Published Monday, October 28, 2024 | | | NEXT MEETING NOVEMBER 13 Post election debriefing from former White House staff See below | | Send this newsletter to a friend here. | | | BOB LINN NO KING BUT KING JESUS | | A few weeks ago, former President Donald Trump issued private invitations to faith leaders from around the nation to take part in a call to prayer at an event in Charlotte, North Carolina, billed as the 11th Hour.
In response, OCPAC Foundation board member, Wade Burleson, and I flew, with our wives, to Charlotte last weekend. We were privileged to be seated in the VIP section with Eric Trump, Ben Carson, and prolific writer, published author, and speaker, Bill Federer. Bill is also a member of the OCPAC Foundation Board. | | Both Eric Trump and Ben Carson alluded to the shocking moment at a Kamala Harris event where two college students shouted, “Jesus is Lord.” Upon hearing that phrase, without hesitation, the U.S. Vice President said, “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally.”
The pro-Harris crowd erupted with cheers and applause to express enthusiastic approval of the Vice President’s snub of Christ in politics. The students were escorted from the building. | | I am reminded of the unifying battle cry of the American soldiers who won America’s independence:
We have no king but King Jesus. | | It was the response of America’s soldiers to British admonitions to bow the knee to England’s King, a king of significantly less stature than the one born in Bethlehem.
Until recently, it was the King from Bethlehem to which all America bowed the knee.
Today, the White House awaits the decision of the American people. Akin to that described by poet Robert Frost when he spoke of two roads diverging . . . and the choice that made all the difference. | | Next week, Americans will choose either the path which excludes the idea that “Jesus is Lord” and welcomes the secularism of the French Revolution or the path which welcomes the Biblical foundations of Western Civilization.
It is a choice which will, as Robert Frost wrote, “make all the difference.” | Dr. Ben Carson correctly stated that this is an election to determine whether America will be a secular nation or a nation under God. | | Over this past weekend, Bill Federer wrote in his weekly American Minute about the French thinker and political philosopher, Montesquieu.
Montesquieu was a prolific writer, and his principal work was The Spirit of Laws in which he enunciated the concept of separation of powers. |  | | While the American founder’s most quoted book was by far the Bible, their next most referenced works were those of Montesquieu. Their concept of the separation of powers came from Montesquieu. Of course, Montesquieu himself gleaned that from the Bible.
As an aside, all this makes clear that the activists of the far left, leftists who are seeking to prevent copies of the Bible from being placed in our children’s classrooms are doing so not from a position of academic integrity.
The far left is doing this for their own personal religious reasons. History, culture, and academic competence demands the Bible be front and center in the classroom as the only means of having an educated society.
The religion of the left is anti-Christendom and anti-Western Civilization. For the sake of their own secular religious devotion, the political left demands we keep Bibles away from our children, assuring an ignorant populace.
Montesquieu Mimesis versus Poiesis The Battle for the White House
Montesquieu laid a more profound political foundation than America’s separation of powers. It was his concept that of prime importance is that societies must be secured in unchanging ideals. |  | | This is the battle which now rages in America’s classrooms and halls of government. Are there metaphysical absolutes or is reality linked to the individual’s imagination and pursuit of pleasure?
It is why one political party vying for the White House publicly endorses Jesus as Lord and the other party rejects the ideas of Biblical truth in favor of the untethered self-expression of the individual and government equally untethered from divine law.
On November 24, 2020, Dr. Carl Trueman took this issue head on when he published The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. |  | | The book is the product of his amazement at the way our culture has disconnected itself from its Christian roots and why it has become to be regarded as coherent and meaningful to say that: I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.
The Mimesis of Trump The Poiesis of Harris
Trueman helps me think more clearly about the schizophrenia imbedded in the American landscape represented by Vice President Harris and former President Trump. Trueman borrowed the terms Mimesis and Poiesis from Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor.
Trueman found them helpful monikers when writing his Rise & Triumph and they represent convenient terms for the two most basic and fundamental views of metaphysics.
A Mimetic view regards the world as having a fixed order and meaning which represents the task of mankind to discover.
Poiesis sees the world as raw undefined material out of which meaning and purpose are to be created by each individual person.
