Last year the government of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region asked for our help. Please interview Christian leaders, they requested. What religious rights would they want to be specified in a new Kurdish Constitution? Would we then write recommendations spelling out these rights?

                                                Proud to be named honorary Peshmerga

I landed in Erbil on August 20, 2017. The very next day an armed Iranian militia—yes, Iranian—ambushed and detained our team near Mosul. For the next hour, some 100 militants surrounded us with AK-47 rifles, shouting and firing dozens of rounds into the air. We tried to turn around, but machine guns and a huge rocket launcher blocked us in. Thank the Lord, Iraq’s Prime Minister himself intervened and effected our release.

After interviewing Orthodox, Chaldean Catholic and Protestant leaders for four days, it was time to gather our notes and make recommendations.

Dr. Terry Law and I drafted seven articles focused on making Iraqi Kurdistan a safe haven for Christians. After an American constitutional expert signed off on the document, we submitted it. The Kurds’ response was wonderful. “We will do all this and more,” said the senior government official with a smile.

Last month that official asked us to return. It’s time to compose their new Constitution and they want our help in implementing the articles composed last year. I’m ready.

Will you send me back to Iraq?

Even Washington is taking notice, despite the imminent midterm elections. A few days ago, Dr. Law met with Vice President Pence about this mission. Since then we conference-called with a leading Congressman who wants to help. Please pray. Our goal is a particular letter of endorsement. (You’re welcome to read between the lines.) Such a letter would ease the process for the Kurds should Iran, Syria or some other neighbor object to this historic first.

Whether summoned to D.C. or heading off to Iraqi Kurdistan, I have to be ready to travel at a moment’s notice. But the costs of last-minute travel to Iraq are high.

Think about it:

How often do you and I have an opportunity to make a historic impact on the Middle East?

For 1,400 years Christians have suffered persecution throughout the Islamic world. Now, here they stand—your family in Christ, with real freedom of worship at their fingertips.

Thirty-one years ago a pastor and complete stranger prophesied to me. “I see you advising a Muslim government someday,” he said. I thought it absurd and put it out of mind for 30 years. Then last year “someday” came. Now it’s time to complete what last year’s mission started.

Will you send me back to Iraq? Regardless of whatever lies ahead, I’m ready to go.

Here am I. Send me.

Please click the blue contribute button at the top of this page to give via our secure online portal. Or you can mail a check payable to Jim Gilbert Ministries, PO Box 141928, Gainesville FL 32614. And more than anything else, please pray for us—especially our daughter, Lexi.

Soli Deo Gloria!

Last month when Terry Law invited me to join his delegation to Kurdistan, northern Iraq, (Read Part I here.) I leapt at the opportunity. The carrot? The Kurds are preparing to declare their independence from Iraq—now Iran’s puppet—and asked for our help in guaranteeing true religious freedom for Christians and other religious minorities in their prospective new constitution. What Muslim government has ever asked Christians for help in writing a constitution? What majority Islamic nation has ever wanted to establish a true safe haven for Christians and other religious minorities? The answer, until now: Zero.

The Kurds are generally Sunni Muslims, but unlike most Sunnis they are not Arabs. “Kurd first, Sunni second,” they say. A remarkable people, they are descended from the ancient Medes, and like their famed king Cyrus (see Isaiah 45), they have historically looked kindly on Israel. Over the past hundred years, they have also been unfailingly pro-America, despite our nation’s betrayals of their trust, both after World War I and the first Gulf War.

A century ago, when the Ottoman Empire was carved up by oil-thirsty France and England and arbitrarily turned into new nations called Iraq, Saudi Arabia, et al, millions of Kurds were denied nationhood, and instead left strewn across Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Why? Because the (in)famous T.E. “Lawrence of Arabia” told his superiors that keeping the region internally fractured would prevent the reconstitution of the Ottoman Empire and hence, keep those new nations from attacking the rest of the world. Lawrence’s plan succeeded, of course, but caused justifiable Muslim rage to build for a century until Al Qaeda and ISIS erupted onto the scene, and also resulted in untold suffering for the Kurdish people. Today, 101 years after the secret, dastardly Sykes/Picot pact that denied them a homeland, 40 million Kurds remain the world’s largest people group without their own nation.

But no more, say the Kurds.

For a full century, this historic people have been told time and time again to “wait a little longer, and you’ll have your freedom.” Now, knowing that tomorrow never comes, they’re making their move, and hoping like crazy that President Trump will support them. “America’s One-Iraq Policy,” one diplomat told me, “could be shafted by a single tweet.” He’s right. One short sentence from President Trump would cause both Iran and Turkey to think twice about actively opposing a sovereign Kurdistan.

