Twenty Fifty-six?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 7/17/21

            We can hardly fault writer George Orwell for getting the exact date wrong. The important point is that Orwell was right about the emergence of Big Brother, Orwell’s name for the impending governmental tyranny that the entire world faced.

In his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written barely four years after Europe was delivered from the Nazi nightmare, Orwell warned that Hitler’s efforts at European domination would not be the last. Other anti-freedom personalities and efforts would rise and the demise of civilization would be certain. Orwell posited that in 35 years totalitarianism would swallow the West if not the entire world.

  But the year 1984 has come and gone. Americans, Europeans, and certain Asians are still voting and selecting their leaders. Furthermore 1984 found America with a president who throughout his presidency warned the nation about intrusive government. That brave president stood in a divided city in the divided nation of Germany, alas, and spoke with anger to the Soviet ruler, “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall.”

What, then, shall we make of Orwell’s prophetic pen and his dire warnings about “Party doctrine” and superstates? Was Orwell wrong? Indeed not. Since the publishing of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, the world has endured Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Tito, Franco, Batista,  Castro, Kaddafi, Hussein, and many a petty tyrant in Central America and Africa. “Man would be free,” wrote Rousseau, “but is everywhere in chains.”

 If Orwell were alive – he died in 1950 – he would still be alarmed. Ironically, he claimed he was a socialist, but wrote often of socialism’s “dangerous ends.” What Orwell addressed most was how bureaucracy and language affect freedom. He argued that tyranny doesn’t always come from traditional tyrants. It was Orwell who introduced the terms “newspeak” and “thought crime.” (You know, “hate crime” legislation, punishing people for what they think, not what they do.) Exploring how corrupt language can be used to advance political oppression, Orwell stressed the connection between language, thought, and power.  

Can we not see how language is used today to hide agendas? Can we not recognize tricky semantics? How did most of us define infrastructure before Biden became president? Can a Black person be a racist? How is it that progressives define free speech so differently from how the liberal “tell it like it is” college youths of the sixties defined it? What is “reproductive freedom” but weasel words?

Today we are awash in a language revolution. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “All revolutions are doctrinal. You cannot upset things unless you believe something outside them.”

And what do the America-haters believe? They believe (or do they really?) that American civilization began in 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves rather than 1776 with the shedding of patriot blood. They believe Al Sharpton and Stacey Abrams rather than Martin Luther King, Alveta King, Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Tim Scott, Hershel Walker, Clarence Thomas and thousands of other Blacks who competed and succeeded rather than hiding behind the color of their skin and claiming victimhood. Like the Islamic group, ISIS, they believe that history and monuments they don’t like should be canceled. Their inability to name another country they prefer belies their true motives.

America-haters are driving us toward the realization of Orwell’s prophecy. They are proving Orwell’s declaration that it doesn’t take dictators to effect a revolution. Re-defining and “re-imagining” will do the job, especially if you involve children and youth. Hence, Critical Race Theory (a Calvinistic-like notion that tells schoolchildren all Whites are necessarily born racist), Defund the Police, the incredulity of “a third gender,” a doomed burning earth, government-encouraged snitching, and a Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who believe it’s dandy to require the indoctrination of our troops with Critical Race Theory. Who needs a dictator for revolution when you can ease it in through bureaucratic edict, schools, the military, and oh yeah, our transnational, radicalized, customer base be-damned corporations who ought to stick to making money?

There’s another problem. More and more good, ordinary Americans are choosing security over freedom. Forgetting that scientists and “experts” of all stripes often disagree vehemently with each other, they’re letting fear-mongers control them. Such is the evil power of influence about which Orwell wrote.

Americans had better wake up before November of 2022, acknowledge which political party has fostered the ongoing revolution, and vote accordingly.

Orwell predicted freedom would die within 35 years. Thank God, he was wrong. Dare we allow another 35 years to pass (2056), to find that our kids and grandkids are living under Orwellian Big Brother dystopia? If we do, Jefferson, Madison, and 1.4 million American soldiers labored and died in vain.

