The us-versus-them mentality misses people because it misses the loving heart of Christ. Whereas categorizing people ends in exclusion, Jesus offers invitations to come as we are (Matthew 11:28–30). Jesus welcomed sinners and associated with the people that we might exclude. He calls those other people his own. He didn’t come to save the healthy but the sick, (Mark 2:17).

“What do we need to do to help them?” “How do we love those kinds of people?” “How are we supposed to speak the truth to them?” Have you heard or asked these questions about people in your church dealing with sexual issues? As well-meaning as these questions might be, they can create barriers between fellow Christians, separating God’s people. They metaphorically paint a circle in which some people are included because their struggles are more acceptable, while others are relegated outside of the circle. When we do this, we allow an “us versus them” mentality to form.
As Christians, we need to be extremely careful with such categorization. When it comes to sexual struggles, an us-versus-them mindset places the emphasis on someone’s sin or behavior, not the individual’s heart. Instead of viewing a person through the lens of Christ, as the Bible directs us, we look only at what is visible.
Here are three ways to characterize the “us versus them” mentality:
It speaks of people as a group. There is a truth to this, as well as a danger. The truth is that groups of people often share a characteristic or are in some way associated with each. When Jesus said to his disciples, “You give them something to eat” (Matthew 14:16), he was recognizing that all the people gathered before him were united in a group by their common situation of being tired, hungry, and a long way from home. When he said of the Pharisees, “Let them alone; they are blind guides” (Matthew 15:14), he was merely recognizing the voluntary grouping with which they had identified themselves.
But there is also a danger. The danger is that we overemphasize the group’s commonality that we deny the variety and individuality within the group. This is “painting with a broad brush.” One example of this is generalizing the characteristics of a group so much that we unfairly stereotype every individual. For example, “Gay people have an anti-Christian political agenda.” Well, in reality there are many who don’t.
It emphasizes difference at the expense of commonality. The attitude we are talking about focuses on what separates “my kind” from “their kind” without recognizing our commonality. This works against humility because our sinfully proud hearts always tend towards positive descriptions of ourselves and easily identify faults in others. An “us versus them” attitude keeps us stuck on those differences rather than encouraging us to recognize how alike we all are.
It emphasizes conflict at the expense of relationship and reconciliation. “Us versus them” defines the relationship by conflict—either our opposition to them or their opposition to us. In so doing, it does not seek connection. It seeks to conquer. It seeks to defend. It seeks to circle the wagons, to protect “us.” An “us versus them” attitude reinforces what separates us from a group of people and does nothing to move us toward engagement, redemption, reconciliation, and unity.
In the Bible, we see a plethora of us-versus-them examples. The religious leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees, seemed quite certain that everyone outside of their own circle was a them. The self-righteous versus the sinners. The pious, mature adults against insignificant children. Powerful men as opposed to weak women.
One of the more prominent examples of this mentality was God’s chosen people, the Jews, pitted against the not-chosen people, the Gentiles. The division was so intense that Jews thought it was unlawful for themselves to associate with Gentiles. In Acts 10, we read about Peter and Cornelius, a commander of an Italian cohort. An angel of God visits Cornelius, a Gentile, and tells him to send men to Joppa and bring back Peter, a Jew. Cornelius obeyed. Then, starting in verse 9, Peter had a vision. Eventually, the men sent by Cornelius arrive, and, while Peter processed the meaning of the vision, he was told to go with the men without hesitation. Peter obeyed.
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Through the joint workings of man and woman, God would use humanity to continue putting the earth into its beautiful order and fill it with His image. This is why generally men are more drawn to tasks that form and shape the world, whether physically or intellectually, and women tend toward tasks that fill and beautify the world, also both physically and intellectually. Furthermore, we should note that how God designed for the earth to be filled with His image-bearers is also reflective of God’s work of creation. 

