Perpetuating Problems for Profit

Welcome to Episode 77 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will try to save you money. And save money for the American church in general, and may be even for the American conservatives in general. We are talking tons of money here, not just a few thousand dollars. We are talking in the billions. Yes, billions of dollars donated or paid by American Christians and conservatives to different causes and organizations, like NRA, HSLDA, ADF, the various pro-life organizations, etc., only to be wasted, and only to have a society that is much worse than it was before that money was spent. And despite the obvious failure to win the causes supposedly advanced by these organizations, American Christians and conservatives continue to donate and pay even more money, expecting different results from doing the same things. There are a number of those organizations that are supposedly conservative or even Christian, whose professed goals are to be Guardians, that is, to protect us, the individuals, from the ever encroaching totalitarian state. And they have become rich on our money, and yet, they have been losing the battle, step by step, little by little, with every year. We will shortly see how this scam works.

Before we start, let me return you to a previous episode of Axe to the Root, Episode 6 – one of the earliest episodes, titled “Denethor Ministries.” In that episode, we talked about the fact that modern American Christians spend billions of dollars in donations to ministries headed by churchian celebrities, and there is nothing to show for that money. Every time I mention this fact to modern Reformed Christians, they agree with me and they start pointing to people like Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, and other hyper-charismatic preachers. But the truth is, these hyper-charismatic ministries and celebrities are way poorer than many supposedly “Reformed” and “conservative” and “Bible-believing” ministries and celebrities. I mentioned a few of those in the episode: Franklin Graham with about $120 million a year in revenues, John MacArthur with over $70 million, Albert Mohler with over $30 million, etc. Numbers like this beat most of the hyper-charismatic preachers, and yet, for some reason, the majority of Reformed Christians are never capable of grasping that John MacArthur, for example, rakes in 2 to 2.5 times more than Joel Osteen. In general, when it comes to revenues, non-charismatic, supposedly “Reformed” celebrities beat the whole TBN Channel cast.

Anyway, the problem is not that so much money is given to them. The problem is rather that there is nothing to show for it. As I pointed out in that episode, even the very celebrities we are talking about admit that for the last decades Christianity in the US has deteriorated and weakened, and has become incapable of making a difference in the world. But that’s on their watch, for the same period they have been taking all that money and building their ministries with it. They have been the teachers and leaders of Israel all these years. They have been training pastors and theologians and church leaders. They have been doing all these gigantic conferences in those fancy air-conditioned buildings. So what do they have to show for the money we have paid them, again? What has come out of all these expensive activities? A decline. In that episode I made the supposedly scandalous remark that we could have had better results if we had spent all that money on bourbon instead. (Boy, did I get some flak for it.) But is it really scandalous to say that? Look at the churches in China, Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America. Compared to our own churchian celebrities, they operate on almost zero budgets, and yet, in many of those places, Christianity has been winning people and has been changing cultures. Perhaps, judging from the facts, we should have spent our money somewhere else, and may be then we would have some victory here in America, don’t you think?

In that episode, I also pointed at the real reason why they produced such negative results for all that money: namely, their pessimistic eschatology. “It shall be done to you according to your faith,” Jesus said in Matthew 9:29, and this principle applies to more than healing: “The righteous shall live by faith.” When your expectations are that you will lose in history and on earth, and the only real victory in the world you can have is as remote as the end of history, it will be unto you according to your faith: you won’t see any victory, or progress, or increase from your efforts in history. Your own faith will doom you to a life of fruitlessness and stagnation. Even when you have some victory or increase, you will consider it just a temporary thing, and you will be psychologically prepared for greater defeats. And that’s what has been happening to these ministries. That’s why I called them Denethor ministries: after the character from The Lord of the Rings, Denethor, who was given the important and powerful office of Steward of Gondor, but whose eschatology was pessimistic and defeatist. So when the final battle came, he had no moral strength to lead his troops into battle, and went insane.

What is more important for our topic today, however, is not those ministries, but their listeners. Namely, what the impact is of such pessimistic ideology on their listeners, and how it informs their social action, and their political action as well. And, as a consequence of that, how it informs their spending of their money for political and social causes. It should be obvious that when you have millions of listeners who have been intoxicated with such pessimistic ideology for decades, they – and the whole society, influenced by them – wouldn’t have any optimistic expectations for the future, right? They wouldn’t expect any victory in the cultural realm. They wouldn’t expect any victory in the political realm either. Even if they happen to witness some victory in the political or cultural realm, they would expect it to be short-lived, and the future still full with more struggles, and an inevitable decline into more social, cultural, and political evil. If you want to summarize the practical ideology of cultural pessimism, it is this: Every solution must be by default incomplete and temporary; the problems stay forever.

