A Little Bit On Politics, The Church, And The Bible

We are currently looking for a Church. I listened to a preacher on line, one that I actually appreciated for not pretending that the things I deal with in my heart and head all week are not actually happening and so ignores it, and I was struck by a thing he said near the end of his sermon. (Sermon title:  “Psalm 73”) I’ll paraphrase it from memory.  He said that some Christians see Donald Trump as the savior of America, then he laughed and talked about how absurd that was. Well, I couldn’t agree more. But I couldn’t help but wonder where he got the idea that Christians see Trump as a savior. I also wondered if he realized that, in saying this, he was making a straw man.  Now, while I’m sure that one could say just about anything they wanted, good or bad, about christians, and then find one that actually fits the description, I can only say that when it comes to a Christian who sees Trump as the savior of America, I’ve never met one. I’ve only met those whom it would be easy to make that accusation against, if one happen to be running a little short on charity as he was making it.

Still, as I said, I liked this preacher somewhat because what he preached was comforting to me in an age that has gone insane. He broached many a hot button issue in light of scripture, and then taught from the scriptures on how to hold to faith in the midst of it.

I also loved another thing he said, because I have been suspicious all along about this one thing, and he confirmed it for me. At the beginning of another sermon he gave a list of subjects that were the hardest to preach on, and of course, politics made that list. (Sermon title: The Marriage You Had At First 8/13) He said that he was once asked during a campaign season if he would be preaching on politics and his answer was no, because if he did he would lose his job. I really appreciated his honesty in admitting that he avoided at least that one subject because of his fear of man.

In another sermon (at about the 12 minute mark)  from another church, the preacher presented a different straw man. I have to give this preacher some kudos though because the name of his sermon was, “The Gospel and Politics”. In his sermon he said that there were people who thought that the Bible should be put aside and that he should talk only about politics during the run up to an election. I highly doubt that anyone really wanted that, rather, I’m guessing that, by reframing their desire into a caricature, it was easier for him to reject them. He said that government can’t legislate morality. That’s easy preaching right there and I couldn’t agree more. He said that hearts have to be changed, and government can’t change hearts. That’s more easy preaching and I couldn’t agree more, and if this is revelatory news to his congregation I have to say that I kind of feel sorry for him and them. What I want to know is, what do these things have to do with politics? He’s told us what the government can’t do. Why doesn’t he teach what it is doing that it ought not be doing in specific terms? Of course, I know the answer to that one. It’s because a lot of what it is doing, like killing babies and indoctrinating children into a secular humanist LGBT mindset, many in his congregation love, and he knows they love it.

As for my own experience, the fellow Christians I’ve met realize that a government that teaches children that there is no god but government, that they are nothing but evolved cosmic dust, that homosexuality is a good and righteous thing, that calling the things sin that God calls sin is wrong and evil, that we can, if we want to, choose our gender, and that extends the red carpet for the butchers at Planned Parenthood to teach promiscuity and murder, is an evil government. But then again, another topic that made the list of unsafe topics earlier was the raising of children. So my guess is that, for a preacher to suggest that steeping your children in 12 years of LGBT and anti-Christ secular humanism training might not be one of the most loving things you could do, is unlikely to happen.

I also read an article this morning posted on Townhall, a site that I have the highest regard for, and that also presented a straw man. I like the guy who wrote it too.  His name is Cal Thomas. But the subject wasn’t Trump this time. It was Roy Moore who is at present being accused of “sexual misconduct” during his campaign for the senate. Thomas presents for our examination an argument from the Bible given by some unknown fellow named Jim Zeigler in favor of Moore. I won’t address the argument he made, and whether it was a good or bad argument because that is irrelevant. True Christians (not blindly assuming that describes Zeilger) making bad arguments from scripture is not, after all, an uncommon thing. And if making arguments from the scripture wasn’t bad enough,  when such arguments are made on behalf of a fellow sinner in an election campaign, such is more than likely akin to adorning your pigs with pearl necklaces during their morning slop.

