Author Archives: cmalsbury

From Gilded Age to Guilted Age: A Review of the 1927 Film, Children of Divorce

By Ehud Would

I recently viewed a remarkable film — Frank Lloyd’s Children of Divorce, a 1927 silent film now digitally restored and available free online. Definitely worth viewing.

Not to worry, this review avoids any significant spoilers.

Sure, modern cinephiles sneer at silent films, but cinematically, this one is quite well done. What’s more, it offers a rare gestalt with respect not just to divorce generally, but its central role in the fall of the WASP aristocracy, that linchpin presaging the internal collapse of broader WASP society. read more

The “Christocentric Hermeneutic” and the End of Christian Theology and Morality

By Davis Carlton

One of my Facebook friends recently posted that we are approaching the year 2020, the first year of the decade in which ostensibly conservative Christian denominations will capitulate on the sodomite agenda. I think he’s right. There may be a few stragglers by the end of the upcoming decade, but I believe that traditional Christian orthodoxy will be mostly dead by the end of this next decade. A book I recently read helped me to understand how purportedly conservative Christians are abandoning the authority of the Bible and any semblance of Christian doctrine. The book is Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God by Eric Seibert who is a professor of Old Testament at Messiah College. I borrowed this book thinking that it would wrestle with difficult texts in the Old Testament. What I found instead was an altogether radical proposal in which the author suggests that the traditional Christian understanding of divine inspiration is wrong and needs to be replaced. read more

Exclusive: a Preview of the Upcoming Three Presbyterian Stooges Movie

By Colby Malsbury

We here at Tribal Theocrat take tremendous pride in our Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism. Thus, when our ace cub reporter Skip Gailee burst into our editor’s office announcing he had scooped the script for Columbia Pictures’ latest Three Presbyterian Stooges short subject, it almost blew our editor’s green visor off of his lumpen bald head. Who doesn’t laugh uproariously at the zany antics of those incompetents PcaMoe, OpcLarry, and PcusaCurly? We were so pleased with Skip we promised him he would be promoted to an unpaid assistant intern position any year now. read more

The Strangely Familiar Love of the WOKE Church

By Ehud Would

Time: the mid-1960s. Place: Southern California.

Middle Class Christian youth found themselves borne upon a revolutionary tide, the portents of which were more revolutionary still. A growing contingent of young women in particular found themselves groping for a more enlightened expression of Christ: a Christ free of all the old bigotries which had sullied Christendom from the beginning — one which announced social equality between genders, nations, and races. read more

Doug Wilson: Straddling the Fence, and Falling Off Both Sides at Once

By Bret McAtee

“There are alternatives to Tribalism; whether we are talking about massive tribes of white liberals or micro tribes of city league bowlers in Topeka. On the secular side of things those alternatives would include massive Nationalist ideologies like “Nazism,” or Internationalist ideologies – Communism, which is the kind of thing that happens when tribalism tries to scale. Mass ideologies, like petty tribalism, demand loyalty and empathy and to hell with outsiders. The only real alternative to an insider vs. outsider mentality is the Christian faith. Because the claims of Christ are ultimate because He is the head of the Church these claims originate from outside the cosmos, which means His claims trump every other claim. I have a tighter bond with someone who is baptized in the Triune name but who lives in Tehran than I do with my next door neighbor who is not baptized. read more

#DatKanye, Or: How Christian Discernment Took a Holiday When a Renowned Rapper Claimed Regeneration

By Colby Malsbury

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH:

70 AD – the destruction of the Temple and the ushering in of the final judgment upon Jewry.

451 – the Council of Chalcedon codifies Christian orthodoxy for one and all times.

1054 – the permanent schism between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East.

1517 – Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door.

2019 – Kanye West says that Christianity is ‘lit’, or something.

