Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?: Jesus Christ in the Obama and Post-Obama Era

By Richard William Bledsoe

Revolutionary France of 1789 was the world's first post-Christian society. Leftism is an ersatz religion, and France became the world's first Leftist nation. Leftism is faux Christianity. America is today becoming a post-Christian society under a similar imitation of Christianity. One of the truisms of such a society is that one can now hide behind the pretense of "openness." Shame, which would have previously kept certain things hidden, is now the only thing of which we are ashamed. One can be completely open about all matters sexual, for frankness about everything is now valued. Yet, such cultures only develop new ways of being hidden.
One hides in plain sight in modern America. One goes on television, the Internet, and to publishing houses to "tell all," using the facade of "boldness" and "frankness," to remain hidden. "Openness" is a cover, and it is a cover for emptiness. We no longer know who, where, or what we are. We have lost ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Dec 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630877422

Richard William Bledsoe

Richard Bledsoe served as a hospital chaplain and pastored Tree of Life Presbyterian Church in Boulder, CO for twenty years. He currently works as a metropolitan missionary inside of Boulder and other cities.

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Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?

Jesus Christ in the Obama and Post-Obama Era

Richard William Bledsoe

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CAN SAUL ALINSKY BE SAVED?

Jesus Christ in the Obama and Post-Obama Era

Copyright © 2015 Richard Bledsoe. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-788-7

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-742-2

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 11/26/2014

To my wife, who persevered

We can only be restored to sanity by the Most High God.

Introduction

My most interesting ancestor is my paternal grandfather, whom I never met, and is therefore unsullied by actual memory. He has taken on something like mythic proportions in my own soul, and he stands in purity for things that I now believe are better fulfilled by looking up rather than looking either to the left or to the right. Who he was became, in a less purified form, a generational hope for both my generation (the 60s generation), and then later, my own children’s generation.

My grandfather was essentially a frontiersman who grew up at the edge of the close of the West. He was killed in 1947, several years before I was born, when his automobile turned over and he was burned alive, returning from tending to his beehives. The honey he harvested from them was a part of his earnings. He and his family scratched out a living in a small town in southern Colorado. From all reports, he was a force to be reckoned with. My father told me that in the years before, he fled to Colorado from Texas where he was a farmer, and had shot off the kneecaps of two lawyers who had stolen his land through legal shenanigans. My father also told me that he had won third prize for the use of a handgun in the Texas state fair in 1906. And there were a lot of gunslingers in Texas in those days, he added. The Ku Klux Klan ran and essentially controlled Colorado through much of the 1920s and 1930s. They had a great deal of power in his small town. Even though it was suppose to be a secret, it was well known that the owner of the hardware store was actually the Grand Wizard of the local Klan. My grandfather was a vocal critic of the Klan, and they threatened to come and burn a cross on his front yard. He went down to the hardware store and bought a Colt .45 from the owner. The owner asked him what it was for. Well, he said, if those Klansman ever come up to my house, they will find out. They never came.

On another occasion, there was a local election, and it was made known that Catholics and Hispanics were not welcome to vote. My grandfather went and stood, just stood, next to the ballot box, and then sent my uncle and father all over town in his Model T Ford, and they picked up Catholics and Hispanics all day and brought them down to vote. Nobody interfered.

My grandfather was not only a man who could take a stand; he was also, unusually intelligent. When my mother was very old (approaching one hundred years old) I asked her for some of her memories of him. She said, He was tall and seemed very important. Whenever we saw him, he always gave us a lecture that seemed to last for about an hour, and I hardly understood anything that he said.

What did he lecture about? I asked.

Philosophers.

Which ones?

The only one I can remember is Socrates, said my mother.

Apparently, he read everything. My father told me that he taught himself mathematics all the way through calculus. I still have some of his mail order correspondence-school textbooks in my library. All of this was from a man who did not have a high school education, and often had to work as a common laborer to make a living.¹

Four years before the Russian Revolution, when my father was born in 1913, my grandfather named him after the author of The Communist Manifesto.² My father’s first name was Marx. You do not give your son such a name unless you think a very great deal of the namesake in the first place, and he espouses what is your ideal. I have no doubt my grandfather read, not only the Manifesto, but also Das Capital,³ and had a very good grasp of what Marx was saying. He was a lifelong socialist, and my sister has in her possession some of his correspondence and writing that he left behind that display his convictions.