Let me repeat this, in case y’all missed it:

If you want to summarize the practical ideology of cultural pessimism, it is this: Every solution must be by default incomplete and temporary; the problems stay forever.

And let me tell you, folks: There’s money in it. Huge money.

Let me explain why.

How does one make money today? I mean, in an honest way, not by crime or government extortion (forgive the tautology). There are three main categories of money making: production, commerce, and maintenance. Production is, obviously, producing new economic value out of raw resources which have no value for the end user (that’s why they are raw). Commerce is bridging the gap between those who have the economic value and those who want it – whether that gap is geographical, or financial, and temporal, it is still a gap. And maintenance – which today is the largest part of our economy in terms of people employed – is preventing that economic value from deteriorating. You can think of maintenance as the “keep” clause of God’s command in Genesis 2:15 when He put man in the Garden: cultivate it (create new value) and keep it (prevent the old value from deteriorating). Part of that maintenance is prophylactics: taking the necessary measures to prevent or slow down the natural wear and tear. (Think changing the oil in your car.) The other part is repair: restoring the economic value of an item after it was made useless by natural or unnatural causes. Or, to put in a fancier way: problem-solving. People pay good money for problem-solving these days.

Now let’s say you want to start a career in repair. What is it that you need to make money? Well, of course, you need people who have broken things. That is, people with problems to solve. The more, the better: your market niche will be larger, and you get to expand. But you have a problem: people who buy things, prefer to buy higher quality of them, that is, things that will break more rarely. And those on the production side are eager to oblige, because – well, because they have to run against competition, and the competition will be doing the same.

What is your solution? Well, there are several possible solutions, but the one that first comes to mind is known to serious economists as “the broken window solution.” Yes, yes, I know there are some not-so-serious economists who call it “the broken window fallacy.” But we know that, from the perspective of a certain part of the economy – the repair sector, that is – it is rather a solution, not a fallacy. And what does that solution say? It says that it is good to break windows from time to time, so that people who specialize in repairing windows have business – and thus, you know, keep the economy running. If you want to visualize it, watch Charlie Chaplin’s movie, The Kid. The movie shows exactly how it is done. Keep in mind, though, that The Kid was a century ago. We are in the 21^st century now, and we may want to have an automatized window-breaking in order to keep us having business. Or automatized creation of any kind of problems. That would solve our economic problems, as many economists would tell you.

Now, what are lawyers? Lawyers are repairmen. They are paid to fix things. I mean, not your TV or your car or your plumbing or your Windows 10. The thing they fix is more impalpable: your judicial standing before the courts. They do not create new value: you are born in a state of innocence before the courts, as far as a truly just society is concerned. (Take note: innocence only before the human courts, not before God.) It takes some sort of event, some damage, to have your judicial standing impaired – either you have to commit a crime, or you have to be accused of a crime. Or, a crime has to be committed against you – although, in this case, normally, you shouldn’t need a lawyer; the state through its public prosecutor is supposed to be your protector, after all, since you are the victim. Either way, in the normal course of events, you shouldn’t need to worry, if you are not a criminal, and therefore you shouldn’t need a lawyer. Which means, a solid, righteous, and just Christian society should be a good news to you: most probably, you won’t need a lawyer your whole life.

And that was the case in Christendom for centuries. Not that Christendom was the ideal society, but it still had certain social and judicial standards which made lawyers rather needless. Those who went into law were considered rather low class. In the literature of Great Britain and the United States of the late 19^th century, the phrase “penniless lawyer” occurs way too often. (Horatio Alger’s fans among our listeners will remember, “Mr. Manning was a penniless lawyer.”) Being a church preacher was considered much more promising and rewarding financially than being a lawyer. Back in the 18^th century colonial America’s colleges, lawyers and pastors studied the same subjects for two years, then lawyers were ready to pass the bar and start their practice; pastors had to study for two more years before they could graduate. There was really not much work for lawyers, mainly because the society was closer to the Biblical ideal, and the civil government was limited to its judicial functions. In such a society, court cases were mainly over crimes committed by individuals against other individuals, or civil disputes between individuals or between companies. And many of these disputes – or even criminal cases – were regularly resolved outside the courts, through civil arbitration.

