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.
Read More
Related Posts:

Both your joy and your endurance are embedded in a life that loudly declares, “I am not God.” And what he desires is for you to be attentive to the life you’ve been given, not the life you think you ought to have been given. To glorify God right where you are, not where you think you ought to be. To trade in the illusion of omnipresence, which belongs to him alone, for faithful presence here, where your own two feet are.

Have you ever considered that the perfect world of Eden was a roadless world? Roads are built to get us somewhere. While there was certainly a sense of expansion in God’s command to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28), the perfect life in a perfect world wasn’t found in getting somewhere but in abiding somewhere.
Genesis 1–2 is a story of place. God creates a universe of what we’d call “reality” and fills it with his creative beauty, declaring goodness over every part of it. In Genesis 1, place is universal. The entire created cosmos is in view. In that sense, place is something we can never escape. And whether it’s heaven, earth, or anywhere else, wherever we can point to and say “there,” that “there” is a place our omnipresent God hasn’t only created but inhabits.
But then in Genesis 2, something important happens as humanity comes onto the scene. Place becomes localized. Humanity inhabits a specific place—Eden, within the planet we call earth—and is entrusted with its care.
Then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed. . . . The LORD God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it. (Gen. 2:7–8, 15, CSB).
One of God’s attributes that he doesn’t permit us to share in is his omnipresence. We’re unipresent, only able to truly inhabit one place at a time. What if the limitations of your time and place were part of God’s grace to you? What if the ever-changing seasons we experience yet cannot possess and the spaces we inhabit that haunt us with a sense of “locatedness” are part of God’s plan for deepening our trust in him and for fruitfulness in life? 
The world we live in has become increasingly mobile. It’s also increasingly rare for someone to remain in one place for his or her entire life. Take a moment to consider the place you’re presently in. I don’t know how long you’ve been there or how long you intend to stay. But for as long as you dwell there, God desires that your presence would bless that place. That you’d live out your heavenly citizenship, wherever you may be in this world. Your presence—your “whereness”—deeply matters to God.
First Question God Ever Asked
Have you ever thought about the fact that the first question God ever asked in the Bible was a question about location?
Read More
Related Posts:

No matter how that question is answered, someone who favors regarding Scripture and tradition as being our proper rule of faith (regula fidei) over Scripture alone (sola scriptura) is channeling the beliefs of Rome rather than the Reformation, and may not be justly termed either evangelical or Reformed – or for that matter, Protestant, his formal church affiliations (the Anglican Church in North America) notwithstanding. 