The latter is classic WOKE ideology in a nutshell.
Its acceptance has been ubiquitous. Every teacher’s college in America has moved from the classic academic disciplines of pedagogy to the academy of psychology. | | Terms like the “psychology of the personal” or “expressive individualism” are phrases describing what Trueman calls the therapeutic mindset of the modern self.
It is the triumph of poiesis over mimesis. It is the triumph of the individual over truth.
All meaning is relativized and truth gives way to the personal tastes of the individual.
This new psychology of personhood has eclipsed American educational pedagogical theory. It is what your children’s teachers were taught in order to receive their degree in education.
It has been the focus of much research and been found destitute.
America's educational institutions have rendered much of the nation incapable of knowing which of Robert Frost’s two roads is best.
No one encapsulated that research and the moral state of America better than University of Virginia professor, Dr. James D. Hunter in his The Death of Character, published in 2000. |  | | He writes:
Under the auspices of the Religious Educational Association, founded in 1903, . . . clergy of the old moral order gave way to the psychologists and educators of the progressivist movement . . .
Fixed truths existing in static rigidity from all eternity are ruled out . . . the new science of psychology was becoming a more authoritative source of moral instruction than religion . . . the Deity disappeared from books and articles on childcare . . .
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the institutional authority of psychology had become foundational.
What happens when therapeutic individualism is no longer a mere pedagogy but a worldview? What are the practical effects when an entire generation internalizes the psychological understanding of moral life as the framework for their moral imagination?
Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws was published in 1748. In it, he states:
Society ... must repose on principles that do not change | | In Closing
America’s colleges of education have for a number of decades been conducted under the pedagogical theories of Brazilian radical (Marxist Critical Theorist), Paulo Freire. It matches everything Trueman and Hunter ‘s books describe.
The stunning section of his 1985 book, The Politics of Education, comes at about the halfway point. He speaks of the transformation of a young child who is encouraged to imagine his own personal reality as his born-again experience. His very own Easter. | | Freire writes:
This easter, which results in the changing of consciousness, must be existentially experienced . . . The old Easter is dead . . . no more than a date in the calendar. | | The numbers at the Vice President’s rally at the recreation center in La Crosse, Wisconsin were dwarfed in comparison to the massive crowds who flock to hear former President Donald Trump. However, their unanimous and enthusiastic approval of removing Christians from the meeting is indicative that next week will signal a choice between two radically different national trajectories.
The untethering of truth from the American classroom represents the kind of untethering which will destroy a nation.
The enemies of the Bible in Oklahoma classrooms are fighting not only against our nation’s sole identity, but against the eternal values Montesquieu articulated as the only values upon which a civilization is able to rest securely. | | Thank you all for being a part of the preservation of truth in our Oklahoma culture! | Send this newsletter to a friend here. | | LEFTIST BLITZKRIEG 5,500 "Trump is Hitler" stories in ONE WEEK | | WADE BURLESON offers a timely article this week in his Istoria Ministries. FIND IT HERE. | | IF YOU MISSED OUR LAST MEETING . . . WADE BURLESON | | Watch the presentation here.
Watch the entire meeting here. | | COMING!!! WEDNESDAY November 13, 2024 | | COMING!!! WEDNESDAY December 4, 2024 MUSIC & COMEDY | | OUR FOUNDATION BANKS AT QUAIL CREEK BANK | | A few of our board members at Quail Creek Bank
From left to right: Joseph Palmer, Alan Loeffler, Suzanne Reynolds, Lucia O'Connor, Father Stephen Hamilton, Bob Linn, and Gaylene Stupic. | | OCPAC FOUNDATION is a 501 (c) (3). Gifts are tax-deductible.
I encourage each of you to support our mission.
To get started, we are suggesting:
The Century Club
To join, mail a cancelled check to:
OCPAC FOUNDATION P.O. Box 721212 Norman, OK 73070
Your $100 per month donation will help support the development of the Foundation’s work to widen our audience and outreach capabilities with quality meetings and enhanced educational video content.
Our beginning financial goals will allow us to secure the initial permanent staff positions necessary to the function of a foundation with ambitions to change the world. | | | | |