This started changing at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century. Since the French Revolution, the abandonment of Christianity as the underlying ethics for the social order brought back the pagan ideas of the state as the ultimate owner of the society; thus, the executive state of the ancient pagan empires was revived as a concept under new names. By the time of WWI, most Western nations had switched to it, and the state was now increasingly reaching out to executively control every aspect of man’s life and society. This introduced two major changes to the judicial process: First, it instituted a new participant in the judicial process: the executive state. It has been there before, of course, but it only acted in relation to its servants – individuals who have taken the oath to serve as representatives of the state in justice, war, and diplomacy. Now everyone – oath or not – was by default a servant of the state and therefore liable to be dragged to court by the state. That’s why we have so many court cases that list The United States or some state or some other government entity as one of the parties. And, second, the judicial process changed its purpose from maintaining the peace between private entities (individuals and associations) to establishing the supremacy of the state in all relations. A man now could not just mind his business and get along and not need a lawyer. He was now subject to tens of thousands of executive and administrative rules that made him a criminal by default, unless he obeyed them all to the tee.

This change was great news to all lawyers. Men were not born free and innocent anymore. They were born enslaved and guilty by default, and they would need lawyers to help them maintain their judicial status all their lives. The executive state was to the guild like the kid in that Chaplin’s movie to the glass repairman. Or even more than that: a constant automatic barrage of stones on every single window in the neighborhood. That is, more work than all the existing repairmen could handle. In 1870, lawyers were still rather lower middle class. Within 50 years, in 1920, they were among the richest men in America. Jeremy Bentham quipped once that the power of a lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law. Under the growing executive state, the law became so complex that uncertainty became its most prominent characteristic: depending on how one could interpret and re-interpret the law, a man could be both innocent and a criminal for the same actions. And since the government prosecutors are always eager to prove themselves by taking the worst possible interpretation, lawyers found a gold mine in being hired to find the best possible interpretations. Throughout the 20^th century, the law profession became one of the most valuable of all, and law education became more expensive than even medical education.

With the money came the social influence. And with the social influence came the political influence. Alan Dershowitz remarked once that “It’s every lawyer’s dream to help shape the law, not just react to it.” That dream has been coming true more and more throughout the 20^th century. As of today, 36% of the members of Congress are lawyers – in case you thought Congress was a realistic representation of the American public. Congress, the Senate, and the different departments of the executive currently hire more than 40,000 lawyers to “shape policy,” which means to determine what new laws they are going to hit American citizens with every year. Think about it. Tens of thousands of lawyers shaping laws, which then these same lawyers must be hired to sort out and clarify, so that the average Joe on the street stays clear of jail. Spiffy, heh? Imagine tens of thousands of glass repairmen shaping the laws of the country. How long do you think the average lifetime of a window pane would be?

In short, the broken-window policy is the official philosophy of our government today. Except that the “windows” are the legal standings of hundreds of millions of individuals. They are legislatively kept in a broken condition every single day, so that lawyers have work to do.

Enter the Guardians.

It was in the 1960s and the 1970s when a number of people started awakening to the reality of the growing executive state. (To the shame of the church, unbelievers took leadership. In fact, the hippies were far more conscious about the dangers of totalitarianism than the average church-goer. The churches in fact supported the growing socialist state. Many even supported Roe v. Wade.) And the solution most people were comfortable with was the creation of lobbyist organizations who would be the lawyers of the people against the state. Like, the state has its own lawyers who shape laws so as to break everyone’s windows so that there is more work for lawyers. The people will have their own lawyers who will be there on Capitol Hill, who will lobby against laws that break windows, and thus protect the people. One group of lawyers will make money out of window-breaking laws. The other group of lawyers will make money out of striking down window breaking laws. Simple. And the people don’t have to do much, just pay their own group of lawyers in donations – after they have paid the government’s group of lawyers in taxes – and they will have their rights and interests protected.

