Carl Wells Books

This blog post is in response to an article by a leading mainstream conservative thinker, in which he gives ten recommendations for how the country can be moved in the right direction. The article appeared at a left-leaning website, but the man really is a conservative rather than a liberal or neoconservative (neoconservative means a liberal wolf in conservative sheep’s clothing).

I have read none of his books (although I own one) but I know he is much better than many conservatives in regard to foreign policy. He is a non-interventionist. Heaven bless him for that! He is “by temperament a conservative and a traditionalist” and elsewhere has called himself a Catholic conservative. I don’t want to name him. While you will see that I disagree with some of his recommendations, I like others of them. I don’t want this to be a personal attack on this gentleman. What his recommendations indicate to me is how generally empty is the playbook of mainstream conservatism in general.

I will summarize his points one by one, and respond with my own opinion of what he recommends.

1/Abolish the Electoral College. Response to 1/It is difficult to imagine a more wrong-headed idea for anyone of conservative temperament. The electoral college was the only thing that kept us from Hillary Clinton being president. Donald Trump may not be the best man for the job, but Hillary Clinton is one of the most mindless and evil people this country has ever nourished up to viperous adulthood. Abolish the Electoral College, and suddenly the party that is best at cheating is the party that has a great natural advantage in winning the presidency. Register enough of the denizens of the graveyards to vote, and suddenly the nation is at the mercy of conscienceless scoundrels. Granted, voter fraud will still help scoundrels win state elections–but the Electoral College means that such fraud will not necessarily swing the national election to the biggest crooks.

2/Rollback gerrymandering. Response to 2/This sounds like a solid idea to me. Both parties try to set up districts so that they have an edge in as many places as possible, with all the “bad voters” isolated in one district, and the “good voters” spread out in plenty of places so that the party controlling the gerrymandering can win as many seats as possible. Why not just have districts arranged in strictly practical geographical ways? Hard to implement this good idea, of course, but if it could be done it would be helpful.

3/Limit the impact of corporate money on elections. Response to 3/This would be hard to do. Would it help if it could be done? Frankly, I doubt it. As a nation, we are too far gone in corruption. We are going to have to become a much better people morally, before we begin to see politicians who are not bought and sold at the national level.

4/Require a balanced federal budget. Response to 4/A great idea. He wants us to see that we need to “choose between guns and butter.” We are not ready to choose. We want lots of butter and lots of guns (by which I mean we want a huge military), both paid for by the other guy’s tax dollars Again, we are too corrupt a people. But this idea is on the side of the angels. Maybe after the nation implodes, there will be a handful of smaller countries arise from the ashes, a few of which will effectively put this idea to use.

5/Implement a program of national service. Response to 5/Quit trying to boss everyone around. Leave people alone. This is an horrific idea.

6/Enact tax policies which will promote greater income equality Response to 6/This sounds like a plan to soak the rich. Promoting greater income equality is a euphemism for “take from the productive and give to those who are not productive.” That is another very wrong-headed idea.

7/Increase public funding for higher education. Response to 7/Public funding means the ordinary person is going to be taxed to pay for more higher education for other people. This is another absolutely horrific idea. So Joe Six-Pack working at McDonald’s, barely getting along on his income already, is supposed to pay for more potential snowflakes to go to college to be corrupted by the politically correct evil scumbags in control of higher education, and thus become snowflakes for life? Wow. Just wow.

8/Find meaningful work for those without advanced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees. Response to 8/This sounds like another opportunity for the central government to spend a lot of money to interfere with our lives. “Meaningful work” is honest work which people want to hire us to do.

9/Treat climate change as the first-order priority which it is. Response to 9/Unfortunately, this gentleman has swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, the leftist twaddle on “climate change.”

