Leftist Gnosticism

It is no coincidence that Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream was based on the Gospel, and the Gnostic Left’s on a heresy.

By Joshua Charles Published on January 28, 2017

The race for DNC Chair is on, and it has taken a disturbing turn.

One of the candidates, Sally Boynton Brown, the head of the Democratic Party in Idaho, made several revealing comments on race.  First: “I’m a white woman, I don’t get it.”  Second: “My job is to listen and be a voice and shut other white people down when they want to interrupt.”  Third: “We have to teach them [Democratic volunteers] how to communicate, how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they are white.”

I address this because it starkly reveals the epistemological and, as we shall see, ontological crisis of our time (epistemology being the philosophy of how and what human beings can know, and ontology the philosophy of being).

Individual Reality

My own theory of epistemology is multi-variable. Underpinning a good deal of it is an idea derived from an exchange between God and Isaiah in which the God who stands inconceivably higher than man says, “Come, let us reason together.” Thus, God Himself acknowledges reason as a standard by which he and man may deal. It follows that if God can appeal to this standard in His dealings with us, we ought to be able to appeal to it in our dealings with one another.

We see the Democratic Party’s full-throated adoption of Gnosticism, the idea that reality is ultimately defined by the individual.

But the modern Democratic Party has rejected this idea. Instead, we see its full-throated adoption of Gnosticism, the idea that reality is ultimately defined by the individual. The gnostics were a heretical group whose theology was rejected by the Church in the second century. They believed that secret knowledge, gnosis, was the key to enlightenment — not doctrine, scripture, or church leaders — and that obtaining this gnosis could be an acceptable form of Christianity, regardless of any of the aforementioned authorities. Theology was thereby subjectivized — instead of the individual accommodating himself to truth, truth was accommodated to the individual.

This thoroughly pagan way of thinking has overtaken our culture, where sex, gender, class, and now racial Gnosticism has dethroned the idea that knowledge is obtained by reason, but rather through an identity-based gnosis. If, as in the case of Ms. Brown, you happen to fit into one of the wrong ones (being white, apparently), you must debase yourself before your fellow gnostics, and thereby obtain this gnosis through self-hatred. Such is the “inverted artistry” of what I call the Gnostic Left. It is no wonder they assume, as a matter of course, that you can’t talk about abortion unless you’re a woman; gender unless you are “non-binary”; poverty unless you speak in terms of class; or race unless you’re black (or “colored”).

If these gnostic presuppositions are true, it is difficult to find any basis for civil society or government whatsoever. The American Experiment was predicated on the proposition that all men partake of a common nature endowed by a common Creator, and thus had common ground upon which to base their rights and obligations within the framework of politics, all of which must be discerned through the common standard of reason.

But the Gnostic Left rejects this notion, and seeks to supplant it with a set of radically different ones.

All Men Are Created Equal

Among the most cherished American rights is free speech — a right which was directly attacked by Ms. Brown upon grounds we owe it to ourselves to be solicitous of; for her radical epistemology, namely the idea that reality can only be known if one partakes of a certain characteristic, is undergirded by an even more radical ontology.

The core idea of the American Founding is summed up by the famous words of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal, and they are endowed with their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” This vision was nothing less than the logical extension of the biblical idea that all human beings are made in the Image of God, and as such are entitled to a set of rights commensurate with that innate dignity. As partakers of a common nature, all human beings were thereby accorded these rights, along with a concomitant set of duties. 

The core idea of the American Founding is summed up by the famous words of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal, and they are endowed with their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

Thus, for the Founders, the right to free speech, based on a divinely endowed and mutually shared human nature, was subject to other duties which none could avoid, namely the duty to speak the truth, and construct arguments based on logic and reason — a common standard, based in human nature, for all Image-bearers. Harkening back to the example of Isaiah, it thus comes as no surprise that this worldview assumes that in our exercise of free speech and the exchange of ideas it is meant to foster, we who partake of a common Image with the Creator must appeal to the same standard amongst ourselves that He appealed to with us, namely reason.

People Are More Than Shards

But the Gnostic Left appeals to a totally different set of commonalities. Rather than appealing to the Image of God, it seeks to explode this Image into various shards — sex, gender, class, race, etc. — and appeal to the shards of that Image, each operating according to its own “reason.” Thus, the Gnostic Left’s foundation of rights is no longer a shared Image, but shared shards of that Image — akin to a puzzle that has been shaken apart into its various pieces, which then only associate with pieces with which it shares some common trait, all the while forgetting about the glorious Image to which they all belong. Is it any surprise that this ideology has grown out of the party that inflicted slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow on this country?

This is why Ms. Brown seems to think that being white is a disqualifier — it is the wrong shard, and thus cannot appeal to the same standard of reason as the black or colored shards, except on terms of self-hating abasement — like an edge puzzle piece trying to join one of the interior pieces, unaware that despite their differences, they are all part of a common Image.

It is no coincidence that Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream was based on the Gospel, and the Gnostic Left’s on a heresy.

Such a brutal splicing of the identity of the human person into its constituent shards, and then appealing to those shards rather than the holistic Image, can lead to nothing but bitterness, rage and hate — all of which the Gnostic Left actively appeals to in its endless quest for power.

To elevate such “heretical” assumptions represents a complete reversal of the Dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, which, like that of the Founders, based its appeal on the objective reality of Natural and Divine Law as found in the Declaration of Independence and the Bible — a law which no one could deny, regardless of his sex, gender, class or race. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Dr. King’s Dream was based on the Gospel, and the Gnostic Left’s on a heresy.

By its adoption of this pernicious ideology, the modern Democratic Party has positioned itself as an implacable foe of the American Experiment, becoming little more than a group of gnostics who believe in one gnosis, and intend to enforce their gnosis on everyone else.

In their view, with the transcendent basis of our society removed, all that remains is power, for in the absence of a holistic Image, power is all that can hold together the various shards.

But the American Experiment is defined by liberty, not power.

Which is why the modern Democratic Party, like many of its political ancestors, remains the enemy of this great experiment, and must be defeated.

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