Meme of the Day: The Jezebel Spirit

Source of this and the other memes below is Western Rifle Shooters Association

In Ephesians 6:12, Paul warned that "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." You can't honestly say he's wrong when you read headlines like these:

• "Oregon high school sparks fury after asking students to write x-rated 'sexual fantasy' including three items such as candles, massage oil or feathers"--Daily Mail.
• "ABC’s ‘General Hospital’ Star Nancy Lee Grahn Compares Ron DeSantis to Hitler for Removing Pornographic Books from Schools"--Breitbart. What type of books? According to the article, "One of the books instructs readers on masturbation, anal sex, and sexting for minors. Another book encourages transgender top surgery for young girls." Well, she isn't completely wrong: Hitler's book burning was mostly focused on burning the trash produced by the LGBTQ movement and Communists (but perhaps I repeat myself) of the time.
• "Bronx English teacher is caught using school email to solicit THREESOMES and exchange 'indecent' photos with men on Craigslist - after forcing out white principal in row over Black History Month"--Daily Mail. 
• "RuPaul Attacks Laws Prohibiting Drag Shows for Children: ‘Drag Queens Are the Marines of the Queer Movement’"--Breitbart.
• "'I'm now a proud criminal': Trans activist boasts about illegally supplying cross-sex hormones to youth by ordering four times the estrogen and testosterone blockers she needs and redistributing medication for free"--Daily Mail. 
• "Governor Makes Minnesota ‘Refuge’ for Doctors to Provide Genital Mutilation, Chemical Castration"--Breitbart. This isn't about radical treatments on sex offenders, but doctors that want to abuse and mutilate children.
• "Students at America's biggest Catholic college DePaul University call for Christian group to be 'eliminated' from campus for labelling LGBTQ as sinners: 'They're spreading hatred'"--Daily Mail.
• "Queer People Must Use History as a Guide to Fight Hate"--Time Magazine. Even as "the queer movement has simultaneously grown more politically powerful and visible in mainstream society—including the securing of critical legal victories and prominence in the culture at large," the authors are calling for a return to the "radical politics and strategies of groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation". 
• "VP Harris's husband likens outraged parents at school board meetings to hatred that led to the Holocaust"--WLOS.com. Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, does not specify any particular comments from parents but is just generally upset that parents are questioning authorities or seeking control over what their kids read at school. Of course, if you follow the news, you know that what parents are upset about are the rampant sexualization of children, pushing LGBTQ agendas, and allowing male students use female restrooms and dressing rooms. 

At one time, teachers were required to exhibit high morals as befitted someone that would be shaping the minds of the young. The type of behavior exhibited from today's educators would not only have been unacceptable, but would probably have resulted in their being run out of town, tarred and feathered, or even charged with crimes and imprisoned. But now the inmates run the asylum, and it is those who seek to protect their children that are being compared to mass murderers. Heck, even trying to model your life after what is good and beautiful is now considered hateful (see, e.g., "There's a Growing 'Trad-Wife' Trend That's Making Feminists Furious"). Society truly is calling good "evil" and evil "good".

    How did we get here? Basically, it is because the moral and intellectual force behind modernity--Protestantism--abandoned Christianity. The Social Pathologist has written a series of articles about the origin of technological and philosophical modernity and how it is a result of Protestantism. The articles are:

• "Modernity"
• "Protestant Modern"
• "Protestant Modern: The Collapse of Protestantism"
• "Protestant Modern: Teal Kooyong"

    The first article discusses how modern technology is not something divorced from religion, but that, in fact, the investigative and experimental mindset that gave rise to science and technology was derived from and because of the reformation and nurtured the scientific endeavor through its most creative periods, well into the 20th Century. 

    The second article delves into how the intellectual and technical flowering of the modern age could not have happened in the Catholic world. I don't have a bone in this fight, so I will leave it at that.

    The third article expands on ideas in his first article, and discusses further the collapse of Protestantism.