What, too soon? Well, I’m sure Ye will settle for being included as a footnote in this historiography. He is a humble sort, after all. read more

The Spirit of Vatican I: The Lesson to be Learned from the Arbitrary Authority of the Papacy

Martin Luther burns a papal bull, and perhaps future traditional Catholics burning the edicts of the Amazon Synod?

By Davis Carlton

The traditional Catholic world is abuzz over the Amazon Synod currently underway in Rome. The synod is a gathering of bishops selected by Pope Francis ostensibly to discuss issues related to the evangelization of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region in South America. The reason for the uproar is the synod’s “working document” titled Instrumentum Laboris. The document was principally authored by former priest turned Marxist firebrand Leonardo Boff. The document is suffused with pantheist language that has routinely become incorporated into liberation theology. Accusations of apostasy in the mainline Roman Catholic Church are nothing new for radical traditionalist Catholics (commonly abbreviated as RadTrads or just Trads), but the anti-Christian (“Mother Earth”) language is so apparent in this synod document that even Catholic bishops such as Athanasius Schneider and Cardinals Raymond Burke and Walter Brandemuller have called the synod for what it truly is; apostasy. I doubt that this apostasy will come as a terrible shock to our readers. The apostasy of Rome is simply trailing mainline Protestantism at this point. read more

Blackface For Me, But Not For Thee

By Colby Malsbury

Oh, joy. That Crazy Cucked Communist Commissar of all the Canadas – better known to some as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – is up to his antics again. It’s election season in the senior dominion, and the first shot across the bow has proven to be the leakage of a series of musty photos and videos depicting Mr. Dress-up with melted charcoal slathered all over his face. The pics of him in an extraordinarily twee Aladdin getup that wouldn’t be at all out of place at one of the Rothschilds’ infamous Hellfire club masked balls were bad enough, but an even more incendiary vid surfaced of him in an even darker shade of ochre dressed as some kind of Rastafarian hobo and shuckin’ and jivin’ like a kid getting down to the Lancelot Link theme song back in the day. Not the most auspicious start for a pol who has staked his entire reputation as being someone who might be incompetent and high as a kite on something illicit, but who nonetheless really really cares. read more

‘Yesterday’: A Film Review

By C. Merle Davidson

WARNING: SPOILERS TO FOLLOW.

Last summer the Film “Yesterday,” was released to middling success. It was intended to be a bit of a nostalgia piece centered on the Beatles’ Music only with a twist.

The film opens with Jack Malik trying to make it in as a song-writer in the pop music genre. At the very outset it is important to note that Jack Malik is a combination of perhaps the most common male English name of all time combined with a Punjab surname that means “King.” Indeed, Jack’s people hail from the sub-continent of India though Jack and his parents are all thoroughly culturally Anglicized, complete with British accents and partaking of British customs. King Jack’s family (parents) are the very embodiment of British middle class culture. The filmmakers’ contempt for Jack’s parents throughout the film makes that clear. Jack’s parents, as being emblematic of middle class Brits, are never shown in the film as anything but doofuses. It seems to me that the filmmakers are communicating two things in the way that Mr. and Mrs. Malik are portrayed in the film: first that they are just like us, even though they are Punjab, and secondly, because they are such perfect reflections of the middle class English they are to be cast in a negative light.
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Where Libertarianism Leads: Presbyterian Pastor Endorses Legalized Bestiality

By Davis Carlton

Few among us had the foresight to see this coming. I certainly didn’t imagine that I would be writing a response to an ostensibly orthodox Presbyterian pastor arguing for the legality of bestiality. Nevertheless, this is where things stand. We truly live in strange times. The comments that I am responding to are from a Twitter thread on the account of Rev. Chris Caughey, who is a Presbyterian pastor and hosts a podcast called Glory Cloud about the theology of Meredith Kline. Evidently Caughey is not a fan of patriarchy. He begins by alleging that “patriarchy is advocated not by men – not even by mice (what an insult to rodents!) – but by cockroaches who are utterly terrified when light is shined on the darkness of their teaching.” read more