The Company We Keep

Building a Tribe

Most of us, for the course of entire lives, are the product of the company we keep.

Those of us who homeschooled our children were worried about more than just their academic progress.  At their most vulnerable stages of life, we were seeking protection against the fickle nihilism of the crowd — the public school teacher dedicated to promoting gender confusion, the band of friends without any moral or spiritual anchor, the Brownian chaos of a people without God, making up the rules as they go.  We didn’t want the brilliant, beautiful souls given to us turned over to spiritual anorexia and sexual gluttony.  Dare we say it?  We had a higher standard.  We didn’t want our daughter debauched by some gang member raised by wolves.  We didn’t want our son urged onto gender transition by an angry lesbian in a position of authority.

So we kept them home.  We chose their company.  We even chose the ideas to which they were exposed.  We created our own family-sized Overton window, and tried to fill our homes with good music, great books, and the village life of a “city on a hill.”  From the beginning, of course, the kids knew we were flawed, that mom and dad routinely didn’t meet the standard, that there was always tension between “what could be” and “what is,” but, given the alternative, it seemed like the only sane sort of tribe to build.

What we forget, as adults, is that this never ends.  All of us, at every stage of life, absorb either the nectar or the poison of the crowd we keep.  I know a politician who started out as kind of firebrand for liberty and the Constitution.  He rose through the state legislatures and on to Washington DC, where the crowd and the money changed him.  He started bragging about the money he brought back to the district, (instead of the taxes he saved us), and the environmental regulation he endorsed, (instead of the regulation he dismantled).  Rumor had it, he became something of a skirt-chaser.  Haven’t we all seen this?  Idealistic men turned into vying, venal beasts, lunging for the pork and the goodies?

It’s a very old story: fervent young Christian men turned into bland, pastoral, politically-correct academics by “Christian” seminaries.  Idealistic young actors vowing to take only redemptive roles, only to go full-frontal and debauched in the sort of “groundbreaking and courageous” dramatic performances only Harvey Weinstein would enjoy.   What about the star athlete, raised in a Christian home, who will be pressured to endorse tomorrow’s half-time abomination?

As a homeschool dad, I would have this lamentation for fellow homeschool dads: “we created a school in the home, but we never created the homeschool village — the place to which they could graduate.”  They went on to godless public agencies and Fortune 500 enclaves, controlled by fevered HR departments.  They discovered a world where they were not free — not in the slightest — to discuss the ideas, the politics, and the spirituality that formed them–and some of them, lamentably, were more changed by their new flock, than the flock was changed by them.

The church, and big extended families, represent a kind of bulwark against this social catastrophe.  Jeff Durbin, in Arizona, describes his church as a “seven days a week congregation.”  Jack Hibbs, at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, has created not just a place of worship, but a kind of city on a hill.  Doug Wilson, in Idaho, has claimed a lot of that real estate for Christ, with a network of businesses owned by his congregants.  I’m talking here about community, the sort of community that created America itself.  America, I tell people, is really New England and New England is really the Leyden fellowship of Pastor Robinson — a church in search of a place they could call home, a place where, under God, they could govern themselves.

There’s a reason Don Lemon and his fellow demon degenerates attacked a church.  They want us all disconnected, sheep without a shepherd, and, ultimately, sheep without each other, scattered, uncomforted by “good company.”

I know whereof I speak. I was one of those kids who barely survived Stanford and its weird Overton window.  I can remember sitting in former church, filled with graduate writers and poets, and I looked around at these people.  I took note over personal ambition, their false progressive piety, and their weird sexual ethics, and I thought to myself, “I don’t want to be around these weirdoes forever.”  For me, after Christ, I think this place, the farm, helped save and sustain me, because I get to meet the most incredible people.  I purposely CHOOSE not to keep company with those who would destroy me, or my family.

Think about it seriously — the company you keep.  Change them, or change your company.

Categorised in: Dominion

This post was written by Jim Riley