On Sunday, August 20th (the day before our near-death adventure detailed in Part I of this report) our team began interviewing the leaders of the various Christian denominations who represent Iraq’s remaining 200,000+ Christians (down from 1.6 million only a few years ago). Most of these leaders are from the Nineveh Plain, a region that adjoins Kurdistan, from Qaraqosh and Mosul to the west to the border of Turkey up north, but is not part of the Kurdish province. “Do you want your towns to be part of a new Kurdistan, or to remain part of Iraq?” we asked them, amongst several other questions.

From Syriac Orthodox to Assyrian Catholic to Presbyterian and non-denominational evangelicals, every leader said essentially the same thing: “We want to live free and as first-class citizens,” they pled, often adding in subdued tones that they know the Kurds have been their protectors and liberators and would welcome any result necessary to keep that relationship.

After four days, the interviews were finished.

“Jim, I need you to gather everyone’s notes and write the document,” said Dr. Law. “Then we’ll go over it together and also run it by [constitutional scholar] Stephen Mansfield.”

I went to work, skipping a day trip up to Dohuk in the north to write. First article:

“This Constitution shall be the supreme law of the nation of Kurdistan, not superseded or nullified by any other law.”

The constitutions of Muslim countries typically acknowledge the authority of Islamic “Sharia” law. But that provision renders any document that contains it utterly worthless, because of Sharia’s, uh, elasticity.

I kept writing, and somewhere around the fourth of what became seven articles, the curtains of my tenth-floor hotel room began to sway gently back and forth. Then, after a few seconds, I realized my iPad and mattress had joined the ballet. An earthquake? Couldn’t be, I thought. This area isn’t that active. But the swaying continued for a good 30-45 seconds. (Turned out to be a 5.6 about 35 miles away, but very deep in the earth. It was the only quake for hundreds of miles around that day.)

Dear Lord, I prayed—or laughed or both—is this document that important? Then I felt embarrassed and arrogant to have engaged in such puffery and started back to writing. But…what if?…nah.

At the appointed time, on Thursday, August 24th, our delegation walked into the gilded office of Kurdistan’s Interior Minister (aka assistant Prime Minister in most countries) and took our seats, the Minister and Dr. Terry Law front and center, the rest of us on fancy couches flanking both sides.

Pleasantries were exchanged, and then Terry presented our document—the one I had written, which listed seven articles, and which Mansfield had given a hearty thumbs up—to the Minister, while holding his own copy aloft to read.

I think I was fine until the moment Terry began reading the seven articles that I had worded to sound more like Thomas Jefferson than James Gilbert.

Dear Lord, that sounds so stark and demanding, I thought suddenly. If this referendum goes south and Iran winds up in charge, I could be a marked man. My heart was pounding as hard as it had three days earlier when that militia outside Qaraqosh were firing their guns into the air. Maybe I can pin it on Terry, I joked to myself, but it didn’t help. My heart galloped on.

Terry Law finished reading and for a moment the room fell silent.

“What is your response to these specific points, sir?” Terry asked our host. I knew they had become good friends, and I was surprised at such a blunt query. Then again, this had to be official…and quotable. Definitely, publicly quotable. Both men knew that.

The Interior Minister held the paper in front of himself and peered intently at it for a moment, before lowering it to his lap. “We will do all of this and more,” he said, breaking into a smile. Terry nodded and grinned, while the rest of us breathed out in unison, so deeply, I thought, we could have launched a small sailboat.

It was only after I’d been home for three days that a long-buried memory came flooding back to me with such force that I leaned against the shower door to keep my balance. (Yes, that’s where God often gets through to yours truly).

It was August, 1987, 30 years and a week removed from this mission, that I had received the most unusual—no, absurd—prophetic word of my life.

“I see a day coming when you’re going to be advising Muslim governments,” said a pastor named Ernest Gentile. “They’re going to need your help.”

I had never met Pastor Gentile, although all my friends spoke highly of him. And for the record, I’ve never spoken to him since. The sum total of our interaction consisted of that one minute when he stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders, and uttered those outlandish words.

Besides, I’m sort of, uh, skeptical when it comes to “words” from people I don’t really, really know and trust. There are just too many weirdos around who think that being in the Spirit means acting like you’re out of your mind. Of course, I have to admit that Pastor Gentile didn’t strike me that way. In fact, he was quiet and dignified the whole time, and today I’m grateful to him beyond words. But at that moment—it was just, just bizarre.

What Muslim government would ever ask Christians for advice? And even if they did, how would my “internationally unknown” self make the cut? Besides, this was 1987, and all any of us knew about the Islamic world was that Iran had held a group of Americans hostages for 444 days, and that there was some convoluted scandal called Iran-Contra. Why would that world ever ask for advice from the Great Satan?

