Contributors
John Mark Reynolds- Contributor

John Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute, and Associate Professor of Philosophy, at Biola University. His personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and his blog can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.info.

A Phone Call in the Night
A Platonist Warns of a Coming Tyranny
[John Mark Reynolds] 4/2/04

Most people dread the late night phone call. Too late for telemarketers. Too late for a social call. Always bad, very bad news. Sick parents. Death. One child is at a sleep over. The phone rings. What could it be? Nothing good. No one calls at one in the morning to say, “Your child is sleeping peacefully. Nice parenting job!”

Phone calls in the night always wake you up and call you to action. It is too late for a warning; the harm is already done, though perhaps by acting you can make it a bit better. It always tempting to roll over and ignore the call, the dread is so great at hearing the bad news, but it must be heard.

Sometimes intellectual speculation is wrong. Too often, people folk are alarmists and do not base their guesses on anything other than fear, but I hear the metaphorical phone ringing, and there's no choice but to pick it up.

The Republic warns of the dangers of too much democracy combined with a failure of moral education in the young. In Books VIII and IX, the master points out that liberty, especially for the virtuous, is in danger when the people become corrupt. Tyranny allows follows this decadence. Always.

Paul in his master work to the rulers of his age Romans warns that sexual immorality, including homosexuality, can only end in death and destruction. A culture that begins to worship the creature over the Creator defies the natural order and dies. It is a law of nations and of men.

Russia in the late nineteenth century was such a corrupt culture. Sexual immorality was rampant in the upper classes. Rulers openly flaunted their kept women. Men began to fantasize that God and Church could be done away with.

Orthodox culture had given Russia a growing liberty and prosperity. If all had stayed the same, education would have been widespread, a functional parliament established, and a middle class formed. Now the children of that prosperity decided they no longer needed the Church. Secularism and Marx became their new gods and so in the name of liberty they staged a Revolution. As Plato and Paul predicted, it ended in tyranny and death.

As both profound philosophers understood: sexual ethics are powerful and public acts. As part of the basic drive to survive, sexual activity has always been regulated in civilized society. In fact, such regulation may be part of the very basis for civilization. It is hard for fallen men to act in their long-term best interest; the lure of the immediate pleasure is always overwhelming. So society helps guide them to restraint and virtue. It civilizes what could easily become base and self-centered and makes it noble.

Most men who surrender to their base desires in this area become unfit for liberty. Liberty cannot be tolerated, because someone might expose the hollowness of their lives.

These men -- libertines -- cannot stand the man who has said “no.” Why? Because it proves they could have done the same. It makes their life a lie. This is partly why the whole power of the state is soon turned to make their opponents be still. They are living contrary to nature and they cannot stand exposure. Soon their lives and identity are built around their private, shameful practices. Such private acts must be protected by the power of the state, since they are war with Nature itself. Only the tyrant can give them the power to shake their fists at Divine Providence.

The triumph of the sexual libertines in the Episcopal Church is an object lesson in the rise of tyranny. First, morality was questioned. Studies were done, brows furrowed in thought. Second, tolerance was urged. Virtuous people are often nice people. They think, “We do not care what they do, as long as they do not scare the horses.” Pity makes them unable to act firmly and gently. No one says, “We shan’t persecute you, but this is our place, our fathers and mothers built it at great cost. Go build your own.”

Finally, when the levers of power are seized, tolerance becomes intolerance. Since the wicked cannot reproduce, their victory is temporary, unless they drive out the righteous. The virtuous must reward the vice ridden. They must admit that their virtue is vice and the old vice is now virtue. Men are kicked out of churches they and their families built over three hundred years.

Now someone might say, am I not proposing a tyranny of the virtuous to avoid a tyranny of the vice ridden? In no way. The vice ridden cannot build a culture, they can only capture it. Holland was built by morally restrained Dutch Calvinists and Roman Catholics. It can only be hijacked by the libertines whose barrenness will soon destroy it. If Holland is to be saved from the tyranny of Islam, it must return to its religious roots. It must give up its addiction to what Pope John Paul II rightly calls “the culture of death.”

Sexual liberation, heterosexual and homosexual, will destroy us all. At the very least, it will destroy the culture handed to us by our forefathers. Why? Sexual libertines do not have and raise children. They must appropriate or they die. So the traditionalist is acting defensively, the libertine tyrannically. They are taking what is ours. They have no hope of having their own culture, with lives that revolve around personal peace and affluence, so they must be pirates. Libertines will always become tyrants.

Judicial tyranny is here now. Catholics are told they must pay for birth control. Boy Scouts are treated as criminals. Election results are overturned by orders. The vast majority of people in California define marriage and the courts destroy this definition. Churches hijacked by such persons soon drive out all the good men. No organizing plan is needed, no hidden conspiracy is necessary. Sin must be hidden or celebrated. It is the impulse for all such libertines.

Yes, if present trends continue, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the Republic will fail and tyranny will come. Soon religious colleges will be forced to submit to the libertines or their students will lose all aid. Church tax deductions will come next. How long until the pulpit is silenced for the “hate crime” of daring to tell some modern Herod that he cannot marry his brother’s wife? Not long, sadly, if present culture is any indicator.

Eventually, some crisis comes to any nation as part of the natural order of things. External threats grow or internal fevers rage. How a nation weathers such threats is a sign of its fundamental health. My grandmother told me that in some ways the Great Depression was good for the nation. It brought people back to God and to their senses. Crime dropped. Times were bad, but there was actually more hope than in the self-consumed twenties.

Barely, our nation has had the resolve to respond to 9/11. But what of the next great crisis? Will we have the courage to fight even this war until the end? Liberals go on consuming the moral foundations of the culture.

Spain is but one example, where the assault came and the majority got placards that cried for “peace.” This is not the peace that comes, hard worn, to the virtuous man at the end of a long life of toil and struggle against evil. Instead, these were over fed middle class people chanting to be left alone. Theirs was the peace of the surrender and capitulation to evil. Soon, if history is any guide, Spain will face another crisis and turn to someone, anyone, who will protect the wealth that allows their secular lives to continue.

I believe the phone is ringing in America. We had better answer quickly. The message should be clear: The sexual libertines will not stop at tolerance. Their behavior will be accepted, or they will persecute us. There is no example of traditionalists, real liberals, being allowing to live in peace after the libertines win. Their war against Nature is such a losing cause that any disagreement, however, weak exposes the miserable charade of their lives. Botox beauties, adulterous public servants, men defying nature must share a code of silence or assent. One good man speaking the truth will bring it all down.

And so there is, at last, reason for hope. Jesus Christ told a story about a bad son. He took the money his hardworking father had earned and spent it all in bad living. He was a libertine. Like all libertines, he ended the ancient equivalent of a burned out lounge lizard at the very bottom.

Finally, he came to his senses and decided to go home. And the Bible says that the good father saw him a “long way off” and came to him. The virtuous dad restored his repentant son. The son did not deserve it, but the dad did it anyway.

The good dad did not send the son more money to continue his corrupting life style. No, the good dad recognized that this would just prolong the pain. But at the same time, the good dad did not reject the son when he was sorry, nor did he wait until his son groveled sufficiently. Dad came when the son was still a long way off and met him in his sin.

So perhaps the phone is ringing in the night, because millions of Christians have already been waking up. Perhaps, all over the nation they are on their knees in prayer, sometimes in despair. Could it be that Father is calling to say that all will be well, to keep hope alive, that He is one His way?

The phone is ringing. Pick it up. CRO

copyright 2004 John Mark Reynolds

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