The Pence of Darkness And God’s Mighty Government

by poputonian

Today’s Indy Star puffs up Mike — I’m “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order” — Pence, but acknowledges he is an underdog in the race for House minority leader. The article also notes Laura Ingraham on Tuesday saying of Pence: “If there is a God in heaven, he will be the next House minority leader.”

Laura longs for someone to lead her from darkness, that place in the wilderness as can only be understood by “church-people,” as Chris Matthews has been calling them lately .

The article also provides this quote from Pence: “We didn’t just lose our majority. We lost our way.”

As any good conservative will tell you — and as Pence explained in his vision statement to House Republicans — ‘losing your way’ means you end up in that “otherplace.” You know where I mean:

We are in the wilderness because we walked away from the principles that brought us our governing Majority.

Yes, it’s that place again … the wilderness.

As interpreted by the minister’s sermon, even the natural world – the storms, the wolves in the wilderness, and the catastrophes at sea – spoke of the war of good and evil and of God’s mighty government. Social institutions, conscience, and the forces of nature meshed in the communal experience to restrain rebellious dispositions.
…
The combined force of so many institutions invested law and authority with immense power. In nearly every dimension of life – family, church, the social hierarchy, and religion – a [citizen] encountered unanimous reinforcement of governing authority. The total impact was immense, because each institution was an integral part of a monolithic whole. In each community the agencies of law and authority merged so that the individual felt himself confined within a unified governing structure. The preacher’s exhortation to submit to domestic government reinforced the father’s dominion in his family. Church discipline carried added terrors because censures were delivered before the neighbors and the town’s most prominent families, and the assignment of pews in the meetinghouse according to social rank reminded everyone of the distinctions among individuals and of the deference due superiors. The total environment enjoined obedience: the stately figure of minister or commissioner as he rode through town, the leading inhabitants’ imposing two-storied houses standing near the meetinghouse at its center, the austere graves of the dead in its shadow.

Only Mike Pence can restore fear of wilderness to puritan governance.

Bushman again:

Election of these officials, even the highest, did not diminish their authority or make them responsible to the people. Democracy, in the Puritan view, was nongovernment, or anarchy, and rulers had to constrain [themselves] not to obey a corrupt popular will. Election was a device for implementing divine intentions rather than for transmitting power from the people to their rulers.

And a contemporaneous quote from the day of Puritan rule:

“In elective states, where persons are advanced by the suffrage of others to places of rule, and vested with Civil Power, the persons choosing give not the power, but GOD. They are but the instruments of conveyance.”

I hope Mike hangs in there. Someday he’ll convince enough people of the invisible darkness that enfolds them, the one they can’t see but which he knows is there. Eventually, the incredible lightness of movement conservatism will save them from it.