The two… the pollution of the Christian church and the demise of traditional America, unfortunately, are inexorably linked.
What kind of pollution am I talking about? The kind that Larry Alex Taunton writes about in this week’s American Spectator [1]:
Over the course of his career, Tim Keller has been a light for the Christian faith in the pulpit. He has also written several helpful books. Yet, bizarrely, he has recently embraced the so-called social justice movement. In a series of articles and tweets this year, Keller, confusing Christianity with the Democrat presidential platform, pronounced authoritatively on issues ranging from “systemic racism” to the “corporate guilt” of white America. All of this, of course, was simply a precursor to his inevitable conclusion [2]:
when it comes to taking political positions, voting, determining alliances and political involvement, the Christian has liberty of conscience. Christians cannot say to other Christians “no Christian can vote for … ” or “every Christian must vote for … ” unless you can find a biblical command to that effect.
Such a position would seem reasonable in, say, the 1916 presidential election between incumbent Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican Charles Evans Hughes. But in 2020, a year when Democrats represent all that is unholy? I can think of several biblical commands that made the choice for any Bible-believing Christian absolutely clear in this election. I mean, would Jesus endorse a radical pro-abortion and pro-infanticide policy; every sordid sexual agenda, even the sexualization of small children; a complete disregard for the rule of law; and open hostility toward His followers? I don’t think so.
I’m telling you, I wish I’d have had this to hand the other night, when someone close to me started rattling on about how Christians had sold their soul for Donald Trump.
A generation ago, pop star Bonnie Tyler famously asked the question, “Where have all the good men gone?” Since then, the situation has only gotten worse, Bonnie. As C. S. Lewis noted, men in the Western world have largely been emasculated, and men in the Church are seldom an exception to this decades-long trend. To stand strong for one’s faith in Jesus Christ and push back at a culture that, in the words of Isaiah 5:20, “call[s] evil good and good evil” is today seen to be “divisive,” “unloving,” “bigoted,” and “intolerant.”
Look at the top of this website and you’ll see the line “those who tolerate everything stand for nothing.”
Think of it this way… was Jesus being unloving, bigoted, and intolerant with the money changers? (Ref: John chapter 2)
You’ll find people in the Christian churches of today, making that claim.
This is because evangelicals in the English-speaking world have confused Christ’s command to love others with being civil as if that were an attribute of God. (It isn’t.) As a consequence, a superficial, self-righteous, good-for-nothing pietism that prefers tone to truth and style to substance has displaced authentic Christianity in many of the roughly four hundred thousand churches in America. This doctrinal malpractice has given us a generation of men, Christian and otherwise, who are what Lewis called “men without chests.”
Don’t know the sort of Christians I am talking about? I’ll give you a hint. They are the sort who will, upon reading this article, take great offense at what I have written here and waste no time in letting me know it, but are not particularly offended by the sixty-one million children murdered in the holocaust of abortion since 1973, by universities that are incubators of radicalism, by Democrats who are compiling a “hit list” of Trump supporters, or by the godlessness of the Marxism they openly advocate, which has killed no less than 125 million people in the twentieth century alone.
It’s no accident that what he describes here is a parallel to the liberation theology that was preached in the church that Barack Obama supposedly said in for 20 years every Sunday.
And this passage, referring to Baptist pastor John Piper, would have been particularly potent to the conversation of the other night:
One wonders how he knows Trump is unrepentant and why he is the one to blame for factiousness. Did the president concoct a Russia collusion narrative? Did he spy on Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Did he illegally use the FBI to push false evidence? Did he do anything justifying impeachment? Did he support the looting, burning, and rioting in our streets? Did he take money from China through a family member serving as a proxy? No.
As for his vulgarity and boastfulness, I suggest Piper get out more. Trump is fairly typical of the chest-beating, plain-speaking businessmen one finds in places like New York, New Jersey, Boston, and Philadelphia.
I am reminded of a quotation attributed (perhaps inaccurately) to George Orwell: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Orwell or not, the sentiment is true. Like many of those who do violence on our behalf for the sake of our freedom, Trump is a rough man. That’s too much for Piper. Oddly, Piper represents a segment of the evangelical population that demands his president bear the characteristics of a Mother Teresa. Does he make the same demands of his barber, his mechanic, his accountant, or his surgeon? One suspects not.
Indeed not.
And frankly, I defy anyone to explain to me how any member of the establishment of either party qualifies as having the characteristics of Mother Teresa. (Snicker)
I have repeatedly suggested in these spaces and maintain today that America has such could not have been established with islam, any of the pantheistic religions, or atheism as it’s cultural center point. Even the non-believer has to admit that the cultural values inherent in Christianity as taught about the time of the founding of this country are what gave us our concept of everything, particularly of Rights.
I suggest that the pollution of the Christian Church by the left is, from a cultural perspective, precisely equivalent to the total elimination of the church.
I am reminded of a book I went through a couple of months ago called”Woke Church”, which, iirc, was written by Pastor Eric Mason. That book seemed to be to me a rehashing of W.E.B. DuBois, who believed, among other screwball ideas that capitalism was the direct cause of racism. Made him all the rage at Harvard, that one did… But of course flies in the face of Dr Walter Williams Dr Thomas Sowell, or for that matter Glenn Lowry… All of which have spent the majority of their lives thinking and writing about race and who uniformly concluded that racism’s biggest enemy is capitalism.
(So guess which way this supposedly new Christianity leans…)
When you change the religion which is at the root of a culture you change the culture itself. When you change the culture, you change the cultural perception of human Rights. Jefferson in his brilliance told us that we the new American culture…
“….hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights;
Is it any secret that the left has been trying to convince us that rights come from government, not from God?
Make no mistake, that’s the direction that we are being pushed in. That change will allow government to remove our rights at its whim. It’s time for Christians to start pushing back, hard.