10/If there is no progress on the nine reforms recommended above, create a new party system which ends the Republican/Democrat duopoly which currently limits policy options. Response to 10/This is an excellent idea. The Republican and Democratic parties are “the two wings of the two-winged bird of prey,” to quote Murray Rothbard approximately. I love the idea of new political parties. I would like to see them spring up locally, one here, another there, dozens, hundreds, thousands if need be. If highly principled people dedicated to small central government begin to be active in politics and begin to challenge the duopoly, that will be a step in the right direction. As a people, however, we are deliriously corrupt, so we may not be ready to begin to take back our nation from the duopoly. Still, a fine suggestion by the gentleman making his ten recommendations.

To summarize, the ten recommendations by a well-known mainstream “conservative and traditionalist” thinker, a man whose books get published, whose ideas get spread around the Internet, who teaches in prestigious universities, who is by no means a warmongering idiot intent upon trying to run the world with the U.S. military–these ten recommendations break down in this way: one sort of neutral (#3), three very good and helpful (#2, #4, #10), and six ranging from bad to horrific (#1, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9).

I find this to be terrifying. This is mainstream conservatism? No wonder leftism is so powerful. If this is all mainstream conservatism has to offer, we are in deep doo doo.

Of course I know that this gentleman makes no claim to speak for anyone but himself. Also, there are branches of conservatism which are more thoughtful–the paleoconservatives immediately come to mind. But the contrast between the reforms offered by our mainstream conservative featured today, and the reforms needed by our nation, is stark.

We are going to have to think for ourselves, and act for ourselves. Which, after all, is only fair.

In the first four segments of this series I have listed twenty of the advantages of the Christian faith. Now let’s look at what seem to be disadvantages.

1/We can’t prove that Christianity is true. God doesn’t appear in the sky every day–or even any day, that I have noticed. We have to live by faith. That is true of everyone on the planet, of course. The atheist lives by faith, the Hindu lives by faith, the Muslim lives by faith, the Christian lives by faith. And so on, through all the faiths on the earth. But the Christian has to live with the uncertainty that maybe all this God and Bible stuff is self-deception and wishful thinking. There really is no escaping this disadvantage. Maybe it is not a disadvantage. Maybe it is the best way things could be organized by God. Maybe He wants us to learn to live by faith, and to trust and obey Him even though we can’t prove He is there and we can’t prove that He should be obeyed.

2/Christianity puts a restraint on our behavior. We can’t just do whatever we feel like doing. Christianity requires us to act in godly ways as the Bible defines godly, not as we define godly. Want to seduce your girlfriend? Sorry, that’s not godly behavior. Want to walk out with $5.00 more change than you deserve because the clerk made a mistake? Sorry, that’s not godly behavior. And so on, through every aspect of life. Biblical Christianity really is a religion which prescribes high ethical standards for its practitioners. If you prefer doing your own thing rather than God’s thing, then Christianity is a disadvantage, and a very big one. That is why Christianity is so hated by humanists. They don’t want anyone, including God, telling them what to do. One can see their point! On the other hand, the fact that God has high standards for His believers, could also be seen as an advantage at least for those believers, if not for those who don’t believe. If God exists, His standards in regard to what is good and what is evil, really might be the wisest standards of all. We might really flourish best living by God’s standards, or at least coming as close to those standards as possible. So what is a disadvantage to some people, is looked upon as an advantage by those Christians who love and respect the Christian ethic.

3/Another disadvantage is that Christianity might just be too good to be true. It is over the top in its promises for true believers. We are going to live within the blessing of God on the earth, then when we die we don’t just disappear. No, we are going to live for eternity, enjoying an endless and wonderful afterlife. God is going to do all this for us, through Jesus Christ. Where did God come from? He sounds pretty unlikely. He knows everything, hears our silent prayers, and does lots of other surprising stuff. It can all sound like a bit much. And if Christianity really is too good to be true, then we are deceiving ourselves, and self-deception is never a pretty thing. Of course we are reminded of point 1 above: everyone lives by one faith or another. To deny the existence of God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in view of the majesty of the Bible, seems to me to be the worst self-deception of all. So I don’t think the Christian is living dishonestly, and I don’t think he is self-deceived, but it seems fair to point out that at times Christianity can seem just too good to be true.

