“We see the maelstrom even in conservative denominations. I can see the beginnings of it in my own denomination. I recognize it because I’ve seen it before, it is deja vu all over again. And just as I’ve seen before, it is catching conservative clergy unprepared. It is the same old thing. They’re frightened into silence, they feel the pressure, they’re in the thumbscrews.”

It would be amusing if it were not so diabolical. The people who control our universities, our media, and our government bureaucracies now feign victimhood. They are la resistance–the resistance.

This is the way evil works: it mislabels things. Up becomes down, right becomes wrong, good becomes evil, and the people who run things become the victims.

For years these people have been denaturing nature, destroying households and families, leveling local communities, all in the name of freedom (which is what they call license); and they have been turning us into serfs. It is all about the progress of history, we’re told. And those who are on the wrong side of history will be crushed.

But the real resistance comes from conservatives and traditionalists. This is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be said. In the old days, when communists were more certain of themselves, and less prone to spin, they called conservatives “reactionaries”. You don’t hear that anymore.

I wish this sort of thing didn’t happened inside churches and denominations, but that’s not the case. We see the maelstrom even in conservative denominations. I can see the beginnings of it in my own denomination. I recognize it because I’ve seen it before, it is deja vu all over again. And just as I’ve seen before, it is catching conservative clergy unprepared. It is the same old thing. They’re frightened into silence, they feel the pressure, they’re in the thumbscrews.

There is a way to resist. But you have to escape the thumbscrews to do so. This isn’t new, either. We see the technique for escaping thumbscrews with the prophets in the Old Testament and with the desert fathers in the early church. The reason we don’t see it more often today is the same reason we don’t see it often in the past. Freeing yourself from the thumbscrews is difficult. But if you’re going to stay true to your convictions, you simply must do difficult things.

Here are a few of the more obvious thumbscrews you must escape.

Let’s begin inside a liberalizing denomination.

Thumbscrew #1: The “Cool Table”

You know what I mean. Back in high school there was the “cool table”. This was the table in the lunchroom where all the popular kids sat. And even though it was universally resented by people who didn’t have a seat at the cool table, everyone wanted to sit there.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, let me break it to you. You never leave high school. Every organization has what C. S. Lewis referred to as “the inner ring”. Churches and denominations are no different.

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