Seven Hills Worth Dying On, Mildly
How to Neutralize Pernicious Falsehoods
By guest author missionary kid ultra.
I am a political moderate. While I am thankful that God has blessed our generation with an army of very gifted provocateurs who agitate in my interest, those of us playing the long game need to be more mindful of maturity.
We don’t want young men to flame out young. We want them to establish themselves well and advocate for the truth consistently across decades.
Developing ever more extremist takes is a great mechanism for shocking people and getting attention online. But it can also trick people into a false sense of being knowledgeable. Sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.
We need to think about how to vet information reliably in a shifting media landscape. This means finding people you can trust, honoring them, and building friendships across dividing lines, even where there might be serious tactical disagreement. For young men to move beyond mere flaming and to begin thinking about more long-term patient toil developing consensus in the culture war, our professionalism must be cultivated. This means being more mild and patient than many would like. But mildness can still orient us in the right direction.
We should seek to inhabit the public world as leaders who can confidently issue basic truth claims, neither getting embroiled in useless squabbles over nuances, nor as scheming neurotics who harbor all kinds of unspeakable taboo thoughts that they never dare whisper.
We must be able to say true things in a humble way. In the long term, we should be less concerned about drawing attention to ourselves and more about quietly building widespread support in the culture for basic truths. These neutralize all the falsehoods designed to silence and destroy us.
God rewards zeal, but I find that cultivating extremism often lends itself to sloppy thinking, inflated egos, and needless quarrels, all of which form the prelude to social division and outright bloodshed. Yes, we have a long way to go to reach our aims of sovereignty. But it is a distance run, not a sprint. We should aim for steadiness in our online rhetoric.
I am a lover of peace.
So, let’s formulate the claims of the Right in the most reasonable way possible. These are opinions that professionals should be able to utter freely in public without cancellation, harassment, loss of business, or threat of harm. We should make a habit of expressing them often, with a spirit of magnanimity, without any malice or resentment. Sadly, the discourse is so corrupt that even mentioning the following claims among friends and family, in the office, in church, or on your social media might cause tensions.
So even to be reasonable, we must be brave.
The Seven Hills Worth Dying On
People groups are not interchangeable, so it’s reasonable that we should limit foreign immigration.
The presence of women can completely reshape how an organization functions, so it’s reasonable for men to exclude them sometimes.
American cities deteriorated after civil rights policies were implemented, so it’s reasonable to oppose civil rights law.
Queer culture is abnormal and is harmful to many who practice it, so it’s reasonable not to want it celebrated or normalized.
It is logical to suspect that anyone who professes loyalty to a foreign state does not want what’s best for America, so it is reasonable to seek to curtail that person’s influence.
Charity is founded on belief in the teaching of Jesus, so it’s unreasonable for unbelievers to feel entitled to charity.
It’s good that White Americans exist, so it’s reasonable to encourage them to have more kids and perpetuate White culture.
Don’t cave when someone implies the opposite of these things. State your disagreement mildly. How often do you see a White person disparage himself for being White? It’s a weird habit, and you don’t have to go along with it, even if it’s not the time to make a big deal about it.
Many might disagree with the framing of the claims being made here, but everyone should be able to agree that at face value these claims are reasonable. Anyone who viscerally reviles you for uttering these claims, or reacts with anger or fear, is obviously being unreasonable.
Our professional spaces and public square should be able to tolerate these sort of mild claims, and any environment which cannot tolerate them is closed-minded to real political disagreement.
Now, advocating extreme, revolutionary applications based on these basic truths can obviously burn bridges. And there will be interminable disagreements about the philosophy or history underlying one claim or another, or reasonable fears about how these claims might be used by malicious people to breed more hate or conflict.
So, it’s important that they are stated in a spirit of peace and kindness, and not enmity. The truth is useless in the mouth of a vile person.
