Open the Churches. Defy the Executive Orders.

I write this as a kind of confession that I have allowed my legal training to distract me from the deeper and more sinister aspects of what the “Left” is doing in America right now.

By way of explanation, my mind has been shaped to analyze things as “legal” issues. In the United States, we have a Constitution, and the right and wrong of state action is properly adjudicated within the terms of law. I do not apologize as if it is wrong to think about freedom as a Constitutional issue. Of course it is not. And at some point it must be evaluated that way. However, the more that I, and other Americans confront the overreach of the “Left,” it is becoming clearer to me that the great affront of these egregious executive orders is not primarily a legal assault as much as a form of “kulturkampf”.

For those who don’t know the term, it is one of those many German words that come to us through Hitler and the German experiment with the total state. Kulturkampf was the first effort by Bismarck to destroy the power of the Catholic Church in the Reich’s consolidation of power.

It is “Culture War” to put it simply.

The distinctive element of Leftism and Nazism and Communism as the enemy of freedom, is the consolidation of ALL the elements of human society under the state.

Mussolini, who was an international socialist (communist) before he became a national socialist (fascist), preached this simple phrase— “everything inside the state; nothing outside the state.”

This is the definition of totalitarianism.

It is war against all institutions that are not subordinate and subject to the state. That means the family, the church, your local community philanthropic organization and you, as an individual. According to the Left you have no proper identify or rights outside of what the state allows. Yes, in the Leftist view, everything belongs to the state. Including you.

And this is why I am ashamed to say I missed the primary problem with these executive orders. I do not think they are constitutional. But more fundamentally they CANNOT be reconciled with being human.

What I mean is this.

I am glad and grateful to the founders for giving me a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. But my allegiance is and must always be first—to my Jesus.

How did I forget this?

Forgive me.

You see I live in the world. And it gets all over me. Like dirt. And if I do not work hard to wash it off, regularly it gets inside of me.

Like a virus.

How did I start my critique of all this wickedness with the law? The law is but a shadow of the light of God.

This is what the Light said,

“Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Man is first and foremost a spiritual creature.

Meaning, the spiritual is the bread of life. Meaning, NOT stuff. God and our relationship with Him is all that really matters. It is the Alpha and Omega of our existence.

Without God, there is no real right or wrong. Just the state. Without right and wrong homo sapiens are only animals. Just like materialists teach in public school.

Moral truth is what is taught in Church. Absolute and inflexible. Eternal. It is the fundament of social and economic order.

And that is why the statists hate it.

Our power to discern the invisible is our inheritance from God. It has no source in reason. Reason, law itself, is but a structure built upon the foundation of this deeper spiritual sensibility. Its source is the natural apprehension of moral order that God has given us.

The reason this witchcraft of statism is wrong and evil is not because it violates the Constitution. It is wrong because man is first a spiritual being. He is not matter only. He is soul. He is spirit. He is the Image of God. And he is a being with dependence and cognition of loyalties and loves greater than to material things—greater than any loyalty to the state.

This is why they hate us.

Because that which is immaterial cannot be placed, corralled, and subordinated to the state. And therefore this spiritual wickedness in high places must threaten and terrify us into submission.

This assault is not primarily legal. It is spiritual. Gavin Newsom, Laura Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer, Jay Inslee, and all these other black shirts, are just another manifestation of the Old Enemy—I wrote about them in my last essay on Facebook.

These Governors are not wrong because their executive orders are first politically or constitutionally wrong, but because they do violence to the distinctives of being human itself—to the duty that the creature has to the Creator.

They want everything under the authority of the state. Kulturkampf. Just like Bismarck. Just like Mussolini. Just like Hitler. Just Like Stalin and Mao and Pharaoh…

The Image of God in us is primary. Not the gut, not even reason. And that Image cannot be made a captive to the state without we ourselves allowing it.

Seek ye first the Kingdom of God!

The state has NO AUTHORITY, properly exercised, to tell you that you can’t go to church.

Not because it is unconstitutional, but because Christ himself tells us to first seek Him and His kingdom, and then maybe we should think about California or Michigan.

I love my Constitution. But my first loyalty is and always will be to Jesus.

Go to Church.

Executive orders be damned.

Violate the edicts of the emperor.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God…