    The fourth article provides a real world example of how the collapse of Protestantism in the electoral seat of Kooyong in Australia that has been traditionally conservative politically and religiously, recently swung 180 degrees and elected a slate of "woke" politicians.

    I think this excerpt from the first article, however, illustrates the basic argument and why we face overwhelming forces of evil calling themselves woke:

    ... Formally, technology shouldn't really impact upon our values system but materially it does, and the medium of the interaction, from a civilisational level, is the midwit. Culture isn't just a product of the guys at the top of the intellectual food chains, it is a product of all levels of society and I don't think what isn't recognised enough is just how powerful this midwit engagement with science and technology is in the shaping of culture.

    "A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to him" is a quote attributed to Pastuer but it captures the essence of things. Not thinking deeply about things is problematic but its how most of the human race lives and the midwit engagement and being satisfied with superficialities is a powerful solvent of traditional religious morality.  The experience of penicillin and fertiliser have probably been more effective de-Christianisers than nominalism.  For the day to day believer, penicillin cures, prayer doesn't. Fertiliser, rather than fasting, ensures the crops. God becomes increasingly irrelevant to our day to day lives.  Faith atrophies rather than is rejected and it is lived as if it is increasingly irrelevant. Only the troubled and the deep end up engaging religion. 

 

    The point here is that technology, in it's success, undercuts a powerful psychological mechanism which powers moral values, namely dependency, especially in the midwit class. As they say, "there are no atheists in foxholes" which simply is a recognition that in desperate times the midwit is prepared to give God some consideration: atheism and degeneracy being luxuries of comfort. 

    Christian forensic philosophers have laboured to identify and combat the errors of modernist thought but the fact is that stupid ideas have been around since time immemorial. What distinguishes the  modern world from the past is the traction these stupid ideas have now, or appear to have now. The average man does not engage life like a Pascal, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Kant: in fact he's probably never even heard of them. The fault of Christian philosphers has been to map the thought of dissident philosophers on the brains of midwits, combating a process that isn't naturally occurring in their minds, wondering why their arguments don't work. The fault lays in the failure to recognise that  Homer Simpson doesn't do Heidegger and the widespread consumption of internet porn is not due the average man's acceptance of the arguments of Foucault.

    Rather, how modernity attacks religion is "psychologically", through material comfort, security and abundance. The "argument" of modernity is not logical but existential. God is not needed, or sought, among people who are fat, happy and in-control enough.  Stupid ideas, which never would have been given the time of day in  a precarious world are suddenly given a hearing. Hubris, ingratitude and sloth act on a population-wide level consigning "hard" religion as an irrelevancy. The rejection of God is more pragmatic rather than philosophical. The relationship of Christianity to modernity is much bigger than just the world of ideas.

In other words, religion isn't important to the midwits (which, I would observe, includes most actors, politicians, business people, and intellectuals) because they are fat and happy and, therefore, don't believe they need God. In fact, it being fashionable to do so, they mock God and his teachings.

    Moving on to the third article, and the collapse of Protestantism, the author writes:

    Furthermore, the civic institutions that these societies built were models of trust, efficiency and honesty, at least when compared to the rest of the world. Leaders were held accountable and were meant to be honorable. Now, of course there were exceptions to the rule, sometimes widespread, but compared to the rest, the Protestant world was in a different league. Good governance, wealth and technological advancement were the markers of it. Contemporary writers were also aware of it and the unique position the  Protestant world had found itself in in the late 19th C.  Much of the opposition to immigrant migration at that time was a based up[on] a fear of corruption of the system by cultures which did not share its values.