Yet…here we are. The Kurds of Iraq, denied a homeland of their own for the past century, now stand on the brink of nationhood. And standing with them: the freedom and safety of not only 200,000 Christians (and perhaps as many Yazidis), but also multitudes more across the Middle East who all their lives have suffered persecution for their faith, and who would likely run to a true safe haven if one existed.

Let me turn activist for a moment. You, YOU, can do something to help establish a safe haven for Christians in the Middle East. You can write to President Donald Trump and ask him to ignore the bureaucratic path of least resistance that his advisors and State Department bureaucrats are likely to advocate, the path of betrayal that our nation has taken time and again ever since Woodrow Wilson turned a blind eye to the suffering of the Kurds a century ago.

You can write or call the White House here, and you can pass this blog along to everyone you know on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and church.

You can join me and help a see a nation born. You, YOU, can make history.

P.S. We can only volunteer for missions like this one because someone supports our efforts. If you believe in our efforts and wish to contribute to James Gilbert Ministries, please click this link. Thank you!

I was in Iraq for eight remarkable days last month, and in Part II of this report I’ll tell you how I was privileged to help make Middle-East history. But there was one day, August 21, 2017, our second day on the job, that has since taken on a life of its own. In fact, it was a drama that nearly took several of our lives. And for that reason, it forms a fiery preamble to our historic mission.

We were in Kurdistan, Iraq’s largely autonomous northern province, at the invitation of the regional government. Their Interior Minister/Defense Minister had invited us to interview Christian leaders in Kurdistan and the adjoining Nineveh Plain, and based upon those leaders’ desires, to help the Kurdish government compose clear constitutional guarantees and protections for Christians and other religious minorities, should Kurdistan declare independence from Iraq.

Although our assignment to interview the Christian leaders began on Sunday, August 20th (see Part II), all 13 of our delegation were eager for our Monday day trip to Qaraqosh, a predominantly Christian town on the Nineveh Plain, just across the provincial border from Kurdistan, and thus under Baghdad’s military control. We had originally planned to go to Mosul, recently liberated from ISIS and just 15 miles further on, but due to a recent rash of kidnappings, were advised to stop at Qaraqosh, once a city of 70,000 Christians, but now home to only about 10,000 souls brave enough to return and start rebuilding.

We left the Kurdish capital of Erbil on Monday morning in a diplomatic convoy of four black Land Cruisers, flanked front and back by camouflaged trucks carrying a total of 20 Peshmerga soldiers, members of Kurdistan’s famed army who, outside of Israel, constitute perhaps the finest military force in the Middle East. In fact, although Iran is trying to claim credit, it was the courageous Peshmerga who this summer liberated Mosul and routed ISIS from the area.

An hour after leaving our hotel, and having passed through a couple of checkpoints, we pulled up to the Nineveh Plain border and stopped at the last guard booth to show our papers. Everything seemed routine and I pulled out my oversized iPhone to capture the moment from my backseat perch in the convoy’s lead SUV.

We hadn’t been stopped more than a minute when the Iraqi police, in their blue-tinted fatigues, failed to notice a young man in civilian clothing slipping past them and heading for the lead Peshmerga truck. Only after he ripped open a tan door and grabbed at a soldier did they move into action. And suddenly the whole world seemed to shift into high gear. Within 30 seconds the troublemaker was surrounded by armed Peshmerga and Iraqi police who shoved him away from the truck and began subduing him. But the scuffle had not gone unnoticed. In fact, it apparently had followed someone’s plan.

“They are a militia armed by Iraq,” our government host in the passenger seat in front of me would tell us a few minutes later. “But they are loyal to the Ayatollah of Iran. They hate our soldiers and someone has tipped them off that we were coming.”

I stopped videoing and lowered my phone as another man in civilian clothing—then another and another—ran past us toting automatic rifles. All at once, armed civilians were everywhere, screaming and waving weapons they didn’t look qualified to carry. Then, not more than 40 feet in front of us, someone raised a rifle skyward and—bapbap bapbapbap—fired off a volley of what sounded like a dozen rapid shots straight into the air. Another rifle—bap bap—more shots.

Now armed men were running from everywhere and surrounding our convoy. I started counting. There were easily a hundred of them, and although some wore no shoes, they all bore guns. A small Toyota pickup pulled near the booth and stopped about 30 feet in front of us and to our right. Within half a minute, a 50-caliber machine gun sat, perched and ready, on the roof of its cab. Punches were thrown at the Peshmerga, but in accordance with their orders from our hosts, none fought back. More shouting. More shots fired into the air.