Darwin (1809-1882), Freud (1856-1939), and Marx (1818-1883) can quite rightly be called the architects of modernity. During the 1800s, these three men were foundational in providing secularism’s answers to three of life’s most important and unavoidable questions regarding our origins, our guilt, and our hope.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection was the key to explaining man’s origin. How did we get here? Of course, answering that question always leads to a very important follow-up: Why are we here?
Although much of Freud’s work on psychoanalysis is no longer practiced by the psychological community, many of his ideas have so thoroughly permeated society that it goes unnoticed. Concepts like the unconscious, libido, id, and ego have weaved their way into our everyday vocabulary. But most importantly, we can thank Freud for teaching us to turn to psychology to help us resolve the strain that our sin and guilt place upon our consciences.
If Freud taught us to look inward, Marx gave us a vision for understanding the world around us. Focusing largely upon economics, Marx saw life as a great power struggle between the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) and the working class (the proletariat). He believed that nothing short of violent societal revolutions were necessary for the proletariat to free themselves from the financial chains that the bourgeoisie had shackled them with. Yet after such a revolution, utopia would surely emerge, a communist paradise without hierarchies and without oppression. Today, Marx’s economic vision of power struggles has been applied to all aspects of culture, fitting being called cultural Marxism.
Again, these three men gave secularism intellectual credibility. Because of them, humanity no longer needed to look beyond this world to answer questions about our origins, our guilt, and our hope. And it is largely due to their influence that we have need to spend an entire lesson focusing upon the questions before us. For over a thousand years, everything that we are going to discuss was practically assumed in the West, and the fact that we must now defend the reality of there being only two sexes can be extremely disheartening.
Nevertheless, we should remember that there is nothing new under the sun. Secularism is only a modern form of paganism that worships the self rather than the gods. Thus, with the diminishing of Christendom, we have actually been living through a revival of paganism. Of course, it has been rebranded. Instead of the world being created through the fighting of the gods, Darwinism says it was created through the struggle of every living to survive. Instead of visiting priests to absolve our sins, Freud taught us to visit psychiatrists, and instead of seeing a shaman to make us magic potions, we produce them in bulk and in convenient capsules. Instead of believing in places like Valhalla or Elysium, we now look for the communist paradise. You see, history does not repeat, but it certainly does rhyme.
Before Christianity became society identity of the West following the fall of the Roman Empire, only Christians and Jews believed in the imago Dei of mankind, yet for over a thousand years, it became an assumed doctrine in the West. In our present struggle over the doctrine of mankind, it is right that we must begin the doctrine that the Bible presents to us as the pinnacle of its very first chapter. The secular revival of paganism means that what was once assumed must now be defended and clarified.
Question 3
The first of the four sections of Gordon’s catechism focuses upon creation. That is an apt place to start because the Darwinian rejection of creation is at the foundation of nearly all the matters of sexuality that we will be discussing throughout this study. As we said in our reworking of question 2, we should be aiming to learn and remind ourselves through this section of the goodness of God’s design for mankind, including human sexuality. Let us begin then with Question 3:
How many sexes did God make a creation?
God made two sexes at creation; “in the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them.”
Gordon fittingly makes a direct quotation of Genesis 1:27 because that is the Bible’s explicit answer to that question. Together with verse 26, these verses form the climax of Genesis 1 and are also one of the most important portions of Scripture for answering the theological and cultural challenges before us. Thus, let us take a moment to consider them in context.
Even though God could have very easily caused the cosmos to exist in their entirety less than the blink of an eye, the LORD chose to create through a six-day process, which means that there must have been significant reason and purpose for Him doing so.
Indeed, if we take a sweeping glance over the six days of creation, we find that the first three days are works of forming and shaping. On day one, God creates light and divides the light from the darkness, naming them day and night. On day two, God divides the waters from one another and creates the heavens. On day three, God gathers the waters together so that land is formed, then he covers the land with plants of every kind. Day four corresponds to day one with God filling the cosmos with objects of light: the sun, moon, and stars. Day five corresponds to day two with God filling the heavens with birds and the waters with creatures. Day six corresponds to day three with God filling the land with a kinds of animals.