These mild claims also form a helpful matrix by which to assess someone’s alignment. If someone is willing to speak the equivalent of these sentiments, that shows his honesty and simple courage. Friends should generally be willing to say some equivalent of all these mild claims, to promote the information that supports them, and to encourage the people who champion them.
If someone grows uncontrollably emotional and denounces any of these mild claims, or denounces you for uttering them, it proves that this individual is misguided, immature, or actively malevolent. He has been compromised. It doesn’t mean that he has to be demonized or attacked. We can even imagine him as a very kind person with the best of intentions.
It’s just that he can’t be fully respected. He deserves to be sidelined in rational public discourse. He is generally unfit for leadership.
Nevertheless, even though he has lost your trust, it might still be fitting to boost him at times, say, if he is willing to utter five out of seven of the mild claims while in the spotlight.
Heck, let’s be magnanimous: whenever any individual is willing to normalize even one of these claims, we should at least be willing to boost that specific use of that specific perspective, even if he is not truly an ally. We need normality and good sense to be promoted everywhere. Maybe someday he’ll find it in himself to go all the way. Still, to my mind, someone who elevates one of these concerns while ignoring the validity of these other concerns might be unbalanced.
We must have the magnanimity to honor people who aren’t fully aligned with us, but still pushing for good things in the public square.
Some might reasonably disagree on the priority of these issues, that dying on one of these hills will cause more trouble than it’s worth. That’s fine. The broader point is that we need to have a culture where you can be a normal, respectable person who says these things aloud without disgrace and can still get real work done.
Others may be unwilling to speak at length on one of these issues because it could compromise their institutional standing. You will notice that certain good writers you respect Never Touch That One Issue. To some degree, that’s fine, too. They’re in their lane, and it’s not their job to tackle every issue at once in the public square. Encourage them, as long as they are advancing along one of the lines, and not throwing shade on other people in other lanes for cheap applause.
Because of some specific mission, and protecting our greater responsibilities and callings, sometimes we have to be very quiet and diplomatic about certain facts. But I would encourage you all to seek positions in society in which you are allowed to speak freely about all seven of these mild claims. It will be good for your soul, and good for our culture, the more that these positions become commonplace. And, thank God, I think after a long time of repression, they are.
We should encourage public figures to state these mild claims as much as possible, in every possible arena of oratory: posters, influencers, streamers, writers, officials, pastors, professors, schoolteachers, anybody. We all deserve to live in a society where public figures can say these mild truths without hostility.
When we as a culture are totally quiet on all these issues, it helps build the environment in which the opposing liberal platitudes can position themselves as the most respectful, kind, and reasonable way to conduct oneself. Someone who goes out of his way to affirm the opposite of my mild claims, or to demonize those who make them, is stirring up conflict. “No one is illegal.” “The future is female.” “Civil rights was the crowning achievement of American liberty.” “Out and proud.” “Judeo-Christianity.” “Housing is a human right.” “Whiteness doesn’t exist.” Despite the awful consequences, no one is held accountable for continuing to perpetuate these false framings. This is how little lies turn into strongholds.
Currently, we suffer trapped within a grotesque menagerie of purity tests by which we filter out so many possible friends, openly biting and tearing at one another. Every young thinking man goes through American life holding secret beliefs he’d never dare utter aloud. And so the falsehoods continue to exercise their hypnotic power on the masses.
The young man is tempted to lie or be silent to protect himself. He becomes a cowardly conformist, or someday snaps, burning everything down, reviling all of the weak people around him. Hating that he saw their weakness in himself. Exiled, he finds himself slowly going insane because he cut himself off from the genuinely reasonable people in his life. He develops new dark cosmologies in private.
So yes, everyone else is wrong. That doesn’t mean that you should disrespect them just to feel better about your place in the world.
Ultimately, no one is pure but Christ. We just need to accept that no one we know will have a perfect heart of justice or lucid insight into all things. So we cannot become emotionally dependent on them as our guides through this chaotic world. And we must deal with them mildly, even when stung by stupidity and betrayal.
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