“Keep them calm, Father. Keep them calm,” I prayed as I crouched down in the seat and our driver began following the troops’ lead to inch into a super-slow U-turn. My backseat partner, Pastor Mark Borrows from western Canada, and I would repeat that prayer for the next 45 minutes. “Keep them calm.”

You always wondered if you’d be brave, I told myself, as I looked through dark tinted glass at a militiaman standing no more than three feet from me with his gun at the ready. Ever since you were a kid, you’ve wondered if you’d have the courage to die for the name of Jesus. Well…what’s it going to be?

The U-turn complete, I looked up from praying and saw another pickup truck with a mounted machine gun, then just past him a huge black vehicle sporting a rocket launcher with a barrel that looked to be the size of a hurricane’s eye.

“Keep them calm.”

More volleys. More screaming. A rifle butt to the eye socket of one of our soldiers, but he sat, stoic. He and his Peshmerga brothers were under orders to hold both fists and fire unless one of our SUVs became a target.

In the passenger seat in front of me, our government guide was on the phone with the Defense Minister. “Help is on the way,” he assured us. Then I noticed the stubby Uzi submachine gun he had pulled out of his satchel. It was resting on the drink holder between the front seats, its barrel pointed back at me.

“Uh, would you point that forward, please?” I whispered, and then resumed my one-line petition. “Keep them calm, Father. Keep them calm.”

More shots, probably a hundred or more, and more screaming and shoving and rifle-butting.

40 minutes that felt like 40 days in this wilderness had passed now, and suddenly we were creeping forward and being waved past the rocket launcher by a man who, for the moment at least, appeared to have some authority. A few seconds later, we were picking up speed and barreling back towards Erbil.

“I feel so stupid,” said Mark, my Canadian comrade. “All I could think the whole time we were praying was, how is my wife going to get my body bag all the way back to Alberta?“.

“If they’d started firing, about 500 letter-sized envelopes would’ve sufficed,” I tried to joke, but we were both too amped up to laugh.

An hour later, we were back in Erbil and headed for the hotel cafe. My closest brush with death in 49 years of ministry was over, but my pulse hadn’t gotten the memo. I looked at my Apple Watch, which had registered a range from 100-133 beats per minute for the past hour, and still showed no sign of slowing.

“The normal reaction would be to try and forget the trauma of this, right?” I asked Mark, who nodded in agreement as we took a table. “But let’s not do that. Let’s make ourselves remember, because this is what our brothers in Christ here have to live with every day of their lives. We can’t forget. We mustn’t forget”

It was about then that I realized the answer to my earlier self-examination. Would I really, after all these decades of professing Christ, have the courage to face a bullet for the name of Jesus?

“I know now, Mark,” I said. “I was ready to do it. If that guy with the rifle had ripped open my door and shoved me against the side of our SUV, I knew Jesus’ name would be the last word I spoke on this earth.”

My heart still pounds when I remember, but I don’t mind. Because now I know. I know.

You’ve probably seen the news that Mosul, Iraq (aka Nineveh) has finally been liberated from ISIS. Well, here’s more news: I’ll be on the ground in Mosul in just a few days!

Here’s what’s happening:

Last week, Dr. Terry Law, my Unmasking ISIS co-author, asked me to return to Iraq’s Kurdistan Region with him from August 18-26. The Kurds are set to hold a September referendum on independence, and passage is a sure thing. As the only Muslim people in the entire Middle East who don’t persecute Christians, the Kurds want their new nation to guarantee religious freedom for Christians and other religious minorities in their pending new constitution.

Recently, their Defense Minister called to ask Terry to gather the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant leaders of Kurdistan, Mosul and the Nineveh Plains, to specify what protections they would want written into a new Kurdish Constitution. An independent Kurdistan would become a safe haven for non-Muslims (who include 10 million Orthodox Christians).

This would be an historic first in 1,400 years of Islam!

True Freedom

Two years ago, our friends and some very enthusiastic students of The Rock School here in Gainesville, jointly gave $25,000 in three short weeks, enabling us to pay shipping for two full cargo containers of excellent food and clothing worth many times more to Christian refugees who had fled Mosul and the Nineveh Plains when ISIS invaded.

This trip is immeasurably MORE important!

From 2000 until the 2014 rise of ISIS, Kurdistan boomed economically and welcomed both Christians and Jews. No other place in the Muslim world can make that boast. Now, rather than temporarily feeding thousands, we can go to the very cities ISIS invaded and help secure lasting freedom from persecution (and reliance on humanitarian aid) for the hundreds of thousands of Christians who remain, and no doubt also for an influx of émigrés from all across the Middle East.