4/The Christian faith can be easily corrupted by its true believers, to become something far below what God intended it to be. Somewhere there is a wonderful quote from Martin Luther on our responsibility to speak the whole truth of God. I couldn’t find the quote, alas, so I will try to paraphrase what he was saying. He said something to the effect that if he preached the whole counsel of God on everything, except on the one point which needed in his time to be preached, then he was being unfaithful and was falling down in his responsibility to God. This failure to speak the truth on the pressing issues of the day is exactly what Christians do right now in the United States. We speak obvious truths, but my experience of American Christianity is that we avoid speaking the truths the church needs to hear. We refuse to preach against idolatry of the U.S. military and the idolatry of the U.S. nation, we refuse to preach against the warmongering spirit in the church and in the nation, we refuse to preach against Christians being involved in public education, we refuse to preach against Christians sucking at the breast of the welfare state. We could go on and on, but you get the idea. This is a horrendous disadvantage of Christianity as it is practiced throughout the country (and no doubt throughout the world). Of course one could argue, and I do argue, that this is not a disadvantage of Christianity in itself, but rather is a disadvantage of our relative faithlessness to the true biblical faith. Still, it is undeniably true that Christians almost always end up preaching and living a truncated and corrupted form of the faith.

5/A disadvantage of Christianity is that we Christians really do tend to become self-righteous and self-absorbed. Through the years I have heard a significant handful of anecdotes about how Christians behave in restaurants, and the anecdotes tend to paint Christians as behaving in ways that bring disgrace to the faith. A recent story I heard was of some Christian person who, instead of leaving a tip for his waitress, left a Christian tract. Common sense would seem to indicate that the waitress receiving the tract would not be very likely to be attracted to the Christian faith. Why not leave a Christian tract . . . but with a generous tip? The waitress would be far more willing to consider the possibility that the Christian faith might be something good, if she got both tract and tip. Perhaps we Christians are so used to thinking that somehow we cooperated in our salvation, that therefore we are pretty righteous people. Our theology seems to be extremely weak. In reality we are the recipients of grace, far more than we understand. Too often we are more self-righteous than righteous.

6/Many strands of supposedly biblical thought lead us down very wrong paths. I stress the word supposedly. This is true even in churches which by and large are very faithful, and where there really are lots of people who have been converted and want to please God with their lives. For just two examples, both dispensationalism and amillennialism begin with presuppositions which lead inexorably to wrong-headed behavior. If you posit A, and A leads to B, and B leads to C, then eventually you end up in a certain place. But what if A should never have been posited? Then your path to B and C and beyond was a foolish path. The two examples given are just that–examples. Over and over again we see Christians beginning with bad presuppositions which are not supported by the teaching of the Bible, and ending up with behavior which is not what we would have expected out of a truly biblical faith. So it is a disadvantage that our Christian theology so often goes awry. One could look on the bright side and say that this is really an advantage, because it shows that truly biblical theology really is important and in the long run when we get it right our behavior will be gradually much more godly and thoughtful. That is my theory and I’m sticking to it.

7/One potential disadvantage of Christianity is that the way God hands out rewards and punishments may be far different than most of us think. There are numerous passages stressing the impartiality of God. I am writing about that in my current book If: God’s Covenant of Grace, and it would be worth a blog post someday. But for now I will cite just one passage. It is a passage which to my mind doesn’t really get discussed enough in Christian circles. Jesus Christ is speaking a parable. ‘”And that slave who knew his master’s will and did not get ready or act in accord with his will, shall receive many lashes, but the one who did not know it, and committed deeds worthy of a flogging, will receive but few. And from everyone who has been given much shall much be required; and to whom they entrusted much, of him they will ask all the more.'” (Luke 12:47-48; see Luke 12:41-48 for context) We Christians may be in for a bigger flogging than some non-Christians are in for. Much has been given to us. We knew, or should have known, our master’s will, but we often did not do it. So immediately after our death, we Christians may not experience all sweetness and light. We may be getting a much deserved flogging–and a flogging more powerful than that of some non-Christians. While this may be looked upon as a disadvantage of the Christian faith–we may be getting more punishment than we expected, by a bunch–it could in my optimistic viewpoint be looked upon as an advantage. It reveals the impartiality and justice of God, and hints that His patience with non-Christians may be much greater than we realized.

