Diary of an Autodidact has a piece up showing connections between some big names in Christian homeschooling and various unsavory characters from history. I have some friends who like the Vision Forum stuff from Douglas Phillips. I’ve studiously avoided any first-hand exposure to his stuff because I don’t like the smell of it even from a distance. I cannot say from first-hand experience whether Phillips really is that whole-sale into Dabney or if he has any caveats or nuances – but I have to say that poem is pretty compelling evidence of Phillips’ enthusiasm. (As for my friends, I have never heard them get behind Theonomy nor anything racist, so I assume they are either ignorant of or indifferent to these tendencies of Douglas Phillips.)
What upsets me most is that vile schlock like this stuff Phillips evidently appreciates is so (rightly) revolting to many otherwise considerate people that they will move as far away from anything he says as they can get. Because people like Phillips champion some Christian doctrine or other along with their self-serving power-hungry invented doctrines, any sound doctrine caught up in the mix is considered proven false because it has been endorsed by a charlatan.
Because Phillips has made differences between the sexes one of his favorite topics, anyone who disagrees with Phillips feels compelled to minimize the importance of those differences right out of consideration. God has not called us to be racist rapist Pope-kings, so therefore we must relate to all people in exactly the same manner, regardless of gender.
What remains frustrating to me in egalitarian thinking is the denial of the creative fiat of God. In order to maintain the spiritual and moral equality of the sexes, egalitarians generally seem to reduce the differences between the sexes to mere biology — physical differences only, and one might almost say, accidental differences. God is positioned as someone who considers the sexes equal in every way that matters, someone who wishes that the sexes were equal in every functional way now but is helpless to make that so. God must wait anxiously for his new creation in order to address the unintended divide between male and female.
There are dysfunctions in gender relations that are not “intended” by God; there will not be two distinct sexes in the new creation. But that doesn’t make what God did the first time an accident. If God did not want differences between man and woman he needn’t have made them. God as creator has full prerogative to accommodate reproduction in other means, as he has amply demonstrated. To ignore any persistent aspect of this creation as insignificant or unintended dangerously ignores the will and power God exercised in creating.
It is terrible and sad that the Babel-fantasy for a world under control promoted by Phillips and his ilk has served to obscure and defame the fact that this world is already under the control of God, not withstanding all the evil that tries (and appears) to pervert it from his purpose. The power-lust of men need not (and truly cannot) impugn the power of God.