The United Kingdom is composed of five (maybe more) identifiable ethnic groups: The English, the Scots, the Welsh, the Scots-Irish of Northern Ireland, and the Cornish of Cornwall. From all outward appearances they are all one people, but appearances can be deceiving. While their skins are the same, their hearts and minds are those of separate peoples, and the UK struggles to hold it all together with the Scots especially wanting to break away and form a separate nation.

I am slow to the table, but the events of the past year surrounding the ethnic uprising of Black Lives Matter and its echo chamber of People of Color (a loose confederation of anyone not of Western European ancestry and/or culture) have driven home to me that I am a member of a tribe and that the nation I had dedicated my life to defending was not, as I had supposed, One People but a mishmash of many different peoples with very different cultures, identities, and political aspirations who want to take this nation in many different directions.

There is not one American people all going in the same direction with a shared vision of a glorious future. Our Congress with its various caucuses demonstrates this well. Of course there are the party caucuses, Democrat and Republican. Then there are the ethnic caucuses promoting the interests of the minor tribes: The Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Asian Caucus, etc. And there are the interest caucuses: progressive (i.e. socialist), conservative, homosexual, and so forth. We are not one people. Nor shall we ever be! And, as reason dictates, a nation divided against itself cannot long stand.

The scripture says we must be born out of our ethnic, political, and social identities, and born into the family of God. It makes clear that a member of God’s family is something entirely new. My skin may declare, “European,” but my heart and mind say, “Christian.” May it ever be so.

I don’t know what your skin or your pocketbook say about you. But if you let those things define your being you are missing out on a better now and a glorious yet to be.

Woke up this morning to a new federal holiday, Juneteenth. Not much discussion but a lot of chatter on what or why, but now soldiers and other federal employees get another paid day off, so from their perspective this must be a good thing, but for the real world, is Juneteenth just a summertime version of Kwanzaa?

Most of what I have been hearing and reading in the media about the 19th of June, 1865 is factually incorrect – not that having their facts straight is of very great import when it comes to reportage from either Left or Right – so a little American history is in order.

June 19th is the day the Union Army entered Galveston, Texas under the command of Major General Gordon Granger after the surrender of the Confederate Army in Texas on June 2. Upon entry he issued a General Order that was read throughout Galveston Island declaring that the Emancipation Proclamation that had gone into effect on January 1st, 1863 was now the law of the land in the regions of Texas that he controlled. And that is an important distinction. We don’t celebrate VJ day on December 7th when Japan attacked the United States, we note that our war with Japan ended on September 2 – that’s when they laid down their arms. (But the conflict did not end even then. The last Japanese soldier didn’t surrender until 1974 – that’s when his war with the United States ended.)

So follow me closely here: The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in Confederate States and not in slave states that remained loyal to the Union or Indian tribes, and only in Confederate States under Union control. Emancipation was a gradual process and not a once-for-all event. As Union armies conquered the territory of states that had left the Union and after January 1st, 1863, the slaves in those regions were emancipated. (As an historical note as long as we’re doing history here, the Choctaw Indian tribe in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) did not free their slaves until 1866, a full year after the Civil War had ended and the 13th Amendment ratified.)

Got it? Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9th, 1865 is the date on which we can mark the end of the Civil War even though it continued until June in parts of the Confederate States. The emancipation of the slaves throughout the Confederate States was a gradual process that began on January 1, 1863 almost two years after the secession of the seven major slave states (eventually eleven) from the Union. So from an historial perspective, Juneteenth marks a very minor event in that greatest of all American wars. It doesn’t even mark the end of slavery in the territory of the United States at large. December 18th, 1865 would be that date. That was the day the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and slavery officially ended.

So why has Juneteenth suddenly become a federal holiday? Because some people want it to be. It’s as simple as that. General Granger’s order may have been a minor event in a major conflict, but those who want to keep the matter of ethnicity front and center in the American mind find it important. Those of us who are part of the dominant ethnic group here in the United States can never say we or our ancestors have treated those of other ethnicities with the dignity and respect that should be theirs as fellow descendants of Adam. While we might think ourselves and our system of government to be the most wonderful the world has ever seen, the truth is we have behaved little differently than every other people in every other part of the world who have shared this planet and Adam’s corrupted nature. The strong oppress the weak and the majority lord it over the minority.