 

Roger Hines

7/15/21

 

                                       I Was There and CNN Got it Wrong

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 7/3/21

            Leaving the Music City Center in Nashville, TN two weeks ago, my wife and I along with long lines of literally thousands of other Southern Baptists paused at the first street corner to wait for the walk signal. Only a few yards away from the curb were five men bearing a Black Lives Matter banner and blaring over their microphone, “Southern Baptists are racists and hypocrites.”

            I wish that the five men had been inside the vast convention hall where the Southern Baptist Convention had just wrapped up its annual meeting. I wish they could have seen the Black singers, Black preachers, and Black speechmakers, particularly Pastor Fred Luter, the first Black president of the SBC (2012-2014) as he nominated for President the candidate who was elected.

            More importantly I wish the profane, accusatory men could have seen 15,726 Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians from all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico slip from their chairs, kneel uncomfortably in limited space, and pray for each other, the nation, and the world. It might also have been of interest to the five protestors, though maybe not, to hear from two of the six SBC seminary presidents that their seminary enrolments are now over 50% non-Anglo.

            Any way you cut it, church is sociology. Birds of a feather flock together. Even so, Southern Baptists for some time now have been convicted that their congregations and  denominational gatherings should look more like heaven is going to look: “saints from all the nations.”

             Americans have always been a religious people. Churches are everywhere, 47,000 of which are Southern Baptist. Hospitals, schools, colleges, orphanages, and rehab centers have been built and funded by America’s church goers of all denominations. It’s indisputable that wherever the Christian faith has gone schools and hospitals have followed. (Full disclosure: I have not researched to find out how many schools and hospitals have been built by American Atheists or the Atheist Alliance.)

Southern Baptists, with over 14 million members, are still the largest Protestant group in America. Like other Protestants and Catholics, Southern Baptists often disagree with each other. Much has been made of a “split,” “division,” and “turmoil” amongst Southern Baptists. Don’t believe it. Never has there been an annual meeting without internal disputed issues. The Nashville gathering, however, was a typical prayer-bathed business meeting and a time of worship. The new president, Pastor Ed Litton of Saraland, Alabama and his losing opponent, the silver-tongued orator/seminary president/activist Al Mohler evidenced their grace and Christian charity with respectful words for each other.

            On the evening just after Litton was elected president, he appeared on CNN’s Erin Burnett show. Gleefully, Burnett gave the setup: “The Southern Baptist Convention has just elected a moderate as their president. He’s coming right up.” Right up, though, Litton kindly but forcefully corrected Burnett. “I’m not a moderate. I’m a theological conservative.” Burnett, visibly stunned, wrongfully suggested that because Litton has spoken out for racial reconciliation and works with a multiracial group of pastors in the Mobile area, he must not represent the rank and file. How insulting.

            Litton’s defense of his conservative creds brought to my mind the fact that as much as Southern Baptists and other evangelicals disagree with each other at times, they are all strong on the fundamentals of the faith: the virgin birth, the sinless life, the substitutionary/sacrificial death, and the literal resurrection, not to mention Christ’s great commission to share the Gospel. That’s why some refer to Southern Baptists as Great Commission Baptists.

The SBC is a voluntary fellowship of “co-operating” churches. It is totally non-hierarchical and each church is totally autonomous. To refer to “problems within the SBC” is absolutely vague and misleading, though individual churches certainly do often have problems.

            Interviewed by the National Review, Litton stated, “The SBC did not inch left. My views of marriage, gender identity, and homosexuality have not changed nor are they going to change. They’re bound by Scripture and there I stand.”

            The Wall Street Journal also got it wrong: “The SBC is at war. Internal fissures have exploded.” No, and no, Donald Trump has not divided the denomination, as the WSJ foolishly suggested. Newsweek, CBS, and ABC also joyfully celebrated the supposed “leftward turn” that Litton himself has denied.

            This stir will not stop evangelicals from spreading the Gospel or from speaking out on social issues. Keeping quiet on abortion, injustice, perversion and moral degeneracy would dishonor the cries of the Old Testament prophets;    the Methodist, William Wilberforce; the Lutheran, Dietrich Bonheoffer; and two great Baptists, Martin Luther King and Billy Graham.

            I doubt that the Great Commission Southern Baptists will ever keep quiet and I pray that they won’t.

 

Roger Hines

July 1, 2021