where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Why American Christians need to be (More) Politically Active

Why American Christians need to be (More) Politically Active
and much of this applies to the rest of us as well     
American Christians live in a country unlike most countries of the world and certainly unlike all the countries that were in existence in Bible times.  That last part is particularly important, because most Christians act like they’re still living in the ancient Roman Empire.
The Bible says that everyone “is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.     Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.”
In another place, it says to “submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right.

So Christians read this and accept everything that our government does as being of God.  Many of them have even accepted the inevitability of persecution from this same government as being a part of God’s plan for our nation’s future.

What they are missing is that we are the government.  The people in Washington or Springfield, if you live in Illinois, they all work for us.  They are supposed to serve us and not we them.  We don’t have rulers and kings; we have representatives, people who work for us.

Suppose you had a business and you looked at the books and saw that your money was being spent foolishly, you would fire the people involved and hire new ones.  If your employees did shoddy work and lied to your customers, making promises they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep, you would fire them.  Because they represent you.  Your name is on the business.

Suppose you hired a lawyer to defend you in a case but found that he was actually helping the people who brought suit against you, you would fire him, because he is supposed to represent you, to argue your cause, to stand  up for you.

I know Christians think this whole world is just a place that they are passing through, yet most I know take quite good care of their houses, their cars.  They work hard on their jobs, because their work reflects them and their testimony for God.  Well, this country is another extension of who you are and your testimony for God. 

The whole world is watching the United States.  Many of them still think of us as that Christian country that we used to be.  And what do they see?  Massive debt, borrowing more money than any other country in the world.  A nation that used to be great by so many standards just being average at best in those same categories.

Is that so unimportant in the light of eternity?  Are these just earthly things that pale in light of heavenly things?  Is this the whole world that Jesus warned us about gaining that would profit us nothing if we lost our own souls?

Christians care more for that one tribe in some mountainous region of the Andes Mountains where the gospel has never been preached than that nation around them that used to send most of the missionaries to other lands, as it methodically erases God from public life, so that entire generations grow up thinking of Christianity as passé, a relic of an unenlightened past and Christians as narrow-minded dolts with their heads up their butt.

Where I think many Christians are missing the forest for the trees is that they are focused almost entirely on individuals but fail to see how large public actions affect those same individuals, or their children growing up. 

Jesus told a parable comparing people’s responses to the Word of God to different kinds of soil.  Some had rocks and thorny plants in them which inhibited these people from responding adequately to God.  Christians are failing to appreciate how the government and culture are affecting the soil of people’s lives by legalizing and normalizing behaviors and attitudes that provide new barriers for people to seeing the validity of the gospel.

Christians are sowing seeds of the Word of God through their words and actions, and the government and culture are following them with dump trucks unloading rocks and gravel on all the visible soil.

When evolution is not challenged in our schools, our school boards, and state legislative sessions, whole generations grow up believing that this is settled fact and the Bible is just made up stories along the lines of ancient mythology, that life is just some cosmic accident of no intrinsic value, and there is no God responsible for all this and to whom we are accountable.

When the Bible is removed from public life and our government, there are no more rules but that of the lowest common denominator, and that is a pretty low standard, where lies don’t reflect on one’s trustworthiness, where normalcy is rewritten to be all-inclusive, where debts don’t have to be repaid, and more and more of life comes under the hand of government to ensure that everything turns out the way it wants.

Christians believe they can undo all this by one by one conversions, which is like saving the Titanic, one bucket at a time.

The Titanic sank, and the United States, and Western Civilization as well, is sinking, while Christians are distant bystanders.  A few issues like abortion and gay marriage have gotten their attention, but there are dealing with the aftereffects, like sandbagging your house against the flood when they should have fixed the dam a generation ago.

They are definitely late to the party, but there are enough of them to turn this around if they own this country like they own their own houses and businesses.

If you found that your bank was skimming a few dollars from your checking or savings account every month, would you say anything?  Yet the Federal Reserve prints billions of dollars a month of new money that devalues all the money you already have in those same checking and savings accounts.  They also keep interest costs down so they won’t owe so much on the money they borrow.  But this means also that all the money you save, because you don’t waste your money and believe in saving, is actually losing money in the bank.

Do you shop at different stores when you find that you are paying more than you have to for the same thing?  Our government can’t think of one way to cut its spending except to offer to cut your favorite things so you just agree to them spending however much they want on everything else.

When an organization asks you for money, are you particular where you give your money, only looking for the most worthy of causes and those who use their money the most wisely?  Do you know all the things your government spends your money on?  Their standards are a lot lower than yours.  Is that how you want your money spent?

Do you sacrifice to live within your means so that you don’t go into debt, because you believe it is wrong to owe people money, because the debtor is slave to the lender?   Your government can’t function for a day without borrowing about 40¢ of every dollar they spend.  The government pays off its credit cards with a credit card.  And whose name is on the card?  Yours and your children’s. 

They don’t think they have to pay it off.  Actually they don’t.  You do.  They don’t have any money but what they take from you. 

If somebody took your credit cards and bought things in your name, would you be upset?  Would you try to stop the person doing it?  That is called identity theft.  The government doesn’t need to steal your identity.  They don’t care if you know who’s taking your money.  The game is to take it in ways that you can’t keep track of, so you would need to be an accountant with a lot of time to figure out all the ways they are taking your money.

I was looking at my pay stubs to prepare my income taxes and saw that between what the government took out of my check and my property taxes, they were taking about 50% of my gross income.  And that’s not including city stickers, state sticker, gas taxes, sales taxes, and all the fees and taxes on my utility bills.  I would love to give to a number of worthy causes, but the government is taking too much of my money to spend on what they want and not on what I want.

Christians believe in being good stewards of their money, but what about the other half of your money, the money the government takes from us?  Should we not care how that is spent? 

Would you pay for somebody’s abortion?  You already are through Planned Parenthood, which your government subsidizes.

Do you believe in the military, the one that now bans chaplains from praying in the name of Jesus?  If you look this up online, please be sure to check the dates on the articles.  This used to be one of those urban legends, but no longer.  I haven’t kept up with all the new rules.  They don’t want to make them too public, but this is not the military we used to know. 

Are you aware that the rules of engagement have been changed in ways that greatly increases the number of our casualties?  There are far more soldiers who have been killed and wounded than need be, so that we can fight kinder, gentler wars. 

Are the souls of those overseas more important than those of your neighbors?  True, some have heard nothing about Jesus before, while our nation still comes to a halt one day a year at Christmas.  But we are letting our culture and our government fill the lives of our neighbors with moral and intellectual stones and thorns which will make them increasingly unresponsive to the Good News of the gospel. 


The early Christians may have considered themselves “strangers and aliens” in their lives then, but our nation here is just an extension of your home or your work.  You don’t let strangers trample through your yard or your house or let anybody tell you how to run your business.  Well, don’t let people run your country either who don’t represent or look out for your interests.  You should be as concerned about your country as you are about your own house, car, and business.