In our ongoing series on holidays and special days throughout the year, we had better not forget this one. Otherwise, we could land in the slammer. Taxes are due! Don’t forget to mail them in!

This is a day of lamentation, not only that we have to pay so much to our governments but that we may not approve of so much of that we pay for. Nevertheless, paying taxes is one of the few civil obligations particularly and specifically enjoined upon us by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. That has to limit some of our anti-tax sentiments to some degree–perhaps we could focus on the good Romans 13 uses of government expenditures–though I’m sure the angst will remain.

So how should we mark and celebrate (probably the wrong word) the meaning of THIS day?

George F. Will gives useful background on the worldview that looms behind Barack Obama’s contention that Americans are religious, love guns, and want border control because they are economically oppressed. A sample:

The emblematic book of the new liberalism was “The Affluent Society” by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a “false consciousness” (another category, like religion as the “opiate” of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:

First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.

According to Marxism and its neo-Marxist descendents (who apply what Marx said about ecoonomics to other kinds of oppression, such as by race, gender, and sexual orientation), “false consciousness” has to do with the oppressed being manipulated by those in power to co-operate in their own oppression. For example, in neo-Marxist literary criticism (still a big deal on non-Patrick Henry university campuses), Jane Austen is said to show “false consciousness” by having her female characters get married rather than empowering them to be feminists.

According to this article in a British newspaper, China already is the world’s dominant nation.

To show this is not just a Lutheran blog, I offer here Carl Trueman offering some semi-whimsical reflections about taking life as it comes, which he calls Zen Calvinism:

Like the Buddhist movement which shares the same name, Zen-Calvinism is a school of religious thought which allows its adherents to live at one with the world, untroubled in any ultimate sense by the slings and arrows which life throws their way. It is also counter-cultural and thus represents a deeply alternative lifestyle. Let me elaborate a little on this counter-cultural mentality.

At the heart of Zen-Calvinism is the belief that all human beings are morally flawed, unlike the worldviews projected by the celebrity-saturated commercial culture of the modern West. . . .Zen-Calvinists also accept that they are themselves no better than anyone else; and, understanding their own tendencies to treat everyone else in a less-than-perfect fashion, they will not be surprised when they are repaid in kind. Zen-Calvinists are at one with the depravity of the fallen universe; they expect to be treated as they know they have treated others.

The second major element of Zen-Calvinism is the mantras which we use to worship. Unlike those used to hide from reality, whether the latest Britney Spears ditty or some nostalgic song extolling the mythical virtues of yesteryear, the Zen-Calvinist mantra book is rooted in the 150 songs we find in the Bible’s book of Psalms. Here, both Zen master and novice find words to express their deepest longings, their profoundest fears, and their most passionate desires in words which, as inspired by God, have the divine imprimatur. . . .

The final element of Zen-Calvinism is perhaps the most important: the realization that all evil has been subverted for the greater good purposes of the God who loves his church. If the supreme crime of human history – the judicial murder of the very Son of God – can be used for the greatest good, then any other crime, sin or moral failing can also be frustrated and turned to good account. And that applies not just to the loutish and corrupt behaviour of others; it applies supremely to that of the Zen-Calvinist who reflects upon these things.

The most conservative Calvinists sing only Psalms in their worship. (Though they are actually metrical paraphrases: to Calvinists, I ask, why don’t you chant them, a musical form that allows you to sing non-metrical lines directly from the Bible? Surely you can’t think chanting the Psalms is too “Catholic” when it would allow you to be even more directly Biblical!) Anyway, I respect that practice, and it’s similar to our liturgical worship that consists nearly always of worshipping with texts from the Word of God.

Anyway, what do you think about this Zen-like serenity? What is distinctly Calvinist about this particular formulation? What is lacking (Christ’s Atonement? His presence? His Gospel? Suffering and the Cross?) and what difference would these make to the Christian’s serenity?

HT: Rob Spinney