Thomas’ slight of hand in the article is, I’m sure, unintentional. Here it is for you to judge for yourself:

That the religious left has made similar analogies to advance their political agenda is no excuse. It proves my point. Religious liberals long ago stopped preaching a gospel of personal salvation in favor of a social gospel that is more social than gospel.

Conservative evangelicals are repeating this error.

The straw man is “the religious left”, and if you support Moore then you are becoming just like them. But there is a huge difference between allowing your politics to inform your religious views and allowing your religious views to inform your politics. If you want to know what the religious left believes, all of them, the Bible is the last place you’d want to look. You’d get a more accurate picture by visiting the DNC website. And, to the extent that this is true for conservative evangelicals and the RNC website, I would have to whole heartedly agree with Thomas. The only trouble is, the RNC hates Moore just as much as the Democrats do. Ultimately, however, the question is, is Zeigler a true enough example of conservative evangelicals to label everyone under that heading as “making the same mistake”?  I think not.

But in defense of those who are making this “same mistake”, I must admit that they have my compassion because when it comes to all things political, as I’ve already pointed out, it is a fairly safe assumption that their teachers on this subject were not their shepherds, because our shepherds were too afraid of being fired for broaching the subject. And the shepherds who have this fear of man have my compassion also, because we all have something to lose when it comes to speaking the truth in these dark times, and we were all raised in a time where silence reigned as supreme when it came to the touchiest of issues.

Thomas goes on with his article to take us into a confusing morass of apparent contradiction. To outline, he started with Zeigler’s Biblical argument and how he thought  it was a bad argument. So far so good. Then he associates conservative evangelicalism with Zeigler and asserts that they are in danger of becoming corrupted themselves for being willing to overlook the corruption of Moore… I think… I guess. I honestly am not entirely sure. Then he suggests that political activism by conservative Christians is the same as confusing the Gospel with politics. After that he swerves right back on a true track with this paragraph:

In an essay for Modern Age Journal, titled “Beyond the Reformation of Politics,” Alec Ryre, professor of Christianity at England’s Durham University, writes that Luther believed governments were ordained by God to restrain sinners and little else. Real transformation of individuals and thus societies, he reasoned, could be achieved only by a changed heart, which is the work of the church, not government.

So I’m now completely confused. I look around me and see evil being condoned and institutionalized by my government. I see every day the carnage in lives. And my response is to… what? Not support Roy Moore who supposedly did something decades ago that can only be termed in our age as “inappropriate”? Am I suppose to believe also that “a changed heart” is an impossible thing to be hoped for when it comes to supporting a person who will have a little say in exactly how our government ought to go about “restraining sinners”? I agree with Thomas with all I can muster that the government has no mandate from scripture, and I’d add even the constitution, to “transform individuals”. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what our government does do, and on a massive scale via public education. Am I supposed to look at all of this evil and at the same time try to keep my own hands squeaky clean by not deigning to suggest that one corrupt sinner might do a better job at restraining evil than the corrupt sinner who is outspoken in his belief that we all ought to glorify more sin, teach more sin to children, and celebrate the killing of more babies?

But this is a normal thing in our day is it not? Christians are confused, and understandably so. We are hamstrung when it comes to being a salt and a light to a dying world. We watch with a feeling of helplessness all week long as our communities spiral downward. And we go to church on Sunday and we enter another world, a world in which the past 6 days never happened. We are asked to look inward, and to try to live more moral lives. When it comes to processing all the murkiness that we swam through the last 6 days, as we waded neck deep in politics from dusk till dawn, we can be assured that we will be offered no help on how to process it. So we are left with the Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, and Fox Newses, or maybe even the MSNBCs and CNNs of this world, and their worldly perspectives, to teach us how we ought to digest, respond and react to all the evil that we see. And then we are ridiculed for doing our best, and warned that we are in danger of becoming corrupted because we hate what we see and experience, and we think that the very evils being condoned by our government ought to be restrained.