In addition to meeting with bishops, pastors and government officials in the Kurdish capital, we’ll make day trips (under heavy guard) to Mosul and nearby liberated Christian towns in the Nineveh Plains. This is our golden opportunity to contribute significantly to both Middle East history and church history.

We’re All In

My longtime friend, Don Moen, often says, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead!” Don’s talking about laying up treasures in heaven, of course, and he’s right.

You can lay up treasures in heaven by sending guys like me, who go to hard places like Iraq and Cuba. Just click the Contribute button at the top of this page, and you can give once, or easily initiate “set it and forget it” monthly giving. (Soon, you’ll be able to give via text message and directly from bank to bank.)

This is us. We go where we’re sent. I’m turning 67 today, and what an honor to still be on the front lines, literally, at such a critical time in history. It would also be an honor to represent you regularly, in Iraq and beyond, in this, my 50^th year in missions.

The election of President Trump, as well as rightward movements in Europe, are prompting US conservatives to speak of the death of socialism. This is abject blindness. It is socialists that are being rejected, not socialism.

America has already embraced socialism in the forms of public education, social security, and even healthcare, where we choose between the socialism of Obamacare on the Left and the socialism-lite of Trumpcare on the faux-Right. Our President is a pragmatic populist, not a principled conservative. Hence, when he ran for office he named conservatives to his cabinet because his base wanted them, but once in office has embraced socialism in healthcare because the electorate at large wants it. As for the philosophical differences between the two, they don’t matter to a self-styled dealmaker-in-chief.

Our nation’s political choices mirror the people’s mood, not their convictions. That’s because mood has replaced conviction, just as celebrities have replaced heroes. Our worldviews—and Christians have been lambs to the slaughter in this regard—are shaped, not by books and reading, but by videos, short social posts and the like. In turn, this enables demagogues, from Trump to Sanders, to disrupt our elections, if not our entire culture.

A sleeping man never sets his own alarm, hence cold-water posts like this one. American Christians had better awaken quickly. Facebook prayer requests accompanied by pictures of Jesus’ arms wrapped around President Trump are the Velvet Elvis of evangelicalism. They’re not merely corny—they’re offensive, because they portray both bad theology and bad taste. Did we post such requests for President Obama? Nope. But why? Was it latent racism? Contrary to the sincere beliefs of many African America Christians, (whose worldviews, as sloppily formed as those of their white brothers, but by different forces) the answer is another Nope. It wasn’t brown skin but the pink politics of Barack Obama that offended the intuitive, blind sensibilities of politically conservative Christians, whereas President Trump merely dulls those sensibilities. But Novocain is never a good subsitute for an alarm clock.

Want to hear the alarm? Ring, ring: it was Bernie Sanders’ popularity amongst the young, not Trump’s election by aging Boomers, that portends America’s future. And American Christians had better start putting a sharp scriptural lens to politics, economics and a host of other subjects if we want to avoid the paradise that used to be the Soviet Union and is now Venezuela.

It’s time to put the flag back in its stand and pick up a Bible.

Imagine a neighborhood of 10 homes where a vote is held on whether certain services should be provided by the neighborhood’s association (meaning a hike in home owners’ dues). 9 homes hold from 1 to 4 residents each, with a total of 24 people, while one home is crammed with 25. (I remember immigrant homes in Orange County, California’s Little Saigon back in the 1970s where this was often the case.)

The home of 25 votes for the new provisions while the other 9 homes vote against them.

If each home’s vote counts equally (like the Electoral College and U.S. Senate), then it’s a 9 to 1 win for keeping said services optional at each owner’s expense.

In “Unmasking ISIS,” Terry law and I recommend nine steps the U.S. Government can take right now. (In a separate post, I’ll list nine steps that YOU can take).

1. Admit that America is at war with radical Islamist jihadists.
2. Destroy ISIS militarily in Iraq and Syria, and take away their caliphate.
3. Secure America’s borders (including enhanced security screening with extra layers of interviews for anyone visiting or emigrating from a Muslim nation).
4. Bolster friendly Middle East alliances and punish hypocrites.
5. Break with Iran and push for a truly independent Federated Iraq.
6. Wage all-out cyber-warfare against ISIS.
7. Wage a massive counter-propaganda campaign against ISIS.
8. Encourage Muslim reformers.
9. Educate and assist Muslim communities in combatting ISIS’ recruiting efforts.

Each of these steps is explained in detail, and thank goodness, some key folks on Capitol Hill are reading it and taking notice. To order your copy, or one for your congressman or senator, click on the book’s photo.