We have listed a few possible disadvantages of Christianity. Some of them may even be advantages. Taken together with the advantages listed in parts I through IV, and balancing it all out, I consider that there are vast advantages to becoming a Christian. I have seen no other faith on the planet, that seems to make as much sense and to deliver as much benefit, physical and psychic and in terms of delivering us a lovely and practical ethic. I plan to stick with the faith. I didn’t become a Christian until approximately age 27 or so, but the long four plus decades since have given me no temptation to leave the faith. There may be disadvantages to the faith, but the advantages are infinitely greater. With Martin Luther, I say, here I stand, I can do no other.

Here are a few more advantages of the Christian faith.

16/The judicial law of the Bible is a good pattern for any nation wanting to strive toward semi-sanity. Granted, some of God’s laws are difficult for us to appreciate, but others clearly would be helpful if accepted and applied. Do we pick and choose? Well, we pick and choose whether we think we are picking and choosing or not. If we began with the presupposition that maybe God knows best, we might be surprised how practical God’s laws are in real life. Of course one of the glories of covenantal Christianity–that is, biblical Christianity–is that Christian nations would leave other nations alone to interact with God as they think best. Moreover, even Christian nations can and no doubt would differ greatly. A knucklehead like me who believes in the great value of God’s laws, would have little or zero influence in many or even in all Christian nations. Some Christian nations might take a view similar to mine, but others might not. All would answer to God. We are all covenantalists–Christians or non-Christians. We pick our poison, and live with the consequences. God’s laws protect people. For example, restitution protects people. A thief doesn’t go to prison to live at taxpayer expense. He pays restitution (Exodus 22:1-4, etc.). This is better for everyone–for the person who had his property stolen, for the thief who stays out of prison, for the taxpayer whose taxes are lowered by that fact that there are no prisons. Two more examples: the murderer is executed (Exodus 21:12-14, etc.); the rapist is executed (Deuteronomy 22:25-27), according to God’s law. Murder and rape would be rare, if we believed God as to how these crimes should be punished. We could list many other practical laws God has given us. I have given you enough here to encourage you to think about it, or to drive you into a rage about the cruelty of Christians, or at least of me.

17/Christianity is profoundly encouraging toward chaste sexual behavior by everyone. God created everything good, including sexual pleasure. But, as is quite logical, He has a right to instruct us how that wonderful gift is to be used. When we obey Him, we benefit. This is an era in which we have a really hard time believing that God knows best about how our sexuality is to be used, but it is true nevertheless that He does know best. We are enduring an epidemic of illegitimate children–children who grow up with no father, and with a mother who has proven to have no common sense and no biblical outlook. We are “shocked–shocked” to discover that this is bad for the children. It is bad for the mother and the father who reject biblical Christianity in favor of their own decision about when you have children and who pays for the children. It is bad for the rest of us–not only as we pay taxes to support the illegitimate children and their feckless mother and irresponsible father, but also as community standards of behavior deteriorate as the fatherless children grow up. The Christian faith would help us avoid all that. There are many more positive benefits to a Christian sexual morality. For just one example: what a joy to protect the purity of a member of the opposite sex, rather than to encourage that other one to sexual immorality! Is that not a wonderful blessing, available to anyone willing to think about life as God encourages us to think about it?

18/One of the great blessings of the Christian faith is the fellowship we can have with like-minded Christians. It really is a joy to spend time with people who have a similar outlook to us as to how life is put together–what is good, what is bad. The way most people think and live is ridiculous. That makes it all the more enjoyable to be with people who are thinking God’s thoughts after Him and trying to move in His direction by the way they live. It should be noted that this is a blessing of which we make far too little use. We could find encouragement if we were more active in cultivating Christian friendships. We tend to stick to ourselves and to our families far more than we should. It is vital that we strengthen our families, but we need to cross-pollinate them with other Christians. The blessing of fellowship with other Christians is a blessing we both take for granted, and use too infrequently.