You can grumble and complain that the ruling elites are just shoving the 1619 Project down your unwilling throat with this new federal holyday (yes, I purposefully spelled it that way). Or you can, like me, use Juneteenth to say that slavery officially ended here almost 150 years ago and its time to let it go and start judging men and women, boys and girls, not by the condition of their ancestors but by the content of their characters and their comportment in their daily lives and then to work to make certain that every ethnicity has equal access to the benefits of American citizenship.

The world now, as it has been through most of recorded history, is ruled by empires – and empires clash as they compete for dominance.

I spent 30 years of my life – how time flies when you’re having fun – in my nation’s uniform defending our territory against the Soviet Empire and my miniscule contribution, along with the contributions of millions of other brothers-in-arms, lead to the downfall of that empire. I say this to let you know I’m not against the American Empire. As Lee Greenwood would say, “I love this land!”

On this date, 16 Jun 2021, three major empires, and a few rising ones, are contending for the right to rule the world. The most dominant empire right now is the new kid on the block, The American Empire which rose to power in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. With our client or vassal states in Europe, Asia, the South Seas, Africa, and Latin America, we have ruled the world since 1945. The US dollar is the world’s currency and some of our vassal states have even monetized their ecomony to the dollar.

The other major empires right now are China and Russia.

The Russian Empire exercised control over Eastern Europe and large parts of Asia (Even the defining of continents is an expression of empire by the way. Where does Europe end and Asia begin?) and into North America for almost 300 years before it collapsed in the Communist Revolution at the beginning of the 20th Century. The Soviet Empire can be seen as a hiccup in Russian history – it held brief sway – less than 50 years – from the end of the 2nd World War until its demise and replacement by Russia in 1992. Today the Russian Empire under its new Tsar, Vladimir Putin, is reestablishing its dominion at that junction between Europe and Asia where it has always been the major power.

The Chinese Empire is far older. The Chinese ideogram (written language character) for itself is a square with a dot in the middle. Since forever, more or less, thay have called themselves, “The Middle Kingdom,” as in The-Center-of-The-World Kingdom. Americans love to talk about “American Exceptionalism.” Well the Chinese have seen themselves as the exceptional civilization since long before we were a twinkle in our founders’ eyes. From the view of the Chinese Empire, the American presence in places like Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and even Japan is seen as an encroachment by a contending empire into their territory. And as the Chinese Empire experiences a rebirth it will do all in its power to restore its dominion over what once were its vassal states.

You can see what’s going on. When the American Empire sends its military or extends its economic reach into regions of the world the other empires see as their own, conflict is certain. Mr. Biden’s recent visit to our vassal states in Europe can be seen as the American Empire strengthening its grip on its clients and doing a little swordrattling in the process. But of this I can be certain, our empire will be opposed by the others, and nations not currently dominated by the great powers will continue to resist their control.

History and empire building are interesting, but what is a biblical view of it all? Jesus made it clear that there would be conflicts between peoples, ethnicities, nation states, empires until the kingdoms of this age are consumed by the kingdom to come. It’s what Christians pray for everytime they repeat The Lord’s Prayer – “thy kingdom come.” When we pray that we are praying for the Battle of Armagedon and the end of this Age of Empires. As much as I love my country, I recognize it is evil and corrupt, and I want to see its reign ended in the reign of Christ.

I don’t know, nor does anyone else, how God is bringing about the end of everything we know and love. Will The American Empire be anything but a memory when Christ returns? Or will the American Empire have been replaced by a people more fierce than ourselves when that Day comes? It all depends on when God has determined for The Return of The King. If it is within the brief time yet remaining for me and my children and grandchildren, then, yes, the American Empire will yet be here to oppose the coming kingdom. If centuries are yet to pass – O Lord, may it no be so! – before Christ returns to end all earthly powers forevermore, then this empire may well have faded onto the pages of a yet to be written history.

I’m not laying a claim to prophecy, but I believe the Age of Denominations is coming to an end.