Day six concludes with the creation of man. He is last of God’s creation to show that he is the pinnacle, yet he is still created on the sixth day to show that he is still within the created order. Indeed, as we will read in verse 26-28, God gave man dominion over all the earth, but he is just as much as much of a creation as the earth itself. Indeed, Genesis 2 will reveal that God used the dust of the earth to form the body of man. For the moment, let us read Genesis 1:26-30:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,in the image of God he created him;male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Americans of all stripes need to seriously reassess their relationship with the country’s major institutions in light of how poorly so many of them are performing and the caliber of the people leading them.

William Lind’s 4th Generation War concept is rooted in the decline of the legitimacy of the state. He writes:
At the heart of this phenomenon, Fourth Generation war, lies not a military evolution but a political, social, and moral revolution: a crisis of legitimacy of the state. All over the world, citizens of states are transferring their primary allegiance away from the state to other entities: to tribes, ethnic groups, religions, gangs, ideologies, and “causes.” Many people who will no longer fight for their state are willing to fight for their new primary loyalty.
This isn’t just about the third world. It’s happening at some level in the US, where institutional trust is in long term decline.
How should we think about identification with, loyalty to, and investment in American institutions?
We already see that the left’s loyalty to American institutions is entirely contingent. As soon as those institutions do something they don’t like, they turn to the attack.
For example, when Donald Trump was elected President, a large number of people on the left said he was “not my President.” They declared themselves “the resistance.” Note the use of insurgency language here in line with Lind’s concept. This is a cultural form of insurgency conflict. Law professors from Yale and Harvard decry the US constitution in the pages of the New York Times. Or again, think about how many climate change activists put their cause ahead of any American considerations. Or how many want to “defund the police” or even abolish the police.
Clearly, these people think that America’s institutions are only valid to the extent those institutions are doing what they want.
I’m always struck when reading leftist writers like Herbert Marcuse, how they stridently and fundamentally viewed America as a morally illegitimate regime. The critical theorists understood that there’s great power in being willing to take a fundamentally critical stance against society’s institutions and structures of power.
How should people on the right think about American institutions?
Americans on the right have tended to be patriotic people who salute the flag, send their kids off to serve their country in the military, etc. They’ve had a lot of loyalty and identification not just with the territory of the US, or the American people or American culture, but also with our government and major civic institutions. This is one reason they get so upset when those institutions “go woke” or deviate from what they believe the institutional mission should be.
This is a problem for the right because, as I noted:
Almost all of the major powerful and culture shaping institutions of society are dominated by the left. This includes the universities, the media, major foundations and non-governmental organizations, the federal bureaucracy, and even major corporations and the military to some extent. The one truly powerful institution conservatives control, for now at least, and it’s an important one, is the US Supreme Court. The other institutions conservatives control — alternative media like talk radio, state elected office, churches — are subaltern. They are lower in prestige, power, and wealth.
This situation caused Revolver News editor Darren Beattie to provocatively ask at the NatCon 3 conference, “Can one be an American nationalist?” As he put it, “What does it mean to be a nationalist in a situation in which the nation’s dominant institutions and stakeholders have become fundamentally hostile to the would be nationalist?”
In this environment, people on the right need to rethink their relationship with American institutions.
Make no mistake. I’m an American. I love this country. I love our people—all of our people—even the haters and the losers, as they say. I love the American way of life. I don’t think we’re perfect. We have a lot of things we have done wrong in both the past and present that need to be corrected. But this my country.
At the same time, we need to take stock of reality and the current condition of our institutions.
This is an area where I am personally torn, and continue to think about a lot. But my current view is that we need to take a triage approach to the our institutions.
Some institutions are doing well, and we should reward them, invest in them, and support their leaders.
Others are in some state of decline. Perhaps some are reformable, or would do better with more public support. Others are in terminal decline. Others are not just declining, but have become actively harmful to ourselves or others.
Back in newsletter #24, I talked about how we should respond to failing institutions. One of the tools I included was a 2×2 matrix I created with axes of Invest-Disinvest and Attack-Defend.
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