I get the impression that Saul Alinsky and my grandfather would have gotten along very well. They seemed to have a lot of the same Leftist ideals. They were for the poor, the underdog, the left behind, and they wanted them to have the power to make their lives better. Saul Alinsky (1909–72) was a community organizer, who gave his life to promoting tactics to confuse, divide, and dispirit the enemy, who was always the American Establishment. He wanted to take power from the haves and give power to the have nots. His most famous book is called Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.⁴

There was a time when only a small circle of political activists knew Saul Alinsky. But in recent years, he has led a ground swell. Part of his resurgence can be credited to Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, who was and is a disciple of Alinsky. As a community organizer in Chicago, long before he ever thought of the presidency, Obama taught seminars on Alinsky, and led demonstrations that were based on his tactics. He brought much of that to his own presidency and tenure in the White House. Alinsky is a thinker who has written some things that impinge on the contents of this book; Obama is mentioned very scantily in the text. The book is not about Obama, and only impinges on him as he is a carrier of Alinsky’s theology. He has carried forward some of Saul Alinsky’s philosophy and he has injected it further into the public mainstream than it has ever been before in the relatively conservative United States. The United States has traditionally been the least secular of all Western Nation-states, a fact noted as long ago as Alexis de Tocqueville. America is now catching up (if that is the correct term) with the far more secular European nations, and Obama is very much the representative figure of coalescence. He is an especially representative figure of late or post-modernity, and it has been broadly noted since the 2012 election, that America is more nearly now two nations than at any time since the Civil War.

The Obama and Post-Obama Era represent the second triumph of what are now commonly termed the 60s. It is that environment that this small volume addresses; however, that environment began long, long ago. It actually began in the Garden of Eden, and it has been breaking out ever since. It seems to be the natural bent of the human race. This is not a book of political philosophy, and you will be disappointed if you are looking for a detailed critique or examination of Saul Alinsky’s works. Rather, it deals with issues that are very much prior to politics. Theology used to be termed the queen of the sciences, and whether known in our age or not, theology is still the queen. Saul Alinsky begins his most famous book with a theological affirmation, and it is that affirmation that is basis of all that this book examines. Alinsky dedicates his book to the author of the first rebellion. He dedicates the book to the memory of the rebellion of Lucifer.⁵ Much of modernity has its origins in doubt and in rebellion. The names of Descartes and Rousseau, among others, set our steerage in the direction of a declaration of independence from heaven, and the myth that doubt, revolt and self assertion are the ultimate values that will lead to an ascension into glory, and a final kingdom of man, or of youth. Saul Alinsky is the latest American incarnation of that faith. It is clearly an apostate faith. Can he be saved? Can even Saul Alinsky be saved? If so, then there is hope.

I admire much of what my grandfather stood for: I admire his courage, his fearlessness, his care for the underdog, the powerless, and the poor. But I now doubt his map. I am not sure my grandfather believed in an ultimate origin or destiny. To quote G. K. Chesterton:

In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By revolting against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.⁶

One has to believe in something before one can doubt anything. One has to obey somebody or something before one can revolt against anything else. The devil has no ground on which to stand to stage his revolt, except the ground that was already created by another. He can in the end only stand for nothing. His nihilism, his nothingness, can only result in vanity and vapor. I am not sure that my grandfather did not in the end come to share my own doubt of doubt. He came to join the Mormon Church along with his family, for at least a period of time. That is a chapter that has always been mysterious to me, and he did not live to explain it to me, nor did my father explain it to me, who died an open unbeliever. My grandmother, who died when she was 103, wanted to return to the Hardshell Baptists of her Missouri childhood, and my uncle was befriended by and I believe brought into the fold of the believing, by a neighbor who was a Bible-believing Seventh Day Adventist, before his death in his eighties.

This book is largely a defense of speech, but it is above all a defense of the reality that there was a speaker who preceded the insinuations of doubt and rebellion, who is still speaking. God was the first speaker to Adam in the opening scenes in the Garden of Eden, and Lucifer, who was an interloper, was the second. To be human is ultimately to hear God and to speak to God. We were in the first place spoken into existence, along with our entire environment in our world and universe. God’s speech is the origin of all that is, and if we grow deaf to that speech, eventually we cease to hear anything, and all meaning disappears. We are turned over to the false hopes of the Lucifer referred to by Alinsky. God’s speech is to be found in final and full form (in this world) in the most common place of all household items: the Bible. It is everywhere, and it is easy to find, but increasingly, it is almost unknown. It is however, the secret of existence, the open sesame.

The modern world is in some official sense, afflicted with unbelief. Modernity is almost synonymous with unbelief. And yet a great deal of the modern world, especially in the United States, is not modern at all. Many people who are in the most obvious and superficial sense, contemporaries, are in fact distemporaries.⁷ That is, the assumed official ideology of the age is not shared by many, many people of our age. Many people are still in the mindset of nineteenth-century revivalism, or Reformation thinking, or even in many ways medieval. A world of angels, archangels, sin, redemption, and answered prayer from the hand of an omniscient, omnipotent God are not in the least foreign to millions of modern people.