I once heard a perennial local candidate say she was running for office for the umpteenth time because “I love politics,” as though her lust for authority were a qualification for it. In fact, it provided a compelling reason not to vote for her, just as one would not hire a marriage counselor who’s been to the altar several times. (I also heard the late Mickey Rooney say in all seriousness that his eight marriages demonstrated his commitment to the institution.)

Not voting for a bad candidate, however, should never lead to not voting at all, as was the temptation for many conservative Christians during the 2016 Presidential elections. To the contrary, we should participate in the process, not because we love politics, but because we love the God who ordained politics. Romans 13:4 calls the office holder “God’s servant for your good,” so that truth alone makes us responsible both to pray and vote, if not to run for office.

President Ronald Reagan’s awareness of his own accountability to God seemed to settle on him after he took office, and my affection for him grew along the way. Such conviction could never have come from loving politics, but only from a love for Truth. Not your truth vs. mine. Not new truth, but the Truth.

Today’s leaders, on the other hand, claim to love Truth but act as though it doesn’t exist. The Left espouses “preferences,” while the Right preaches “values,” both of them malleable substitutes for the inconvenient rigidity of absolutes. Reagan, by contrast, embraced those absolutes. He knew that God in heaven is not “whatever you conceive Him to be,” but that He is the Almighty Creator, Ruler of this world and all others. He understood that all authority belongs to God, and that the bits of it that He apportions to men are just that: bits, limited jurisdictions to be overseen in the clear light of accountability to Him.

We all were created to be lovers of the Truth, but failing that, we will love something else and call it truth. We will find another foundation upon which to stand, another throne at which to worship. For those on the Left, that foundation is politics, and its throne is civil government. They insist that we keep religion out of politics, yet politics is their religion. They believe in salvation by federal legislation. The state is their god, and the public school is their church. Thus, they harp at us to keep the God of the Bible out of both public office and the public classroom, because they have already enthroned their god there and fear the competition.

The god—goddess, actually—of the Left has a name, and Reagan identified it in speech after speech, even before he entered politics. It is Socialism, the spirit of Big Mother. Margaret Thatcher called it the nanny state. The junior gods of the Left, always ready to pass new laws in order to see what’s in them, see their Mother as an organ of nurture, a giant teat for suckling the unfortunate masses who can neither feed nor clothe themselves, but somehow excel at self-esteem and rights-marching. Hence the constant Progressive effort to offer new teats and new ways to latch on. Never mind that they’re dry; more teats are good.

Meanwhile, the intimidated denizens of the Right, trying to please both a brash new President and the same old goddess, offer up diet sacrifices to her, in the hopes that she’ll at least lose weight. She will not. Instead she’ll just scream “feed me” like some Audrey II in “Beltway Shop of Horrors,” until eventually they butcher a fresh pound of flesh from the national body.

Such collectivist arrogance gives no place to authority greater than its own, especially absolute authority. In fact, today’s American collectivists—nearly all D.C. Democrats and not a few Republicans—are paradoxically sure that truth is relative. They celebrate its many manifestations with words like diversity, tolerance, and even gender fluidity. You live by your truth and I’ll live by mine. Whatever you believe is okay as long as you’re sincere. Same sex marriage? No problem, as long as it’s “true” love. Abortion on demand? Well, I personally oppose it, but I can’t make that decision for someone else. [Cue gag reflex]

The alternative to this hideous mix of debauchery and demagoguery is not soft indulgence. The answer to a lie is not to repeat it in nicer tones. Yet that has long been the response of Congress’ counterfeit conservatives since at least 1994 and early signs are that it lives on in 2017. The problem is that values—the GOP’s go-to euphemism—are every bit as elastic as the Democrats’ sacrosanct preference. Values sounds duly religious, but it’s really just the old Progressive idol sporting a Republican halo.

At some point, Americans must acknowledge that both parties have become the people St. Paul warned his protégé Timothy to avoid: “lovers of themselves…having a form of godliness but denying its power.” Repentance and a return to the Founders’ first principles would be a good start. Yes, there were slave-owning hypocrites numbered among them, just as there are abortion-tolerant Roman Catholics and Protestants in office today. But even those counterfeits were fluent in the Scriptures, and knew our fledgling nation would live or die based on the foundation it supplied.

Getting back to real, non-poll-tested faith is not about winning the culture war, but winning the culture. And if we will take our stand upon the sure footing that all truth is God’s Truth, then we can lead the way to repentance for a nation that will gladly follow, not because we took over or imposed our doctrines, but because we served society so well that our accusers had nothing left to say.

