‘Progressive’ Christianity Is Actually Regressive Medievalism

Source: AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin

The religious left refers to their ideology as “progressive Christianity,” even though their economic ideas regress to the middle ages and most deny the fundamental truths of Christianity that Jesus is God and he rose from the dead. Still, the left covets the power that the name “Jesus” holds on real Christians and wants to use it to lure them into their socialist dark web.

A recent venture in the tradition issues from an Anabaptist blogging as the Hippie Heretic. Anabaptists tried to create a communist city during the early 16th century in the Netherlands, another example of regression.

The Cult Of The MBA CEO

The MBA degree turned 111 this year. How is it doing? Great for those who hold the degree from top business schools; not so much for the businesses they run, according to a study by the Institutional Investor. The cult of the MBA CEO has led to huge increases in executive pay but not profit gains:

According to data from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, average CEO compensation at the largest firms rose from $1.8 million per year in the 1980s — roughly in line with the previous 45 years — to $4.1 million in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, it had risen to $9.2 million. And those numbers are after adjusting for inflation...

We found no statistically significant alphas — despite testing every possible school with a reasonable sample size. MBA programs simply do not produce CEOs who are better at running companies, if performance is measured by stock price return...

The Conservative/Libertarian Shotgun Wedding And The Trump Divorce

What is wrong with conservatives? Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age and an editor for The American Conservative, has joined Tucker Carlson and Abby McCloskey in trashing free markets and demanding greater state intervention. McCarthy whines about a lot of things and blames then all on globalization. But at the core of his complaints sits the hollowing out of the middle class in the US.

I’m not sure there is a hollowing out of the middle class because it’s hard to define. For most of history, the middle class was the group of independent small to medium size business people that socialists called the bourgeoisie. It made up about 5% of the population until the class exploded in size during the industrial revolution. At some point in the 20th century the term was redefined to include workers whose income was in the middle between the rich and poor, mostly factory workers without a college education. So the decline of manufacturing jobs as a percentage of the total workforce terrifies conservatives and socialists.

Socialism Is Not About Sharing – It’s About Killing

When I comment on articles about socialism on Facebook or web sites like Christianity Today or Patheos, I often get the response that socialism is just sharing and I wonder where they got such an idea. After all, if you read the writings of the followers of Saint-Simon, Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Mao, none of them mention sharing.

So where did so many US citizens get the idea that socialism is just about sharing? I think the answer lies with “milk cow economics.” Starting in middle school, most social studies classes eventually get around to it. Here is a typical example from one of the many sites that popped up in a search of the term:

Socialism: You have two cows. You give one to your neighbor (share).

Communism: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and gives you some milk.

Fascism: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and sells you some milk.

Nazism: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and shoots you.

If Elizabeth Warren Really Was An Indian, She’d Know Not To Trust The Federal Government

The media are confused over Democrat presidential candidate and senator Elizabeth Warren. They laugh at her attempt to prove her tribal heritage while taking her tax plans seriously. They advertise their ignorance on both accounts.

Let’s take her claim to a tribal heritage. She was wrong to take a DNA test. That would prove her lineage according to the government’s rule of what makes an Indian, or a member of a tribe. Tribes never considered “blood quantity” as a condition for tribal membership before the state forced them to do it. Slave owners came up with that nonsense in order to keep as many people as possible as slaves. They divided people into quarter, half, sixteenth, etc., black.

The “red” people of the Americas never practiced such silliness. (The tribes called themselves red; it was their way of saying, “We are the beautiful people.” Oklahoma is Choctaw for “land of the red (skinned) people.”) Tribes are made up of clans of families, so if you were part of a family in a clan then you were part of the tribe. Anyone could marry into a tribe and many tribes had Europeans and Africans as members. After the un-Civil War, the Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole and Chickasaw tribes freed their slaves and made them full tribal members.

What Christian Leaders Usually Fail To Understand About Economics

She spoke for a lot of Americans when representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview recently said, “I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.”

The left continually assaults rich people and covets their wealth. It’s no wonder that many of them do penance for having acquired such wealth by supporting socialist policies. John Schneider provides some relief for billionaires in his book The Good of Affluence: Seeking God in a Culture of Wealth.

I think of people like Janet Willis, who is CEO of the Wills Corporation, a firm that manages large investment portfolios held mainly by Christians. In telephone conversations, she has spoken at length and with obvious passion about her clients who have become wealthy beyond their imaginings during the last decade of growth in the stock market. She tells me that these people are almost invariably moved by their good fortune, and deeply troubled by it at the same time...And they look to the intellectual leadership in the church for direction."

More Tuckerism: ‘Conservative’ Journal Blames Markets For Social Ills

Media commentary tracks the business cycle. During recessions and most of the recovery, the media obsess over economic growth because tax revenues have declined. The media think we work only to feed Leviathan because without the government we would all die, right? And they will broadcast dozens of stories about people who died because of a lack of funding at one of our many levels of government.

Then when the economy turns around and GDP, the stock market and government revenue are robust, the media fix their gaze on all of the other problems that they can imagine. Recently, I wrote about Tucker Carlson’s screed. This week, Abby McCloskey rides a similar horse in her article “Beyond Growth.” Others will join them in a thundering herd, that is, until the next recession, which will happen within a year or two. Then their message will again become, “It’s the economy, stupid!”