The NRA is a textbook case of that shift. It was established in 1871 with the purpose to improve the marksmanship of the average American – after it was assessed that the Union armies scored one hit per every 1,000 shots they made, and that was not good enough. So, at the beginning, the organization was concerned with setting up ranges and teaching Americans to shoot properly and accurately. In 1934, however, they established their Legislative Affairs Division, and – mark this one – that division testified before Congress in favor of the first gun-control law, the National Firearms Act. Makes sense, after all: you hire lawyers, and the lawyers want to help shape a law that would make many individuals criminals, so that the lawyers can then defend them in court. For the next 40 years the NRA lobbied for one gun-control measure after another. In 1968, it stood in support of the Gun Control Act, a law that was entirely motivated by the Black Panthers Party demonstrating around government buildings. The NRA’s position at the time was strongly leftist and anti-Constitutional, namely, that the Second Amendment did not protect individual rights but only applied to organized state militias; we know what party today supports such interpretation of the Bill of Rights.

The NRA changed its position only around 1975. By that time, the Legislative Division had taken over the organization, and the organization had little to do with the original concept and purpose; it was devoted mainly to lobbying now. In 1975, the NRA started a shift towards protecting those rights that it helped erode for the previous 40 years. Now that the laws were passed, and a legislative momentum was established, the NRA now took the other side to defend it against those same laws and against that same momentum. All of sudden, overnight, the NRA became a strong Second Amendment defender. Forty years of breaking windows . . . now’s the time to shoulder strap that pane holder and soften some caulk, and go repair them. For a fee, of course.

The 1970s and the 1980s saw an increased number of such lobbyist and political organizations emerge. Other gun rights lobbyists also emerged. The efforts of Jerry Falwell gave the start to Moral Majority, and an increased awareness of the injustice of abortion. (Before that, most churches either didn’t care, or some – like the Southern Baptist Convention – even supported it.) That led to the emergence of various pro-life groups and organizations. Some were practical and sought real measures to end abortion: like Operation Rescue. Most, however, took the path of political lobbyism. The National Right to Life Committee was established as early as 1968, but many of its chapters were set up in the following two decades. In 1983, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association was founded, with the purpose of political lobbyism and legal defense of the right to homeschool. Different other homeschool organizations appeared as well in different states. In 1990, Ray Sekulow established the American Center for Law and Justice to protect human and civil rights. The Alliance Defense Fund was established with the same purpose in 1993. Etc., etc., etc. The rise of the executive state in the first half of the 20^th century created a demand for lawyers who would protect the individual from that state. Such demand for lawyers was not present before the early 20^th century. In the second half of the 20^thcentury, lawyers moved in to meet the demand.

So, the question now is this: Now that we have the understanding that the individual needs to be protected against the state, how are his new defenders supposed to go about it? What is the most effective way of freeing the individual from the state?

The answer should be obvious to anyone who can think logically: If we had freedom for the individual before, and if the dangers to his legal status came later with the introduction of the numerous laws of the executive state, then, duh, the best way to protect him is to return to the old ways of the old days, right? After all, we are all “conservatives,” n’est-ce pas? We should be all about restoring the good old days. We didn’t have laws about regulation and control of guns; and we had freedom about guns, so there wasn’t any danger of violating any gun regulations. We had zero laws about schools and education; so there wasn’t any danger of violating laws about homeschooling. We had zero laws about carrying an ID; so there wasn’t any danger of being arrested for no ID. We had zero laws about taxes and tax exemptions for non-profit organizations; so there wasn’t any danger of having to deal with soulless tax collectors, or be careful what you say from your pulpit, or of messing up your tax return. To summarize, our liberty did not consist of having the right laws or the right government action in enforcing them. It consisted of having no laws outside outlawing criminal behavior (an attack on life, liberty, or property), and having no government action outside the courts. True liberty, after all, consists in having very few laws.

Or even better than that: true liberty consists in having no laws that define when, where, and how you can exercise your liberty. And in giving the government neither the right nor the prerogative to define your liberty, period. The fewer laws we have, the more liberty. The more limited the scope of our laws is, the more liberty. That’s why the Law of God in the Bible is called “the perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25), because it is limited to only Ten Commandment a few dozen case laws. The Talmud says that there are 613 laws in the Bible, but the truth is, the majority of them are multiple repetitions of the same laws; so the real number is probably not more than 100. (Compare this to the tens of thousands of laws and regulations that the federal government produces every year. And that excludes the ones produced by the local governments.) And none of these laws give any executive power to the state; in fact, even the power to wage war is a judicial, not an executive power, and war was declared by judges in the Bible, for specific crimes, not as an executive policy of the state. (On the executive state, listen to my lectures at the Freedom Conference in Tucumcari NM last year.) You don’t violate God’s boundaries, and you don’t violate other people’s boundaries; and the Law of God doesn’t say anything about the state’s boundaries. The state is not supposed to impose boundaries on individuals (other than the ones God explicitly imposed), nor make any demands of God or of men. That’s the perfect Law of Liberty.