God raised up and has used Christian denominations (Denomination – a subset of the whole, as in a dollar is a denomination of US currency. There is always and ever only one Church and any organization that declares itself the Church rather than a part of the Church is immediately to be seen as not included in the Church, but that’s an issue for another day.) to advance the kingdom of Christ in the world through the proclamation of the gospel. This has been true since Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door and set off the Protestant Reformation. The past 500 years have seen denominations rise, do a work of ministry, fossilize into formality, fall away from trust in scripture and in God’s leading, become religious bureaucracies, and after falling away from Christ, fall into irrelevancy – and usually remain as zombies eating at the flesh of the living.

Large religious bureaucracies cannot maintain the purity of the Church for long. They become embroiled in contests for power and position, and are quick to sacrifice principle to maintain membership. As long as there has been a consensus on what constitutes the gospel and godly living, denominations could stay in God’s toolbox. But that is no longer the case. Denominations digress from the clear Word of God on the most basic of issues. When a church or denomination rejects the clear teaching of scripture with a, “Did God really say . . . ?”, you know that organization or congregation has turned from Yahweh to baal.

The short-range future of the Church as we await the Return of the King is, I believe, strong self-governing congregations joined in voluntary association with other bible-based churches. They will own their property, write their constitutions and bylaws, elect or appoint their pastor/elders, and support external ministries as they see fit. Christian organizations will no longer have the political power and prestige they have enjoyed in the past – and that is a good thing. Political power corrupts the visible church. The world demands the church surrender its allegiance to Christ alone as the cost of a place at the political table. And faulty human beings, even and especially those draped in clerical garb, are quick to surrender the blessed hope for that place.

Christians in the US and Canada, be prepared to be the off-scouring of the culture and relegated to the same anachronistic irrelevancy as the churches in Europe. The bishops will continue to adjust their robes and swing their censors. The denominational churches will continue their ceremonies and rituals. But they are standing at the altars in Bethel and not New Jerusalem. You who believe God and his word will be considered wild-eyed extremists – fanatics to be suppressed or ignored. But when you see these things taking place, look up! Our redemptions is drawing nigh.

Three words, seemingly quite different, mean the same in the current social context: Ethnicity, tribe, community. All three words mean an identity separate from the larger group. When a politician says he/she wants to represent his “community,” he is making clear that his community stands separate from the whole. The word, “race,” is often used as a substitute for ethnicity or tribe, but because race is a superficial identifier rather than one of essence, it is a poor descriptor. A man or woman can be of African or Asian descent and be absolutely in the mainstream of Western Civ. And one can be a descendant of European settlers and be firmly fixed in the hip-hop community.

I wander off in the weeds here just to make the point that the more an ethnic or community group sees itself under siege or threat from the outside, the more violent it becomes. When we look at the world around us we see groups who are unusually violent. Take the Palestinians and their constant attacking of the Jewish Israelis as one example. From the outside it doesn’t make a lot of sense to attack someone who is certain to cause massive destruction in return. But Palestinians see themselves as a threatened community abandoned by those they thought their allies and they strike out.

The example closer to home is the death and destruction among those who see themselves members of the “black community.” Black men are not born more violent or murderous than any other sinner in the human race. Yet men who see themselves as members of an oppressed community, men who only comprise 7% of the US population are responsible for 50% of the murders here. Again, it is not because they are intrinsically evil. It’s not because Black men are more violent, more homicidal, than men of Asian or European origins. They are not closer to some primitive evolutionary ancestors than other men. We are all children of the same Adam. No, the violence we see in those who identify as members of a persecuted community here is the same as that of the Palestinians and the the Serbs and the Irish (during the Troubles).

If you don’t identify as a member of a minority community, you, like me, may scratch your head when members of those communities engage in riotous mayhem when a criminal fires upon the police and is killed in return as they did in Minneapolis. Well, when you don’t see yourself as one of “them”, as in a member of the larger community, then any police action is seen as an assault on your community. Then, as with Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israel, the community strikes out in self-destructive violence against its “oppressors”, and because of its heightened state of alert against aggression from the dominant community, more violence is committed against one another. Minor slights result in gunfire and bodies pile in the morgue.