“Let your light so shine before men,” Jesus said, “that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”

Charles Darwin succeeded in foisting bad science upon the world only because bad science was preferable to the truth that God really is God and we have to stand accountable before him. Being a smart monkey is a better deal to sinful man than admitting he’s sinful. Grow a tail, lose a soul. Nice trade.

The outworking—effluence actually—of Darwin’s theories culminated in a modern vanity called communism, that state of perfection a society achieves after socialism has worked its magic. Vladimir Lenin promised, in fact, that within two generations he would produce a perfect state, a “worker’s paradise,” where the only government necessary would be a few administrative clerks, and where the public urinals would be made of solid gold. Ah, yes, gold: But would they flush?

That’s the big problem with collectivist praxis: Nothing works, or at least not for long. Why? Because being God is too big a job for anyone except, well, God. In fact, adding more bureaus to the bureaucracy only clogs the hopper even worse than it already is, and makes the beast churn out more of what he’s already too full of. As one historian has noted, free men write books; bureaucrats fill out forms in triplicate and then shuffle papers all day.

One of my friends in the erstwhile Soviet Union served two prison terms in the 1980s, both times for fictional crimes. I asked him later how the KGB found it so easy to take him. “We have a joke,” he said, “that Soviet law is so marvelous that it contains something for everyone. You see, we have so many laws that I cannot keep one without breaking another. There are always grounds to get me for something.”

Just as printing too many dollars makes money worth less (and eventually worthless), so writing too many laws only breeds lawlessness. Such irony was not lost on the average Russian in the mid-80s. That’s why they referred to their oversized union as a land of “unlimited impossibilities,” and called Moscow, the capital of Absurdistan (it’s the same word in both Russian and English).

After the official dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, the locals didn’t know how to govern cooperatively. How could they? They had only known totalitarianism. Freedom, they assumed, must be the opposite, which is to say that the answer to bad government must be no government. Chaos reigned.

Moscow’s bureaucrats, who never left office but simply declared themselves reformers, began making rules on their own. What once had been micromanagement from the Kremlin now became a regulatory peeing contest. One guy levied a ten percent tax on business, so his comrade down the hall levied an additional eleven percent burden on the same business. And so on.

Eventually Muscovite businesses were being taxed at more than one hundred percent of gross revenues, so nobody paid much of anything. And what’s more, the pencil pushers upstairs didn’t really expect payment. Everybody understood that if you want a little juice you’ve got to squeeze the whole lemon. If you want to collect twenty percent, go for a hundred-twenty. But such a philosophy assumes you won’t run out of lemons.

What Russia had immediately after Gorbachev wasn’t true freedom any more than a recently beheaded chicken’s flopping around the farm yard is dancing. It was simply the absurd death waltz of statism.

My question is: Why do so many lefties like Bernie Sanders, and the Party he crashed in 2016, keep lining up for a turn with the chicken?

Why, after Soviet communism failed, did Europe’s socialists take off their red coats and dye them green in the name of environmentalism?

Why do tenured American professors and congressional “progressives,” none of whom have ever had to live with socialism, keep pressing for a way of governance that so recently failed so spectacularly?

Because so many people think they’re better dancers, that’s why.

Both socialism and communism would have been abandoned world-wide by now, were it not for one particularly evil conceit: “We can do it better.” Time after time around the globe new pretenders connive or shoot their way to power in the name of doing it better, and then bring their various societies to ruin.

As PJ O’Rourke once quipped, “Socialists think perdition is a good system run by bad people. And liberals want us all to go to hell because it’s warm there in the winter.”

Thank God, when the Berlin Wall broke to pieces like a tired dam on November 9, 1991, Darwin’s monkey died in the rubble. The Modern Era was done at last. Some might argue for an earlier or later date, but in front-page terms, what better headline is there? Everything else, including the Soviet implosion, was aftershock. The quake that brought the house down happened on that chilly autumn day in Berlin.

Of course the dawn of the Post-Modern era doesn’t mean an end to chaos, just Darwin’s particular subspecies of chaos. Today’s Post-Mods have mostly traded V.I. Lenin for John Lennon. “Imagine no religion.” But at least they’re willing to sing a different song. They don’t yet know who they are, so in the meantime they’re just Post-something else, and are presently flirting—yet again—with socialism, even though they cannot define it. In other words, Post-Modernism is a vacuum, not a presence. Which makes for great opportunity if the Gospel is what it claims to be. If we’ll work to win the culture instead of fighting the culture war.

And that, dear reader, will be so much more fun without that danged monkey.

Have you ever noticed that the Left tends to be far better at motivating crowds—especially young, emotional ones—than their counterparts on the Right? I mean, really, wasn’t Bernie more entertaining than Hillary, Ted, Rand and just about every other horse in the 2016 race with the exception of Candidate Trump?