19/Another of the great blessings of the Christian faith is that God actually sends the Holy Spirit (God Himself) to inhabit each believer. The Holy Spirit is willing to guide us into all the truth (John 16:13). Alas, Scripture warns us that we can quench (1 Thessalonians 5:19) and grieve (Ephesians 4:30) the Holy Spirit, and this is a warning we do not take to heart as we should. That is why we are far less conscious that the Holy Spirit inhabits us. For most of us, the Holy Spirit has probably gone into hibernation in self-protection to avoid being quenched and grieved every minute of every day. But that situation need not continue. We really can begin to internalize the truths of the Christian faith, can desire to become more godly, can desire to be led into all the truth. We have always Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father and the Son have been center stage since the beginning, the Father more so at the first, the Son more so lately. The time of Holy Spirit may be next. We hear a fair amount about the Father and we hear a lot about Jesus Christ. Even the Father doesn’t get a lot of ink these days! I remember when I was a child in church that it seemed to me that we heard a lot about Jesus Christ and not a lot about the Father; I wondered if the Father felt neglected. (My guess is that He did.) I am not sure I knew that there was a Holy Spirit. We still don’t hear a lot about the Holy Spirit. That is because we are living in the Antinomian Age, shrugging at applied Christianity–that is, shrugging at truth. We don’t really want to be led into the all the truth. We want fire and life insurance, and an easy life: we want Jesus Christ to save us. But the Holy Spirit, according to the Bible, is real, and what a blessing He must be to those Christians who seek to obey Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

20/We have often heard that a cardinal rule of medicine is, “First, do no harm.” This is in fact one of the great blessing of Christianity. First, Christianity does no harm. I am speaking of biblical Christianity, of course. There are clearly times when Christians do harm. For just one example, the way the U.S. Christians have given vast support to preemptive war, to torture, to warmongering, to idolatry of this country, is horrific. Christians have done vast harm. But that was acting in opposition to biblical Christianity. Biblical Christianity at the worst leaves other people alone. Beyond that, Biblical Christianity helps people. It takes other people the gospel. It gives them physical help. He helps them think and live biblically. It treats people with kindness and generosity. We are encouraged to pray for and love even our enemies! When we see Christians doing something that does harm, we know we are in the presence of something anti-biblical. True Christianity shares the goal of medicine: “First, do no harm.”

We have enumerated twenty of the advantages of the Christian faith. Next week we will devote our final segment to the disadvantages of the faith

Here are a few more advantages of the Christian faith.

11/The prayer life of the Christian can be a great blessing and consolation. We can pray for ourselves, our family, our friends, our church, our nation. But we can also pray for our enemies and for those we despise. There is generosity of spirit in such prayers; it is an example of love in action. Our prayers can be flawed, but Scripture seems pretty clear that God can take flawed prayers and make something useful of them. (Romans 8:26-27) There is a peace of mind in being able to put things in the hands of God. Most of us face many difficult challenges in life. We can pray about our situation, then somewhat relax because we have turned things over to the creator of the universe. The famous ironic phrase is, “Why pray when you can worry?” Exactly. That is, of course, exactly and humorously backward. Why worry when you can pray? We can put things in God’s hands. Of course this could be a way of dodging responsibility, but there is no necessity that we dodge. We can pray and still work hard on our end to do the right thing. There is no contradiction in such behavior. God gives us plenty of responsibility in life, and expects us to act with biblical wisdom. Still, we can always go to Him in prayer, and know that His response will be what it should be–even if His response is not what we hoped for.

