covenant with the god of its choice, and receiving the consequences good or bad. But it didn’t happen that way. Christians are drifting along with everyone else. So instead of thoughtful Christians acting in a highly thoughtful manner, and thus thoughtfully moving the nation to a peaceful break-up good for all concerned, we have been thoughtfully contemplating our navel. The enemies of God are the ones beginning to realize that two cannot walk together, unless they are agreed. (Amos 3:3) Good for them.
Children at tea are messy (E. F. Benson). History is like children at tea–messy. The break-up of the United States will not be as clean as we would like. Hopefully violence and starvation and loss of personal savings will be avoided, but maybe they won’t be avoided.
Moreover, all our problems will not be fixed by secession. Our problems are not caused by “them.” Our problems, at bottom, are caused by “us”–by evangelical Christians. The pietist, antinomian (anti-God’s law) Christian church is the source of all our problems. I wrote a book on the topic–The Christian Betrayal of the United States–but it is probably fair to say that my fifteen books, my few current blog posts, and however many books I publish in the future, can all be more or less summed up in one sentence, or even one phrase. Until the Bible-believing Christian church wants to get serious about applying what the Bible teaches, we are going to go on causing enormous problems for ourselves and for the people who live next door to us, and for foreigners as well. It’s us.
As a nation, as a Christian people, as a non-Christian people, we won’t change until circumstances force us to change. We are bankrupt, but that won’t get us to change. We have to have the consequences of bankruptcy, before we will consider change. If consequences come, then we will consider change. Or, at least a few of us will cast around for a better way. It doesn’t have to be all of us. It just needs to be a significant minority of people in the church. That minority will help Christians as a whole and people as a whole move toward a more realistic, better world. At least such is my hope. It is only a hope, not a guaranteed occurrence.
Mr. McClanahan suggests that states like Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire all may be ripe, in the “not so distant future,” for secession, as California increasingly is. All seven are basically left-leaning, again like California. The only one of them I have even visited briefly, is California. But I would love to visit all of them, especially Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. All eight states seem to have a lot to offer in terms of natural beauty. (They are not as beautiful as Indiana, of course, but they are doing the best they can under the circumstances.)
Maybe, after many secessions, the rest of us can visit California and its leftish cousins. We will respect your laws, and spend our tourist dollars to your advantage. We will take our yahoo attitudes home with us, leaving you to work out your salvation in fear and trembling, as we also will do in Flyover Country (Philippians 2:12). Divided, we will not be as powerful to do as much evil in the world.
If the North had had the practical wisdom to let the South secede, many disasters could have been avoided. We are at another potential turning point in history–secession once again rears its beautiful head. Will the rest of us foolishly try to keep the U. S. and A. together? I hope not. California, Abram (Abraham) speaks for us. So I hope, anyway. At least he speaks for me.
‘So Abram said to Lot, “Please let there be no strife between you and me, nor between my herdsmen and your herdsmen, for we are brothers. Is not the whole land before you? Please separate from me; if to the left, then I will go to the right; or if to the right, then I will go to the left.”‘ (Genesis 13:8-9)
Maybe this time we will have learned what we should have understood in 1861, but didn’t. California, we are brothers. You have gone to the left, so we will try to go to the right, if we can figure out what the right is. We probably won’t figure it out very quickly, but that’s our responsibility, not yours. Good-bye and Godspeed.