The following comes from a William Shirer, a war correspondent, and someone who lived in Europe (Germany) during the events leading up to Nazi Germany, and during the actualization of those events under the Third Reich. Indeed, he has written an award-winning book, among others, entitled The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The reason I want to share his insight is because it is apropos to the current global moment vis a vis COVID, and its political response. I recognize that I have many readers here at the blog, for which I’m grateful; some in fact are MDs. In my last post one of these MDs encouraged me to read Biologos etc. as if a neutral source of information regarding COVID and its entailments. The reality, as Kant knew so well, is that there is no such thing as an agendaless Switzerlandish mode of being in this world. We all are bounded by preunderstandings that have come to us tacitly through our own various formations as human beings in a very active world. As a result, we must engage in the process of what has been called distanciation, as much as possible. This is the process of gaining critical distance from our own presuppositions and preunderstandings about reality, insofar as that is possible, and thus come to have the critical valence necessary to be discerning. Even then, we are still pressed about by various external stimuli and pressures that define our subjectivities. But this does not need to result in a normative relativism of the sort that we are unable to critically discern truth from falsity, insofar as things have discernable correspondence to extramental or mind-independent realities that are true with or without are assent. I mention all of this, leading into this passage from Shirer, because my hope is that by reading what he has to say the critical person will come to have a capacity to see how history just might repeat itself; insofar that peoples’ hearts, unchecked, don’t change. Here Shirer writes about how it was that an otherwise highly educated German population became subject to a psychosis that led them to believe that whatever the state fed them was right, and that all other dissent was incredulous:

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but … one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were. – William Shirer (in Adolph Hitler’s Germany)

I am presenting this again because I want to be clear about my approach to things in this current world moment. I believe the sort of delusion that came over Germany in the 30s and 40s has once again swept across the world. To simply appeal to untethered asserted narratives without any public debate is neither Christian nor safe. The Christian mind has brought about much of what we consider to be the Enlightened world, for better or worse. But, as with anything, the spoils gotten can quickly become spoiled gain that only brings rot to the soul. That’s largely what I see taking place currently in the world, and even among professing Christians. They have lost the plot, and as such have joined in with the state narrative that whatever our Big Brother says simply is the truth. But this is not the way the truth works, not for the Christian. We discern light from dark, and have the capacity to do that in Christ by the Spirit. But there must be a humility to accept that we might be considered foolish, not part of the mainstream institutional thinking, if we are going to actually come to have the capacity to think critically about things.

I recognize that many of you don’t read me for my political views. But it is precisely because of my theological commitments, indeed, my radical commitments that I am against any form of natural theology as I see it. When the American church (and the Western church in general) comes to conflate the state’s pronouncements with the Gospel truth, it is at this point that I become highly suspicious. My suspicion motivates me to seek out, often, dissenting voices, voices that are experts in their fields; but voices that are dissenting (and thus being smeared by the state) from the mainstream political narratives afoot. I consider churches participant in forwarding state narratives to be antiChrist. I consider failure by Christians to discern this to be telling about their intellectual if not spiritual commitments.

I will no longer have comments open on anything political I might post forthcoming. My straight theology posts will always have comments open, but honestly, I am not interested in dialoguing here at the blog about political matters (which COVID most definitely is, it also has a highly religious and ethical component tied into it of course!). My admonition: don’t be the type of person Shirer writes about; that isn’t limited to the 30s and 40s, it is about the human condition in general.

PS. The primary reason I will have comments on such posts closed is to protect me, and potentially you. I get too triggered and very quickly on these issues, and I’m afraid of what I might say in the heat of the moments.