I think we can safely say that this fear was borne out. The author continues:

    One of the distinguishing features of modernity is the rise of the bourgeoisie. They were the managerial class which bought the practical skills which enabled modernity. Much is made of the elite, but it is the middle, particularly the upper middle where the cultural "center of gravity" lies. It's the senior lawyers, doctors, economists, journalists, bankers, engineers, etc, that set the moral tone of the professions. The Protestant world was able to produce a large, well qualified, honest and technically able group of senior bourgoisie who were the "managers" of modernity, and it was their cultural values which shaped it. In the U.S. this bourgeois group by and large belonged to the "Mainline" religions but similar "mainline" faiths were in operation in other parts of the Protestant world. These mainline faiths provided moral instruction particularly to the bourgeois who ensured that the commence, law, science, medicine,etc operated with their moral limits. 

    The "health" of modernity is in many ways then a reflection of the health of Protestantism and this is why the collapse of " traditional" Protestantism has been the greatest western calamity of the 20th Century. The bottom line is that that Christian guardians of Modernity are no longer there.  It is the corruption of these particularly Mainline strands of Protestantism--to which the senior bourgeois belonged-- which is the mechanism by which the modern world became de-Christianised: Christianity meaning Christianity in a "traditional" sense. As Mainline Protestantism de-Christianised so did the upper managerial classes, who took their moral instruction from it.

    It's beyond the scope of this post to elaborate on the mechanics of de-Christianisation, but as Buckley noted at his time in Yale the process was in full swing. Chesterton noted similar changes in England in the 1920's . And what do I mean by de-Christianised? Most of the readers of this blog will intuitively grasp at what I'm getting at but to formally define it is much more difficult as one of the core problems of Protestantism  is inability to self-police its limits. Protestant expression is protean. However if one take the position of sola scriptura, then readings of scripture which broadly deny its everyday textual meaning can be taken as being unsound.  A Christianity which can theologically align Christian approval with the concept of "Gay Marriage" or other modern "innovations" is a false Christianity.

    If anyone wants to understand why our institutions are becoming more corrupt and left leaning it is because the space occupied by "sound Protestantism" in the governing  and administrative bourgeois class has been filled by either it's pseudo-Christian variants or by outright atheism. The number of "sound Protestants" in the appropriate administrative positions simply aren't there to push back. 

Or, when they are there, they are too cowardly to push back. 

    In short, then, the Social Pathologist has described how material prosperity caused the mid-wits of our society to remove the whole armor of God (see Eph. 6:11), leaving us vulnerable to Satanic influences.

    And to certain people, the abandonment of Christianity and Christian morality is enough to explain the sorry state of our society today. But I disagree. It doesn't explain the craziness of it all. There periodically come along times in a society, culture or civilization where it seems that society has become mad: the mass murders of tyrants like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot made with the full complicity of the larger population; the degeneracy of Weimar Germany and pre-WWI France; the violence and anti-Christian excesses of the French Revolution; the degeneracy and excesses of the Roman emperors Caligula and Elagabalus. And the list could go on.  

Unfortunately, post-Weimar solutions are probably where we are headed.

    Vox Day recently linked to an article from "Rev. Matt" that seems to get us closer to the mark of why things are so crazy today, entitled "The Jezebel Spirit." As a bit of a background, although most of us are familiar with the Book of Revelation because of its prophesies of the last days and Second Coming, it doesn't just jump into the apocalyptical visions of John. It actually begins with a series of letters filled with praises, instructions, and rebukes directed at various of the early Churches under John's care. In Chapter 2, beginning at verse 18, John is directed to write a letter to the church in Thyatira, including the following from verses 20-24:

    Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.

    And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.

    Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.

    But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will put upon you none other burden.

As Rev. Matt indicates in his article, a Jezebel type person or persons are often at the rot of a society. Rev. Matt explains:

Throughout history whenever a society has accepted women leadership (matriarchy), or worshipped a female Deity, this has been followed by the acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism. Without fail. It is a remarkable convergence, especially considering that this is observed in cultures that had nothing to do with each other and could not have influenced each other, because they were separated by centuries and continents.