Given all this, what do you think a lobbyist of a lawmaker is supposed to fight for, if they want to protect or restore liberty? That’s right, they should fight for – or lobby for, or vote for, or speak up for, or evangelize for – the repeal of all laws that give the state power over individuals. We want to protect the liberty of gun owners. Good. The solution is to lobby for and demand the repeal of all gun control laws and regulations, starting from the National Firearms Act of 1934. We want to protect businesses from socialist regulations. Good. The solution is to lobby for and demand the repeal of all laws that regulate economic activity. We want to protect homeschooling families and private schools. Good. The solution is to lobby for and repeal all laws that get the government involved in the business of education. Etc., etc., etc. If you are honest in your professed mission to defend liberty, your only job must be to fight for the repeal of all laws that give the government power or control over any aspect of life. Any other activity would qualify you as either self-deceived, or dishonest.

So, is that what all these organizations have been doing? Not at all. To the contrary, all of them have been busy lobbying for more and more laws, defining finer and finer points of how, where, and when we can exercise our liberty – all in the name of protecting us, of course. The lobbyist efforts have expanded enormously, and all these organizations have been absorbing billions of dollars, and yet, the result has been more laws and less liberty.

Take the Home School Legal Defense Association, for example. Until the 1980s, most states did not have laws that regulate education. That made it possible for homeschooling families to teach their kids without any interference from government bureaucrats. States like Texas that had such regulation provisions for education, did see pressure from educational bureaucrats on families (and in the Leeper case, homeschooling was protected only when the court struck down some of the government regulations). But such states were in the minority. The majority of the states had no regulation of education, and homeschooling was simply a traditional form for many families, especially in the rural areas. Private community schools (not run by any government) and parochial schools operated independently of any government regulation or supervision, and had no problems. The hippie movement created a number of homeschooling families and communes who had their own volunteer schools, and were not harassed by the government. Most of the reaction against homeschoolers in the 1960s and the 1970s was limited to a few urban areas where regulations existed. (And in fact, some of the reaction came as the result of the actions of church ministers who hated homeschooling and reported Christian homeschoolers to the state.) There was reaction, of course, but it was not so widespread, and the right solution was the removal of all regulations. The HSLDA, however, focused on active lawmaking with the purpose of creating new education laws in every state, including where they had not existed before. The purported idea was to create legal defense for homeschoolers. But in reality, such new laws and regulations only cemented the state as the new authority to define education. The laws became multiple and thus uncertain; and remember, the power of a lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law. Homeschoolers became “protected” through a system that broke windows at every step and therefore required a glass repairman at every step. And the HSLDA was always there to provide expert repair services.

Similar was – and still is – the situation with the NRA. Remember the murder of Philando Castille in 2016 by Jeronimo Yanez. The NRA remained silent on the issue for a long time, even though Castille was a registered gun owner. After the NRA got criticized publicly for its silence, Dana Loesch of the NRA offered the excuse that Castille should have put his hands on the wheel first (even though he was only reaching for his driver’s license), and later changed the story to that Castille was carrying his weapon illegally, because he was in possession of marijuana. In other words, the NRA declared that they believe that the simple text of the Second Amendment must be ignored in favor of the theory that the government should set when, how, and under what circumstances individuals can exercise their Second Amendment liberties. It shouldn’t be a surprise, though, given the history of the NRA and their theory of “responsible carrying,” which means, carrying subject to limitations by the government. The NRA never lobbied to restore the legal status of weapons to what it was before the National Firearms Act of 1934; to the contrary, they have worked hard to pile new laws and regulations over old laws and regulations, all designed to make it harder and harder for an individual to carry a gun and yet remain “legal.” Gotta break those windows.

The ADF went even father: they tried to convince people to break their own windows. In an initiative in the last 10 years, they called pastors to send letters to the IRS openly declaring that they are going to be preaching on politics and thus violating the Johnson Amendment. The IRS has been reluctant to track pastors for the Johnson Amendment anyway, but this placed many pastors within the IRS’s cross hairs. The ADF, however, never called for the obvious solution: the abolition of the IRS. The solution was sought within the same system, with just newer and newer regulations and amendment.