Is there a solution? I don’t think so in any secular sense. The only thing that has worked outside the United States is separation. Ireland broke off from the United Kingdom and many Scots want to follow suit. Yugoslavia broke up into the separate ethnic territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Czechoslovakia became Czechia and Slovakia. Ukraine broke off from Russia, and Pakistan from India, and then Bangladesh from Pakistan. Tribes demand tribal territory. People with separate ethnic identities don’t seem to be able to live together in peace. We’ve been trying it here in the US for some time, but the voices demanding we get into our separate ethnic enclaves and divide the spoils are increasing. E pluibus unum may not long endure. Currently the dominant power structures are doing the Marie Antoinette thing and trying to placate the demands of minor ethnic groups, but eventually the mob will not be placated and will be dragging them off to the guillotine.

The only lasting solution is a new identity. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. As Jesus put it: we must be born from above into a new community – a new ethnos. That is what God is doing through the gospel. I’m not saying “church” or “religion.” Church and religion can be just as tribal as “Country” or “R&B”, “Rock & Roll or Rap.” But true faith in God through Jesus Christ is a total transformation. All superficial identifiers of skin tone, hair texture, language, or ancestry fade into insignificance and all we see is Jesus and his brothers – and mine.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

So begins our, the American, Declaration of Independence. “Consent of the Governed,” does not necessarily mean democracy. The American colonies, and after them The United States of America, were by no means democratic institutions, but those dwelling therein consented to governance.

Over the years since 1776 we have added voices to the chorus of consent other than the landowners, professionals, tradesmen, and merchants who formed our original constituency, but the universal principle has remained: legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed.

But what happens when the people do not consent? Our history is not all unicorns and rainbows. From the earliest times since our breaking away from English rule people have risen up against what they considered intolerable oppression by the larger government. Even before our Consitution was ratified, Shays Rebellion arose against excessive taxation, and the ink wasn’t yet dry when western Pennsylvania rose up in the Whiskey Rebellion – again over what they saw as oppressive taxation. And do I even need mention our American Civil War when the Southern States cried out in union, “We do not consent!” They made the case that as they had joined the Union voluntarily they could leave the Union in like manner and they put forward their non-consent by taking up arms to eject the civil and military representatives of their “former” government and establish a new one more to their liking. That didn’t go well. American fought American and brother fought brother in the bloodiest war ever fought by the United States. It ended with the devastation of the South, the imposition of martial law in the rebel territories, and a slow return to the status quo.

2020 began a new chapter in our “We do not consent!” story. We have seen a greater diversity of rebels than I have ever read in our history. Two rebellions are running simultaneously: there is the Trumpist Rebellion that broke forth in violence in January of 2021 at the nation’s capitol, and there is the Black Rebellion that flamed to life with the death of George Floyd and is still manifesting in our cities. Both of these rebel movements have been festering for some time and there is no end in sight.

The Trumpist Rebellion is rooted in a resentment to the triumphalism of the “Progressive” movement. The rise of militant feminism after the Second World War, the devolution of the traditional family and traditional values, and the general sense that “my people are being replaced by those people” have brought this resentment to a boil. To their eyes the “Progressives” are winning the struggle to determine what America is and will become – and they don’t consent to that future. Every rainbow and Black Lives Matter banner, every affirmative action by the government that puts them in the back of the line, signals their ethnic group’s relegation to insignificance, and they are in rebellion against that future.

The Black Rebellion grows from similar resentments. It is important here to point out that ethnicity and race are not the same thing. Race is a superficial classification based on superficial variations in physiognomy. Ethnicity on the other hand is the declaration of “this is who I am.” Peoples of different races can be of the same ethnicity and peoples of the same race can be of different ethnicities. Serbians, Croats, and Bosnians are of the same race but of very distinct (and usually antagonistic) ethnicities. The same can be said of the conflicts ongoing in Africa, the Indian sub-continent, China, and elsewhere. While there can be, and often are, conflicts between peoples of different racial expressions, race is not the most important element in the conflict. It’s not about “what I am” but “who I am.”

