restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

Incurable Infracaninophiles

 David Alan Black

It’s time to fess up. I am an infracaninophile. An incurable one at that.

As a child growing up in Hawaii, I remember always playing the part of a Confederate soldier – Johnny Reb – when we fought the Civil War, partly because no one else was willing to wear the gray. I was also quite happy to join the Wehrmacht and play a German – even though my favorite TV show at the time was Combat, during which, of course, I always rooted for Sergeant Saunders and the Amis.

More recently, I have taken to various “lost causes,” not the least of which involves being one of the few New Testament scholars to support the Pauline authorship of the book of Hebrews. My views on the origins of the Synoptic Gospels are just as unpopular, as is my reticence to take sides in the Majority/Byzantine text-type debate (I argue neither for the primacy of this text-type nor for its secondary nature – much to the chagrin of many of my esteemed colleagues).

Of late, however, I have attached myself to what many of my dearest friends consider a most hopeless cause indeed. I support an absolutely unelectable candidate for president of the United States. I say “unelectable” by man’s definition, of course. When people ask me, “How in the world can Michael Peroutka get elected?”, I reply, pointing to heaven, “It only takes one vote for him to win.”

At any rate, my advocacy for the Constitution Party ticket of Peroutka and Baldwin (the latter being a Baptist preacher, no less!) makes me no more popular among my friends than my espousal of Matthean priority. I do not consider this completely my fault, however. As Charlie Shedd once said, “The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.” We are simply experiencing today, I believe, a spiritual dearth in the life of the churches. It is my feeling that the average church member’s understanding of “what it means to vote responsibly” (this usually means to vote Republican) is so shallow and superficial as to constitute a major perversion of the Gospel. I also believe that, to a great degree, it is this misunderstanding of political reality that is hindering God’s efforts to accomplish His purpose in the world today.

I sometimes feel all alone in supporting the CP ticket, but that is an irrational sentiment. Names that come to mind of like-minded people – and this is certainly not an exhaustive list – include Doug Phillips (president of Vision Forum), Mark Dankof (a Lutheran pastor and editor of Mark Dankof’s America), Lewis Goldberg (editor of The Patriotist), Lee Shelton (editor of Ever Vigilant), and Jim Rudd (editor of Covenant News). All of us believe in limited constitutional government and oppose the Leviathan our federal government has, unfortunately, become. We are, all of us, incurable infracaninophiles.

By now, dear reader, you will surely have guessed the meaning of this wonderful term I have been bandying about. Perhaps you, too, are one: an infracaninophile – lover of the underdog!

August 24, 2004

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. His latest book is Why I Stopped Listening to Rush: Confessions of a Recovering Neocon.

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