Truth be told, the celebrants of the cultural Left—political progressives, entertainment elites and most news media—are nearly always better at propaganda, because they generally deal in untenable ideals (aka fantasies) rather than reality, and hold little regard for truth other than to turn it into balloon animals they will then proclaim alive. Such truth-twisting is grounded in the moral quicksand of relativism, and it shows up in bogs everywhere from the halls of academia to the Supreme Court, with its “living document” view of the Constitution, to Saturday Night Live, whose stock in trade is caricature trying to come off as commentary.

From politics to education, the Left has long fielded slicker salesmen than the starchy slugs on the Right. Thus, despite suffering occasional defeat at the hands of a Reagan or some lesser figure riding his chimeric coattails, they have largely succeeded in gradually nudging—sometimes yanking—American culture in their direction.

Until Donald Trump.

Trump did not reverse this leftward march so much as he confused the marchers, like a like a kid tearing apart an ant trail with his sneaker. And although it remains to be seen whether the 45th President of the United States will lead the country left, right or in a drunken weave, the mere fact that he ruined the old trail was enough to put him into the White House.

I have long maintained that in politics, a party’s proficiency at propaganda is invariably inverse to their actual ability to govern. In other words, the reason leftists are often clever at political spin is because they have to be, since their policies don’t work. Conservatives, on the other hand, have historically proven less adept at marketing their wares, accustomed as they were  to letting the career skills they brought to offce do the talking for them. President Trump may muss this little construct as well, or he may vindicate it yet again, as did his immediate predecessor.

The savvy reader will note that lying and propaganda are not necessarily one and the same. Propaganda may sometimes be truth too loud, as Candidate Trump often demonstrated (and before him a host of revivalists harking back as far as Charles Finney.) More frequently, however, propaganda is the devil in Groucho glasses, and as time goes by truly dedicated propagandists are likely to leave the truth behind altogether in favor of furthering their deceit.

Communist Russia provided the perfect example. The Soviet KGB employed three primary propaganda techniques, even spelling them out in their manual for field agents. First was what we might call “cultivation,” where the target of their ire was mentioned briefly but unfavorably for some weeks or months in various news articles, setting the stage for a big smear later on. They often used this trick on people they eventually intended to arrest and either send to prison or into exile. I have friends in both categories.

The KGB also instructed their agents to take a “180 approach” to the truth, i.e., to state exactly the opposite of their true intentions, and to state this position frequently and without wavering over time. The goal was not necessarily to make everyone believe the lie, but rather to make the truth seem less certain.

That technique was related to a third one, wherein patently absurd lies and accusations were hurled in order to make subtle ones believable. It’s the “trojan horse” method, and it is now popular with the American press. For example, if you want people to believe that a certain person is racist, you accuse him of two or three utterly ridiculous offenses, while dropping in the white lie about his past “ties” to segregationsists, the truth being that he once received the unwanted endorsement of some 20-member redneck fraternity.

The KGB failed, of course, as witnessed by the ash heap formerly known as the USSR, but that failure actually spotlights the one good quality about lying: It inevitably succumbs to its own poisons, because it is the work of history’s greatest failure, Satan.

Realizing that fact served me well throughout my three Christian dozen missions to Soviet Bloc nations, both before and after the fall of Marxist communism. Staring at a giant propaganda billboard one day in Estonia and cursing it under my breath, I suddenly realized it was nothing more than a garish pretense, like the raised voice of a substitute teacher who proves he’s not in charge by yelling that he is. After that day, I made it a point to stop at every portrait of Brezhnev or statue of Lenin—they were everywhere—and cursing it. “This is not your country,” I would whisper while feigning a tourist’s curiosity. “This nation is God’s property and you’re coming down.” Needless to say, those portraits and statues were swiftly cast down in late 1991, and for years afterward I stopped, lifted my hands in praise to God, and danced on their empty pedestals.

Whether in politics, courtroom or classroom, lying eventually caves in on itself for the simple reason that it is the construction of false realities, an alternative to the real world over which only God can preside. As my Russian friends used to joke, “Our government thinks it is God. If that’s true, then all our problems are solved!” In other words, being God is a really hard job that will take you down if you’re not suited to it.

Yes, deceit does injure people, but in the long run, truth tellers have every reason to rejoice, because lies are houses built on sand. They provide no foundation for the future, and any institution—political administrations, newspapers, universities, corporations—that relies on them will fall. Those left standing will thrive, because Truth will have set them free.

“The LORD said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession'” Psalm 2:7b,8, ESV.

Christ’s opponents are two millennia too late. He asked.