Anyway, the Black Rebellion is an ethnic conflict. Black America, by and large, has a separate ethnic identity marked by the way they speak, the music and art they produce, the way they dress, the food they eat, and the way they worship. A cultural anthropologist could drill this down deeper and point all the other distictives that define this ethnicity, but this is sufficient for my purposes. It is enough to say that Black Americans are a distinct ethnic group with distinct ethnic beliefs and practices. (Distinct even from their distant relatives on the African continent, I should add.)

I, in no wise condemn these dissenters. Whether it has been the back of the bus, a separate but unequal public education system, redlined ghettoes, diminished economic opportunty, (and the list goes on ad nauseum) the Black ethnos has been given the short end of the stick. How could they not resent and rebel? But what happens or is to happen when large segments of this ethnos no longer consents to be governed by the larger community? That is the question that now confronts us. Let’s take Milwaukee for example. What happens when the Black community there will no longer accept even reasonable and even-handed policing? The last uprising there was because a Black criminal violently resisted arrest and was killed in the process. Now in the White community (ethnos) a White criminal killed by the police would be greeted by a collective shrug and a “he should have surrended.” But the Black community in Milwaukee is rejecting policing by the larger community regardless the crime committed.

We – big tribe America – have a choice: we can either stop imposing our political will upon the Black tribe through policing or impose it through greater police or military action. Yes, we can bandaid the situation by concessions and bribery, but that will not provide a lasting solution. We can shove the Trumpists a little lower in the feeding chain, but that will just raise their resentment and spirit of rebellion. Or . . . Or we can recognize that the Black ethnos are a separate and distinct people like the Indian tribes and work out an arrangement in which they can self-police to a greater extent. I really don’t want to see another “balkan” conflict on our soil.

In December of 1890 the United States of America and the Lakota were at war. By 1890, the wars between the American Indians and the United States were almost over with the Indians being overwhelmed by United States technology and firepower. Anyway, in December of 1890 the 7th US Calvary was doing cleanup operations against the Lakota. They had surrounded the remnants of the warriors and their families at Wounded Knee in South Dakota and were engaged in disarming them. Depending on whose account we read, the disarmament went south somehow and fighting resumed. The 7th had overwhelming firepower and when the smoke cleared between 250-300 Indian men, women, and children, and 30 something soldiers, lay dead.

The US Army calls this, “The Battle of Wounded Knee,” and social historians call it, “The Wounded Knee Massacre.” Whatever you want to call it, we can all call it an unnecessary tragedy. The Indian Wars were over. The United States had won. I know that sounds weird, but the Indian tribes were Americans (as in they were here first) but they were not citizens of the United States of America. They were aliens in the the eyes and the laws of the USA. Even after the end of the Indian Wars, the United States Congress didn’t confer birthright US citizenship on Native Americans until 1924 – largely because of the bravery and dedication of Indians in The Great War.

Even today, 140 years after Wounded Knee and almost 100 years after birthright citizenship, the United States and the Sovereign Tribes haven’t got all the details of our relationship worked out.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with the Black Holocaust? I said I was going to write about that not the Indian Wars. Much, I believe.

History is messy – as is the entire story of how one tribe or ethnicity relates to another, and how that story is told.

Yesterday (June 1, 2021), Mr. Biden, in behalf of the United States government, gave an impassioned speech to commemorate the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot or Massacre. (If it was a race riot, it was a riot by the European-descended against the African-descended and not the other way around.) It was a tragic massacre of some 300 people and the destruction of their homes and businesses much as had been the outcome at Wounded Knee.

If we allow the recent race (a word I hate to use because it doesn’t capture the reality that ethnic identity is far more significant in the history of conflict between peoples that their “race.”) riots (I’m not all that old, so the first one I remember well is the Los Angeles Riot of 1965) be seen as the model of ethnic violence in the US, we will miss the larger historical record. While the riots since the 1960s have been mostly Black-on-White, or Black-on-Black, that is not the way it has always been. If we look back on ethnic violence in the US since the end of the Civil War and the conferral of birthright citizenship on the former slaves in 1868, the major riots were White-on-Black culminating in Rosewood in 1923. I don’t know how you feel about this, but it boggles my mind that we are less that 100 years from the day when it seemed quite ok for my migrant ancestors to take up arms against the children of their former slaves.