And the same situation can be seen with the various pro-life organizations: the very term “pro-life” today means simply lobbying for regulations on abortion, not for the total abolition of abortion. That is, it simply means “pro-death within the limits of the law.”

There are many more examples, some more prominent, some less, on state and county level, but in general, lobbyist organizations that claim to protect individuals against the different levels of government. The pretended objectives never really materialize. The individuals are never really protected, only under a heavier burden of regulations that create more and more problems. And in all these more and more problems, there is more and more need for lawyers to come in and sort it out. For a fee, of course.

And yet, the paying public continues to ignore the fact that the promised victory is never closer than the last year, or than 10 years ago; but is, in fact, much farther away. We can’t even imagine returning to the freedom of the 1970s, let alone to the freedom of the 1770s anymore. The problems pile up, the lawyers make their money, and Christians and conservatives seem to not notice the scam. How is this possible?

It is possible because of the Denethor ministries. Specifically, because of their eschatology. When your eschatology is pessimistic about the victory of the Gospel in history and on earth, all you expect on earth is eternal problems – including in the political realm. Any victory will be by default temporary and limited. Any loss will be permanent and sweeping. All we can do in history is fend off the enemy’s forces until Jesus comes. Until then, we can have no victory.

It is not difficult to see why such eschatology will be the best eschatology for lawyers: if you believe that victory will never be possible in history, and if you believe that problems are here to stay and multiply, then you believe that it is normative for your window to always get broken – and in fact, to be broken more frequently, every day. When an organization works to make sure that you never really get victory but your problems multiply and get worse over time, this won’t raise your suspicions. To the contrary, it will be normal for you. And then, it will be normal for you to expect that nothing can be done about it except for paying your fees to lawyers to protect you, until Christ comes back. What else can you do, after all, given that there can be no victory this side of the Second Coming?

In other words, if you are looking for conspiracies, no need to look at Soros or some world cabal of powerful bankers. The conspiracy is much closer to your home, and much more mundane and obvious: liberal lawyers working for the government who help shape the laws, conservative lobbyists who claim to be “protecting” the public but actually lobby for more power to the government to define and limit our freedoms, and evangelical and Reformed pastors who keep their listeners convinced that there is no other way, because there can be no cultural or political victory this side of the Second Coming.

What is the solution to this? The solution must start from where the problem started: namely, the theology and the eschatology of the modern churches. The crippling effect of the theology of  escape and defeat can be cured only by abolishing that theology in our pulpits, and replacing it with a postmillennial eschatology of victory: that history is the progressive manifestation of the victory of Christ on earth. Our normative expectations must be expectations of victory – not only in our personal lives, but in the society and its laws as well.

The next step is the de-funding all organizations that have proven to part of the problem by never actually solving it. Not only the NRA, the HSLDA, the ADF, or the various pro-life organizations, every single lobbyist and law institution and organization must be thoroughly examined by Christians and conservatives in respect to its true ideology and track record. If there is no expectation of quick victory – by repealing laws that limit liberty, not by making new laws that define it – and if there is no plan for quick victory, that organization’s true goal is to continue profiting from perpetuating problems. Such conduct must be penalized by Christians by  de-funding. And in fact, the de-funding must be extended to the pastors who are part of that conspiracy. Any church that preaches anything less than victory for the Kingdom of God in history, or any church that is not doing anything in the culture to achieve that victory, must be denied funding until it either changes its preaching or its leadership. Christian money can’t go to causes that only strengthen the enemy, and enslave the people of God. No more broken-window solutions, and no more theories that justify institutionalized window breaking.

And the third step is, we need to lay the foundations for our own alternative culture with alternative solutions to everything. But this is a matter a different episode, or may be even a book.

That book is Joel McDurmon’s Restoring America, One County at a Time. Joel has done an enormous job in describing how we can take back America without having to rely on an elite of lawyers and politicians and pastors to restore the liberty this country was once known for. Make that book a required reading in your family and your church, and among your bourbon-and-brisket buddies (or your pumpkin-spice-latte buddies, if you prefer). And then find ways to act on it.

Also, as usual, in your prayers and giving, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by translating and publishing books that bring the Gospel to every area of life. We do not preach defeat, and we do not preach constant problems. We preach that the victory of the Gospel is inevitable in history, and on earth. And we are working to achieve. Help us give Christians in Eastern Europe the tools to achieve it. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate for a cause that is worth it. God bless you all.