12/Christianity is for every type of person. You don’t need to be rich, intelligent, educated, popular, good-looking. But you also don’t need to be poor, dull of wit, uneducated, unpopular, homely. Christianity is a religion of the heart. God takes us from where we are, and looks at what we do with what we have. God looks at the heart. ‘”But many who are first will be last; and the last, first.”‘ Jesus Christ told us that in Matthew 19:30. It all kinda makes sense, once we understand that the heart is the key. Our sins come out of our hearts (Matthew 15:19). But so do our good things, if there are any good things in our hearts. The fact that the heart is so crucial, indicates the way that people who are vastly different in circumstances can learn to get along with each other. Differences in social class, in race, in country of origin, can be overcome if we anchor ourselves in Christ. Once we see that we are all in the same boat–very sinful, and needing the salvation of Jesus Christ–we have a much better chance of being able to get along with people vastly different from ourselves. There is an eternal gospel for every nation and tribe and tongue and people (Revelation 14:6). If we accept and obey that eternal gospel, we can expect to be able to get along with a lot of people who differ a lot in looks from us, but who are similarly accepting and obeying that eternal gospel.

13/Another advantage of the Christian faith is that the Bible contains a lot of practical wisdom in how to live. Granted, most Christians read the Bible little or not at all! This is a bit shocking, but human nature is what it is. We want easy. Once we are “saved,” we think we have fire and life insurance. Why read the Bible? But that is not a fault of the Christian faith–that is a fault of our laziness. If we read the Bible steadily, it eventually begins to sink into us as to how much practical wisdom we can gain from our reading. We can refuse to dig into the Bible, but if we are willing to dig, we can dig as deep as we want for as long as we want. There is always more to learn. Some of what we learn may seem esoteric, but much of what we learn will apply to prosaic everyday life. Personally, I don’t find the Bible easy to read. I am a lifelong reader of all sorts of fiction and non-fiction, so perhaps it is easier for me to pick up the Bible than it is for people who read very little, but nevertheless the Bible is still work for me to read. The reading of it repays the investment in time, however. The practical wisdom of the Bible is conveyed in specific instruction, but it is also conveyed by means of stories. “Here is what so and so did, and here is what happened as a result.” We learn from stories like that, and the Bible is full of them. The Bible, challenging as it is, is a great advantage to those committed to the Christian faith.

14/One advantage of the Christian faith is that it encourages gracious behavior to all, even to our enemies. We are instructed to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44). I mean, give me a break! Really? Yes, really. There is logic behind such instructions, I think. We are enemies of God, or at least in the past have acted as enemies of God. He nevertheless is gracious to us and saves us through the blood of Jesus Christ. What is more logical and fair than that we also take grace to others? We can pray for our enemies, even if we hate them, even if they are truly despicable. What God does with those prayers is up to Him. Gracious behavior toward others may have results for good. We are told that we are not to shrug and walk off when we see our countryman’s donkey down; we are to help (Deuteronomy 22:4). However, Exodus 23:4 ups the ante significantly. Here, we are to rescue the wandering donkey of even our enemy. Imagine the practical results of such behavior. Here comes my enemy, who hates me, leading my lost donkey, which I really cannot afford to lose, back to me. Wow. There may be some redeeming qualities to the guy after all. Even if he still hates me, he obeyed the teaching of God to help me get my lost donkey back. God teaches us to behave generously toward everyone, even our enemies, and in the long run this has got to be of great practical help in our daily living with each other.

15/There is a type of communication with God which falls short of being prayer, but which nevertheless seems to me to be a great advantage of the Christian faith. That is, one can talk and argue with God. We can whine and complain. On the more positive side, there are times when we simply can say, “Praise God!” If we are out of line with our arguments and whining, well, it seems to me that God has broad shoulders and is not exactly a snowflake in danger of curling up in a fetal position if we are somewhat out of line. He knows our lives are sometimes difficult for us, that our understanding is small, that our characters are pretty rotten even after regeneration and conversion. So He won’t be overly shocked. He knows what is going on in our hearts anyway. Why not just speak up and give our point of view? If we are too much out of line He can always apply a gentle two by four up the side of the head. But I think it is a real and signal advantage that we can talk and argue with God. Maybe that is just a vain hope on my part. Or maybe it is correct. Think for yourself.

Next week we will list a few more of the advantages of the Christian faith.