I’m sorry, but I’m not buying any of it. I know I don’t love like I ought to love, but I still can’t drive by a school house without being heart broken. I can’t watch the vast majority of the young people I’ve seen grow up in our Churches walk away from the faith after 12 years of secular humanistic indoctrination, and not be a just little upset about it. If that’s wrong, if wanting a government that restrains evil with the power of the sword, rather than endorses and perpetuates it with that power, is the same as being corrupted, then I’m afraid that I’m hopelessly corrupted, and that I’ve horribly misunderstood the concept of being salt, light and love. But I dare not pray that what little love I do have grows cold so that I can be like others who are able to look with indifference on what I see, and proclaim within my own heart to my self, “at least I’ve got mine, at least I’m not corrupted like them”.

 

The 2nd Amendment, A Win Win

Let’s face it, guns are for killing. But it’s worse than that really. Yes, they are for killing animals for food and protection, but for the moment the killing of animals is not a problem. The fact is they are made for killing people, and for some, including myself, that’s a real problem.

When it comes to living in a Utopian paradise, put me in the front of the line. Who wouldn’t want to live in a place where there are no guns, and there is no need for guns, and whatever other fantasies one might have that seem ever to be in our futures if we could only get that one benevolent dictator to control us, and rid society of evil, and allow all us good folk to have no worry but how to enjoy ourselves? But… I’m also a realist.

Being a realist, I realize that there are harsh realities with which I must cope. One of the harshest of those realities is that man is not basically good in his heart and core. Those who preach the contrary are the same ones who create Hells on earth attempting to bring about their fantasy land Utopias. They’ll do great evils because they are convinced that their Utopian goals justify it. All the while they preach that evil is relative. They have to preach that in order to hold on to their concept of man as being, at his core, good while simultaneously observing the unpleasant realities that the same is not true.

So, what if they’re right? What if man actually is basically good? In that case, I’ll keep my weapons because they won’t be a problem anyway. I won’t need them to protect myself, and I won’t hurt anyone, because everyone else is basically good, and I’m basically good, and good people don’t do things that cause others to need protection from them. And what difference does it make if lots of other good people have weapons also? We’re all basically good. Right? But we all know that this is a pipe-dream, but it’s still a win for me, because my ability to protect myself and my family from evil is not threatened for one thing. And, there is a deterrence to evil for another thing.

On the other hand, what if they’re wrong about the heart of man? If man is not basically good, as the famers of the constitution supposed, then what man will we hand our guns to in order to bring about their promised Utopia? What government would we trust to not enslave us once we’ve been disarmed, as history teaches us that governments most certainly do? Well, the answer would be no one, which is why we have the 2nd amendment in the first place. So it’s another win.

CS Lewis said it in as good a way as I’ve ever heard it said. He accused the Utopians with: “You castrate, then bid the gelding, be fruitful”. We are told over and over that morality is relative, that what is right for one person is not necessarily right for another. We are preached to day and night that we evolved from nothing to life, that we are nothing more than bags of chemicals that exist as the result of happenstance. That, dear friends, is the moral castration. But then we are told to act as if morality and goodness actually does matter in the grand scheme of things. We’re not told why, we’re not given a basis for it, we’re just supposed to take someone’s word for it, because, Utopia. In short, we are told to be morally fruitful. Why, might I please ask then, are we shocked when people act according to what they are taught, and not according to a made-up morality that bears no ultimate consequence for ignoring. Yet evil continues to happen. Out of the moral fog of moral nothingness comes a hand that continues to slap us silly. And then we become confused. What we are told to think, and reality, are all of a sudden in mortal combat. And then we are comforted by the promise of ever more laws, as if the evil perpetrated against us was not already illegal. And blame is then placed on the realist, for he knows that laws can’t fix bad hearts, and bad governments who assist in making hearts evil can’t protect us.