(In essence, by outsourcing their OWN MISSION to professional advocacy organizations, churches have neutered themselves from engaging in the spiritual battle within the culture. - CL)
Read full text: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2024/07/31/courage-cannot-be-outsourced-a-review-essay-on-stephen-baskervilles-who-lost-america/
...........The author begins from what he calls the Iron Law of Washington: People who are paid to solve problems acquire a vested interest in perpetuating the problems they are paid to solve. In other words, ineffectiveness is a consequence of the perverse incentives created by professionalization: “We are now experiencing the culmination of the long tragedy of Americans delegating and abdicating their civic responsibilities to a professional political class.”
Most efforts to influence policy are now the business of “public interest” lobbying firms staffed mainly by attorneys. The resulting mindset is typified by conservative columnist Rod Dreher; after bemoaning the decline of religious freedom, he exhorts his readers: “We have to fight!” But how does he suggest we do this? “If you aren’t donating to the Becket Fund and/or the Alliance Defending Freedom, please consider it.” Citizenship now means writing a check
to a bunch of lawyers...........
Genuine Civic Engagement and the Role of Churches
“A truly effective opposition,” writes Baskerville, “can only come from what the right-wing firms have displaced: citizens, householders with families and property, millions of them, all exerting face-to-face pressure.” Some people like this still exist: scores of parents have recently confronted school boards over the sexual indoctrination of their children, and the overreaction of the authorities in many districts is the best proof of their effectiveness. Yet these brave souls are dangerously exposed, at risk of retaliation such as “de-banking” or even the confiscation of their children. They require organizational backing they will never get from risk-averse professional conservative institutions.
Historically, churches have provided such backing:
Ever since the settlement of New England, churches made themselves the principal vehicles for citizen participation and checks on government. The proliferation of churches as voices of political dissent was the driving force behind both the English Revolution of the 17th century and the resulting exodus to America.
Later on it was churches that “agitated for the American Revolution, led the abolition of slavery, furnished the organizational structure for the early working-class and trade union movements, opposed World War I and Vietnam,” and on and on. They performed three functions crucial to converting individual dissent into effective public opposition:
Churches shaped and articulated citizens’ voices into some coherence, so that people had more than individual, changeable opinions; they had fixed principles and shared beliefs. Churches allowed citizens to combine their voices, enabling them to be more effectively heard. Finally, the churches demanded that we act when government officials were too weak or corrupt, even when action might cost us something.
Importantly, their mission included the moral betterment of the citizen himself:
They inculcated virtues necessary for effective citizenship and for which today’s lobbying firms have no substitute: self-discipline, self-sacrifice, sobriety, delayed gratification, a work ethic, perseverance, fidelity, a fierce commitment to family integrity and sexual morality, courage. Today’s pressure groups, even the most “Christian,” would never dream of trying to elevate their membership morally.
What such groups have succeeded in doing is neutering the civic effectiveness of the churches:
Why should churches today take a stand on issues like the family and sexual morality—or for that matter the destruction of public health, injustices in the courts, the bloodbath in Ukraine, or anything else? Why should they alert us when government officials abuse their power, and compel us to do our civic duty even when it involves hardship, sacrifice, and danger? Nowadays we have the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, American Center for Law and Justice, and other groups of paid advocates to do it all for us—and without incurring the slightest hardship, sacrifice, or danger.
But when such advocacy groups fail to offer the necessary resistance, as they conspicuously have when faced with the Biden junta, no one else steps into the breach.
A significant symptom of the neutering of the church’s civic effectiveness is the growing emphasis of Christian advocacy organizations upon “religious freedom.” The author notes, e.g., that the website of the Family Research Council contains far more on this subject than on families. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical origins of such freedom. A scholar of Puritan political thought, Baskerville points out that (contrary to popular myth) New England’s founders did not come to North America in search of religious freedom, something in which they did not believe: “but they did advocate other things vociferously, and religious freedom was an unintended result.” Their successful civic advocacy carved out a domain that the public authority was eventually forced to concede was outside its purview.
Since today’s churches have given up advocating much of anything besides the ruling ideology, the government has resumed its encroachments. Why should anyone be surprised? It is the nature of government to seek to expand its power, while pushing back against this used to be the church’s business. “For conservatives and churches to complain that their ‘religious freedom’ is being infringed,” writes Baskerville, “is like an army complaining that someone is shooting at them.” If churches in their role as the traditional and proper guardians of marriage, e.g., had bothered to fight back against the police-state machinery created to enforce unilateral divorce, they would not be forced to defend their “religious freedom” today.