I have been a Presbyterian pastor in a university town rather well known to broadly partake in modernity in a pretty deep way. In some ways, my town is more an outpost of the mindset of Western Europe than of the American West. I am personally a distemporary of most of the people around me—so were the members of my small church, and the several thousand other evangelical believers in this area. And yet I find that being a distemporary does not at all inhibit or destroy the ability to communicate with those around me. In fact, in some ways, it enhances communication. It is, after all, sometimes more fun to talk to an outsider who has an utterly different perspective on the world than to speak with those whose opinion is already known and almost entirely shared. Over the years, I have fostered the habit of offering to pray for my distemporaries when they have become good enough friends to let me in on some of their troubles. I have never had one person refuse me, or treat me as though my sanity ought to be checked. Quite the contrary, I have always been treated with the utmost of seriousness, and with great appreciation when I have offered such prayers. I even encounter what seems to be a kind of hopeful belief. They seem to really believe that if I pray, something will happen, and it often does. They often say, I can use all the help I can get. It makes me believe that unbelief is not as absolute as some modern thinkers, and curiously, theologians of a particularly modernist stripe would like us to believe.⁸ It has led me to believe that something like a breviary of unbelief might even be helpful to certain modern people. One has the impression that many unbelievers are utterly ignorant about why they do not believe. It seems to them to be as certain as was the flatness of the earth in Columbus’ day, or the Ptolemaician order of the stars prior to Galileo. It is in other words, an unexamined premise that simply functions from day to day. And yet when it is challenged in any existential way (for example with an offer to pray for conflicts or problems), it doesn’t seem to offer much resistance or be very absolute. It might pay to examine it. It might pay to see if there is some viewpoint that might offer some surprising light on it.

If there is a God (which these people seem implicitly to be open to), what might God’s point of view be on the fact that there is so much unbelief in and about God? Does God have anything to say about it? I began to examine this question several years ago trying to understand the unbeliever not from his own perspective, but to see what the Bible itself has to say on the subject. Personally, I have found unbelievers own account of their unbelief to be mostly a blank, or a series of denials that are not very illuminating. In my experience, God is very illuminating when he speaks concerning any given subject. Most people don’t know this because they only know the Bible on a most casual basis, and have never studied it on almost any question.

I hope to give some illumination—the kind of illumination that even my grandfather would have found to be another, and better, kind of enlightenment.

1. My grandfather was also a self taught chemist who set up a laboratory in one of the buildings on his property. He worked for a local paint company that produced lead based paints.

2. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto.

3. Marx, Capital.

4. In the chapter entitled Tactics, Alinsky promotes thirteen rules that have since become infamous. Here they are:

1

) Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

2

) Never go outside the experience of your own people.

3

) Wherever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

4

) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

5

) Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

6

) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

7

) A tactic that drags too long becomes a drag.

8

) Keep the pressure on.

9

) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10

) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

11

) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through to its counter side.

12

) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13

) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals,

126

–

30

.

5. The details and documentation for this can be found in the chapter

4

of this book.

6. Chesterton,

47

.

7. I owe the term distemporaries and the idea that the word represents to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. See especially The Christian Future,

172

.

8. It is ironic that it is especially modernist theologians, like Bultmann or Tillich, who are the quickest to assure us that belief in a supernatural Gospel is virtually impossible for modern men. Bultmann’s quip that since we have electric lights and radios, men can no longer believe in God is an especially telling, and silly example.

1

Hebel

¹

Solomon was reputedly the wisest man in his time. Solomon’s last discoveries had to do with the utter emptiness and vanity of the world. He wrote an entire book about it. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, is among the best known literary statements in the entire world. If understanding or experiencing this statement implies wisdom, or at least a great prelude to wisdom, then the modern world must be pretty nearly the wisest age in all of history. A vast number of modern people have soundly declared this to be what they, too, have learned out of life. At first blush, they do not appear to be proud, for they say it is all there is to be learned. For volume, this is pretty slim in terms of philosophy. It appears to be a kind of humility. But it could be a species of pride as well. The nature of pride is that it lies, especially by means of inflation. It believes very small things to be very big, especially if it is about ourselves or our knowledge. Solomon could have been humble (because he knew what a small thing nothingness really is), and the modern world, claiming the same thing, could be proud—swelling nothingness to a very great and vast thing.

It is curious that modern men and women have learned what a vast thing the universe really is, and have commonly declared how insignificant we as human beings are. It is, at the same time, declared that almost all of that vastness is absolutely nothing as completely empty space. The odd thing about this new and startling discovery of vast amounts of