He later adds:

    What people, including Mark [Driscoll], commonly call the Jezebel spirit is really the goddess Astarte, Ashtoreth, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Artemis, etc. In other words an active demon or demons that shows up in a consistent pattern throughout history, in every continent, in unconnected cultures, but always with the same tricks. Mark notices this too, but a key difference is that I call it the Asherah Spirit. If you read my works you'll see why.

    Our society is under the sway of these same demonic influences today. Whenever culture accepts feminine leadership it invariably follows that homosexuality and transgenderism rise up. ...

 In other words, it isn't just a secular movement or philosophy that got us where we are. Perhaps in the 1960s or 1970s we could point our fingers at various anti-Western and anti-Christian (they were one and the same) philosophies like Marxism and its bastard offspring of critical theory and modern feminism, or institutions that were largely under the control or influence of anti-Christians such as our federal court system and Hollywood, but it has gone beyond that to something that is decidedly Satanic. 

    Others have noted and commented on this. For instance, Vox Day comments: 

    ... we don’t need a fresh, objective, historical secular perspective. That’s the very outdated sort of thinking that has placed humanity in its current peril. We need to return to the old moral language, and specifically, the historical Christian perspective upon which Western civilization was built and by which humanity advanced intellectually, morally, and technologically to heights it had never seen before.

    All ideology is deception. Whether it is an ideology of the Right, such as free trade, free speech, libertarianism, Objectivism, or conservatism, or an ideology of the Left, such as socialism, communism, feminism, anti-racialism, or social justice, it is a deception and a distraction from the true and ancient conflict.

    Satan is real. He rules this fallen world. And he is determined to root out every last vestige of the truth, because the truth inevitably leads to the Truth, which is Jesus Christ. That’s why the satanic imperialists lie about everything from economics to race, from science to sex, and from math to phonics. It is the essence of the truth they fear, not the specific fact in question.

    We are living in a post-ideological time in a manner that exceeds mere identity politics, because every single identifiable ideology is poisoned with falsehoods in its core axioms. None of them are built on the truth, indeed, they are literally designed to deflect their adherents from the truth. And all of them observably lead to the exact same evil destination, as we are seeing take place in real time with “capitalism”, “democracy”, and “free market economies”.

And the Proof Positive blog recently decided to switch its emphasis from a secular explanation of our current politics and culture to one based on matters of the spirit:

    As Ferris Bueller once asked at the end of his movie, "Are you still here?" The blog "Proof Positive" as we knew it is gone. Never to return. For nearly 15 years its objective was to change America through politics and the political system. You can see what a great difference THAT made! I love my country, and I thought that, built upon such a great foundation, it could be restored to its former glory. I was mistaken. Not in that America was once a proud and free country, but about the means any such restoration should take.

    America needs revival.

    Not a new president, or a new party or by repealing this law or passing that one. It needs a spiritual revival, much like the Great Awakening of the past. Politics is not going to cut it. And politics was mostly what Proof Positive was all about. Politics, polititians and other celebrities...quoting them, mocking them, refuting them...spitting in the wind! Take for example the following picture:

Before, I saw that as a political problem! Liberals influencing society. Conservatives tolerating liberals, etc. But that's a SIN problem! Sinners violating the laws and precepts of God, trying to influence young children to follow in their footsteps. ...

Read the whole thing.

    Now, I want to note something about the picture above of the drag queen. It knows that it represents something demonic. It is reflected in the costume and decorations. It is seated in front of a rainbow, something stolen from Christian denominations which had long used a rainbow flag as a symbol of God's protection; therefore its use of the rainbow represents a false alternative to Christianity. It didn't dress as a kind, matronly woman. It didn't dress as a princess or queen. It isn't trying to pretend to be a unicorn. It picked an outfit using a crown with multiple horns, chose scarlet hair, and applied makeup to look like a sorceress or demon. Symbolism is important to these people because they are obsessed with signaling that they belong to a certain group or class. This drag queen is signaling her allegiance.

    The Jezebel Spirit is real, it is demonic, and it is present throughout all our institutions including our churches. Be careful out there and make sure that you have on the whole armor of God.