No Boats Offshore

By: Chris Johnson

I saw this quote in an X comment today, and it’s stuck in my head: “We have retreated all the way to the beach, and there are no boats offshore.”

The account that posted that was talking about Donald Trump, “He isn’t ‘conservative’ in the true sense of the word, that is one who conserves the status quo.

“However, there is little left to conserve. We have retreated all the way to the beach, and there are no boats offshore.”

Military metaphors are apropos in political speech. After all, the promise of the form of government commonly called, “democratic,” is that the problems once solved with combat are now addressed through voting. While the threat to our immediate physical safety is alleviated through this system, the political realities are no less dramatic.

When we speak of lasting political change, it is often through language of historical battles which marked such changes in the past: Crossing the Rubicon, the Barbarians at the gates, a Trojan Horse, “Remember the Alamo,” storming the beaches, etc. It would be our mistake to categorize these references as myths or metaphors, rather than the decisive actions of our ancestors that have made lasting civilizational change.

“We have retreated all the way to the beach, and there are no boats offshore” may be a metaphor for us, but the threat that it communicates is no less real than if it were stated literally.

The point is that when you’re being attacked (politically or not) and there’s no place to retreat to, all that’s left to do is to follow Trump’s challenge when he rose from behind the podium in Butler, PA with a .223 sized hole gushing blood from his ear: “Fight.”

When Trump says “fight,” he means politically, no matter how that statement might get spun by his enemies in the months ahead, but the implications of this election are every bit as real as those historic battles. This is an existential “fight” for a way of life that we are right to not want to lose.

In the introduction to his book, The End of Everything, Military Historian Victor Davis Hanson says it this way, “The continual disappearance of prior cultures across time and space should warn us that even familiar twenty-first-century states can become as fragile as their ancient counterparts, given that the arts of destruction march in tandem with improvement in defense.”

Among the most effective “arts of destruction” in our day is information warfare: misinformation, disinformation, and narrative formation. The “news” that is presented to us and the “popular opinions” that are crafted for us to share are sculpted by their sources to create a world in which the only “right” thing to do is the action which also gives them more power and authority.

Voting and political activism aren’t the only way to push back. It certainly isn’t the only ground we’ve ceded in our “retreat to the beach.” At least as important as political action is building cultural strongholds – the “improvement in defense” – which celebrate the natural order and provides a space for discipleship and sharing Truth, i.e. church communities, county fairs, youth sports, practicing hospitality in our homes, etc.

I don’t think it’s true, quite yet, that we’ve “retreated all the way to the beach,” or perhaps we have as a culture, but there are still pockets of resistance peppered around the nation and the world. And I don’t think those pockets can ever be stamped out, because noticing nature is a practice that can’t ever be squelched. What God’s Word says is true can’t just be scribbled over and ignored. Nature always wins eventually, like a sapling popping up in a crack in the concrete.

Of course, as Christians, we know Who wins in the end. He laughs in derision at the schemes of the nations which we find so distressing.

Our civilization may have “retreated to the beach,” and there may be “no boats offshore,” yet we must never forget that it is our God who “drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.” (Exodus 14:21)

 

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