This impulse to suppress those peoples who “are not us” is a universal human desire- I see that the separation of humanity into distinct ethnicities at Babel as recorded in Genesis 11 lies at the base of all ethnic conflict. It may be universal, but it is a universality that is an expression of our fallen from grace and into sin condition. “What is” is not what is good regardless its universality.

Anyway, accurate data are not available but anywhere between 3000 and 6000 Black men, women, and children were unlawfully killed by White groups and mobs between 1868 and 1923. After Rosewood it became ones and twos rather than mass uprisings, so while all murders are heinous, they aren’t in the ethnic uprisings count – a few men killing just a few isn’t the act of the many (except when the many refuse to convict in the face of overwhelming evidence). For 50 years after their inclusion in the American Experiment, the governing authorities in this country turned a blind eye to the persecution and suppression of these newest citizens.

And now I get to the point of this essay: the persecution and oppression of Black Americans in the past is not the Black Holocaust. The Black Holocaust is the bastard child of the past. The American reality for her Black children is that today some 7000 Black men, women, and children were murdered by other Black men last year and the numbers are rising! Generations of oppression have produced this Black Holocaust. Yes, every murderer is responsible for his own crimes and he should pay with his life for them, but if we do not recognize that these murders are the fruit of the past we can never understand what is happening and search in the right place for a solution.

I don’t have THE secular answer. White guilt won’t work; it soothes the White liberal and angers the rest. Throwing money into the inner cities won’t work – the cities aren’t equipped to use that money wisely and well. We’ve got to be able to contextualize the persecutions of the past within the broader context of all of ethnic conflicts throughout all of recorded (and much unrecorded) history. If the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians, although of the same “race” can’t coexist, what right have we to assume we can sing Kum-Bah-Yah and everything will be fixed? We must get beyond the denial of those who think everything would be just fine if our Black citizens would just quit rioting, killing each other, and get a job, and the denial of those who think we can end the Black Holocaust if we would only throw billions into their ethnic enclaves and usher in the new age of equity and equality. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put forth every effort to do the impossible. Even a bandaid is a benefit when no other cure is at hand.

Yes, of course, I have the Christian (God’s) solution to the problem. The GOSPEL is the only answer to ethnic conflict. In Christ God is creating a new humanity. In Christ he is healing the division of Babel. In Christ men and women of every tribe of Adam’s descendants are being made members of that new tribe that shall live and reign with him forever. In Christ the purchase of his blood are again one human race. This is the real E Pluribus Unum.

The eternal and lasting hope of the Christian is the return of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. Death, for the Christian, is the blink of the eye. We close our eyes in death and open them to see the face of Jesus the Returning King.

Time ceases at death. The soul is not sleeping in death although death is referred to as sleep throughout scripture. The dead in Christ are not in storage waiting for Resurrection Day. Death is analogous to sleep in that we are unconscious to the passage of time in sleep.

Time is not a fixture of God. Time is a creation of God. He created time when he created matter. He says of himself, “I was, I am, I am to come.” God sits outside of his creation and thus he sits outside of time.

I do not fully understand the physics of time. But I’ve learned enough to know that it can be sped up, slowed down, and turned back on itself. The way I envision death is that we all live on a timeline that begins with our conception and (in our present existence) ends at our death. But something happens to that timeline at death: it leaves its plane and loops to that point in time when Christ returns to raise his chosen ones. We are, in some sense, transported through time to the Resurrection. We fall asleep and awaken in new bodies at the voice of our returning king.

The beauty of this is that, as it is written in the 11th chapter of Hebrews, all of God’s redeemed, from Abel to the last believer on earth are made perfect in our new bodies simultaneously. No one is going on before and waiting impatiently for the redemption of the rest. We close our eyes in death individually and in time; we open our eyes in resurrection simultaneously and in eternity. Awesome!

Materialism as a philosophy says that all material things have material causes. This is only partially true. While the material is material-caused, the spiritual can alter the material state. Thus a demon-controlled individual may have a material cause to his schizophrenia or drug addiction that is the result of demonic action.