It is curious to find an outsider discussing one’s group and its tenets. The thing is often helpful, since the outsider brings a different perspective that can help those within a given group realize where their beliefs are lacking in consistency or clarity, or where they have too much exaggerated their presumed strengths or understated or ignored their weaknesses. It is not particularly curious to find an outsider defining the nature of one’s beliefs or purporting to determine who is and is not a part of one’s group, however. When someone who is not a Presbyterian says that we are too prone to squabbling amongst ourselves, mere justice to the truth often compels one to grimace in pained agreement. But when a member of another tradition or an unbeliever comes along and tells you what you believe or includes within your communion someone you consider an outsider, the result is not amusement or begrudging agreement.
So it is with some annoyance that we find a Lutheran interim pastor and former professor at two Baptist institutions (Eastern University and Gateway Seminary), Carl Mosser, discussing what he calls the Reformed reception of the beatific vision in Credo. Of particular interest are the following statements:
Convinced departure from traditional Christian teaching about humanity’s chief end is adverse to healthy spirituality, Boersma and Allen seek to retrieve the doctrine for the sake of renewal. They are especially concerned for its recovery within the Reformed tradition.
And:
When theologians like Hans Boersma and Michael Horton unpack humanity’s chief end in terms of the beatific vision and deification, they are not importing exotic doctrines into the garden of Reformed theology.
Michael Horton and Michael Allen are professors at Reformed institutions, but Hans Boersma is not Reformed in any meaningful sense of the term, contrary to what these statements seem to imply, and contrary to what is implied yet more strongly in one of the footnotes:
Though historically a minority position within the Reformed tradition, Allen and Boersma both incline toward a Christological understanding of the beatific vision indebted to John Owen and Jonathan Edwards. 
Boersma holds the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House, works especially in “patristic theology, twentieth-century Catholic thought, and spiritual interpretation of Scripture,” is motivated by his interest in what he calls “sacramental ontology,” and has published books like Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery about major trends in the Roman communion. He also quotes Pope Francis approvingly, refers to himself as a Christian Platonist, and is on record saying that the Reformation was a tragedy that should be lamented.
And while such things ought to suffice to dispel the mistaken notion that Boersma is somehow Reformed, the same issue affords material evidence that makes that fact yet more painfully obvious. Asked “who have been your most formative influences in theology and ministry?” Boersma replied:
I would say Henri de Lubac, the twentieth-century Jesuit patristic scholar, has been the most formative for me. His understanding of participation, his reading of the church fathers, and especially his reappropriation of spiritual exegesis is profound, and has deeply shaped my reading of Scripture and my entire metaphysical outlook. Beyond de Lubac, Yves Congar’s view of tradition (and its relation to Scripture) has also been important to me. It helped me leave behind a sola scriptura view and acknowledge the inescapable intertwining of Scripture and tradition—and as a result, I’ve come to have a much more receptive, appreciative attitude toward the Christian past.
Most Reformed people would answer that question with Calvin, Martyr, Bucer, Flavel, Sibbes, Watson, Rutherford, Owen, Chalmers, M’Cheyne, Hodge, Warfield, Lloyd Jones, Sproul, or some other reformer, Puritan, or later Reformed minister or theologian. With Boersma we get a Jesuit (!) and Yves Congar, a major and deeply controversial figure in the Roman communion who was heavily involved in Vatican II, as well as an unabashed admission that Boersma has abandoned sola scriptura because of what he regards as the “inescapable intertwining of Scripture and tradition.”
Now lay aside the thorny taxonomic question of the precise relationship of the Reformed and evangelical traditions of the Reformation, and whether they are utterly distinct (as R. Scott Clark would argue) or fundamentally intertwined, as many others would suggest (especially on the Presbyterian side of the wider Reformed tradition). No matter how that question is answered, someone who favors regarding Scripture and tradition as being our proper rule of faith (regula fidei) over Scripture alone (sola scriptura) is channeling the beliefs of Rome rather than the Reformation, and may not be justly termed either evangelical or Reformed – or for that matter, Protestant, his formal church affiliations (the Anglican Church in North America) notwithstanding.
And yet notwithstanding such a painfully obvious display of Romanist[1] inclinations as I have quoted above, Mosser on three occasions implies that Boersma is Reformed. You might be forgiven, dear reader, for thinking that such a blunder on his part and the part of Credo’s editors justifies being rather skeptical of everything else that Mosser writes when he purports to present the Reformed acceptance of the beatific vision. We shall consider that important matter in a subsequent article, but for now let it be noted that by such sloppiness in presentation Credo is unhelpfully skewing the lines of what qualifies as Reformed; and almost I begin to think that people who purport to “retrieve classical Christianity” from the medieval and early church, but who cannot accurately classify theologians in the here and now, are perhaps not fully to be trusted in the former endeavor either.
Tom Hervey is a member, Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Simpsonville, SC. The statements made in this article are the personal opinions of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of his church or its leadership or other members.

[1] My use of Romanist rather than Catholic when referring to the beliefs of the papal communion is not intended as an epithet, but arises because on a consistent Protestant view Rome is a false church and therefore has no right to present itself as catholic, inherent in which is the suggestion that we, who are outside her communion, are therefore severed from the true church of Christ. We would say that we are the true heirs of the catholic faith, and that Rome’s peculiar doctrines are later accretions that frequently undermine the true faith. Hence in Animadversions Upon Fiat Lux Owen speaks of affairs “when once Romanism began to be enthroned, and had driven Catholicism out of the world” (p. 260). Again, the term is used for reasons of conscience, not to promote hatred.
Related Posts: