The Bible describes people as sheep on a number of occasions,
which is an unflattering way of saying that they are totally unable to take
proper care of themselves and need the help of shepherds (pastors) and God, of
course, as the Good Shepherd. But the
image is one of utter dependence.
Or to put it in a more positive light, everything rises or
falls on leadership, whether it’s delivering a nation out of bondage, bringing
a people to its Promised Land, restoring a nation back to God, bringing
revival, rebuilding ruins, defeating enemies, or restoring hope. The Bible doesn’t know of bottom-up change. Even at the smallest level of the Israelite’s
society, at least when it was started, there were leaders of tens.
Yet the Old Testament also shows a nation frequently doing
battle against evil nations, requiring God’s people to be strong and of good
courage. The New Testament highlights
that our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against principalities and
powers, but I think we often lose sight of the conflict part. I believe the Old Testament wars were fought
partly to show us the intensity and reality of this fight.
Christians in America no longer see a conflict, because they
see everything as being God’s will. God
is sovereign, and whatever happens happens for a reason.
Christians in our country have also been misled about their
role in public life. (I hate the word
‘politics.’) They believe their concern
is simply to sow the seed of the Word of God in people’s lives, but they should
stand by while government, public schools, and modern culture saturate the hearts
of the people with politically correct thinking, intimidating the Church into
an observer role in our society.
Christians
have been misled about their role in public life by their pastors, their
teachers, and many of the organizations they rely on for instruction and
guidance. 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 think like they’re still living in the 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 are taught to accept
everything that our government does as being of God, whether ordained, allowed,
or caused. After all, God is sovereign,
and He often allows Christians to live under unjust governments to test and
refine His people. Many Christians have
even accepted the inevitability of persecution from our government and nation as
being part of God’s plan for our future.
What they are missing is that we
don’t have rulers and kings and Caesars; we have representatives,
people who work for us. 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.
Suppose you had a business and you
looked at the books and saw that your money was being spent foolishly or
wrongly. You would fire the people
involved and hire new ones. If your
employees did shoddy work or lied to your customers or to you, making promises
they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep, you would fire them. Why? Because
they represent you. Your name is on the
business. Our elected officials do these
same things all the time, and we need to hold them responsible and demand
change.
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 and your interests. If you are not communicating with your representatives,
they don’t and won’t know what you want and need them to do or not do or when
they are not serving your best interests.
And you certainly won’t know what
they are actually doing if you are not paying attention. And since many issues are complicated or
nuanced, people will often need someone to connect the dots and show them what
is really going on.
But is this the role of the Church
and pastors?
First we should talk about the role
of the individual believer in our society today.
Apart from the issue of abortion and
to a lesser degree gay marriage, Christians have essentially given control of
the country over to people to whom God is either non-existent or
unimportant. We have been told that
religion has no place in government.
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 and their cars.
They work hard on their jobs, because their work reflects them and their
testimony for God.
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 nation that we used to be. And
what do they see now? 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 this 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?
Do you care about your children? You sacrifice to give them the very
best. You see them as your God-given
responsibility to nurture, guide, care, and prepare them for their future, yet
our government sends millions of jobs overseas, leaving an economy of parttime
service jobs for your kids to raise a family on. It spends money it doesn’t have, so it
devalues the money that you do have. The
American Dream is in part that your children will do better than you did. That is almost non-existent today because of
government policies that you would never do personally, because you would find
it immoral or unwise. And we should do
nothing about this?
You send your children to a school
system that indoctrinates them in a worldview that you regard as sinful and
just plain wrong. 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.
Morals are just societal constructs that evolve, and there are no
absolute standards of what is right and wrong.
You think your children are unaffected by this when they go to school,
and there is nothing you can and should do?
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.
But what about the separation of
church and state? We’ll get to that.
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 butts.
I certainly don’t want to diminish
the importance of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth, but if you aren’t
seeing the lost people around you every day, you’re not loving your neighbor. You need to stop and really look at the
people passing by. Yes, our nation has
had the gospel for hundreds of years, but every generation has to hear it
again, and this generation has not heard it.
And here you already speak the language and know the culture.
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 the seeds of
the Word of God through their words and actions, and the government and culture
are following them with dump trucks and bulldozers, covering all the visible
soil with rocks and gravel.
Christians believe they can undo all
this with 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 lament
the loss but do nothing to stop it. 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 rates 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, or your money, the most
wisely? Do you know all the things your
government spends your money on? Their
standards are a lot lower than yours, and you won’t like where it’s going to. 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 it spends. 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.
Do you wish you had more money to
give to various causes or to save for your children’s future? Your biggest necessary expense is taxes. Your representatives determine how much is
spent, how it is spent, and how much they want from you in taxes. If you want more money, you have to work for
them to take less.
Would you let other people use your
credit cards to use for whatever they wanted?
Would you try to stop them?
People often steal credit cards.
This 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 more than 50% of my gross
income. And that’s not including city
stickers, state stickers, 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.
Every church has a class now and then
on finances, how to manage your money, how to be good stewards of what God has
given you. You’re taught to budget your
money, avoid debt, be frugal and generous.
But is that only with the half of your money that the government lets
you keep? You have no responsibility how
the government spends the rest of your money?
Should money management courses only
teach you how to respond to and make the most of government policies rather
than to try to fix them in the first place? You should say nothing while the government
constantly diminishes the value of the money you have and keeps trying to take
more of it?
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 would have been in the past, so that we
can fight kinder, gentler wars.
The early Christians may have
considered themselves “strangers and aliens” in the world 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 you or look out for your interests. You should be as concerned about your country
as you are about your own house, your car, your family, your business, your
job, or your finances.
Being active politically means also
to be active culturally. You can’t watch
a television program or a movie today without seeing that sex is meant to be
casual. If you get together with a
person after your initial encounter, then, of course, you have sex
together.
But in real life, this leads to a lot
of unintended pregnancies, so we need abortions so that children only grow up
with people who really want them. And then,
of course, we need to have sexual education classes in all of our schools so
people know where to get abortions and how to safely navigate the entire sexual
experience, including gay sex, because you might be a homosexual and not know
it, being made to conform by society into a sexual pattern that is not truly
your own: heterosexuality.
What culture embraces today, politics
embraces tomorrow. Laws are made to
regulate and normalize all the latest new things that have evolved in our ever
more enlightened society.
Think of it like a war. There is the actual combat, army against
army, but you also need to think about disrupting the supplies that the enemy
receives so that they are weaker when you engage them. The government and culture feed secularism
and values contrary and hostile to Christianity to the people you are trying to
reach.
If Christians are not engaged in the
culture and politics, the people they want to reach will be more resistant to
the gospel. Christianity will be seen as
having been disproved by science. The
Bible will be seen as wrong or at best mythical. Its social and moral views will be seen as
anti-science.
If Christians today lived at the time
of the American Revolution, there would not have been an American Revolution,
and we would still be subjects of England.
And if the Christians of the time of the American Revolution were alive
today, there already would have been a Second American Revolution.
Why am I so sure?
They never would have accepted the
removal of prayer and the Bible from public schools, because they knew the
importance of religion and morality in the lives of the nation.
They would never have accepted the
involvement of government in all those myriad of things not enumerated in the
Constitution
They would never have accepted our
government running on borrowed money apart from a national emergency like war.
They would never have accepted the
use of paper money or money not based on a fixed standard like gold or silver.
They never would have accepted the
idea of a “secular” nation void of any references to or acknowledgement of the
truth of Christianity.
But what about the separation of
church and state? Didn’t they intend for
our nation to be secular?
We have been told that the separation
of church and state forbids any mention of God in schools and any public
support for anything religious, yet the First Congress had Bibles printed to be
used in the public schools. The Bible
was a main part of public education until the early 1960s, when a court called
supreme said that it was wrong to do that.
The phrase in the First Amendment
about establishing religion had to do with the idea of government-run churches
as existed in Europe, but not forbidding government to “aid one religion, aid
all religions or prefer one religion over another.” (Supreme Court 1947 Everson
v. Board of Education)
Schools and public life teach values,
the values of a nation. The values of a
multi-cultural, pluralistic society become the lowest common denominator, which
is not enough to promote the values that were considered necessary for our
country to thrive, like love, compassion, mercy, honesty, faithfulness,
integrity, sacrifice, giving, hard work, thrift, and responsibility.
When public education is scrubbed
free from all things religious, society ends up putting God and religion into a
box that is only opened in private and only in the presence of those who have
been warned of its contents and agree to be exposed to it. But the rest of society learns to think that anything
religious is not meant for public viewing.
But we have too many other religions
in our country now for any return to some idyllic past of a Christian nation,
or so we are told. This is historical
revisionism and modern relativistic thinking.
Our Founders had the Bible taught in public schools, because they
believed it to be true. They did not
view Christianity or any religion for that matter as merely cultural
accoutrements or personal preferences. A
nation has the right and duty to promote the values that establish its
identity, and our Founders saw no contradiction between allowing people to
believe what they wanted and teaching the Bible in schools.
A country needs a moral framework on
which to build, a common worldview to guide its policy making. If it’s not Christianity, then it is
secularism, or practical atheism, a lowest common denominator of human opinion
on what is right and wrong. Political
correctness. Equality, fairness, and
tolerance. Don’t offend anybody. There are no absolutes.
We need higher standards, not lower.
A Christian worldview is very
different from mandating Christian practices or beliefs. Those values I listed above are not values
inherent in secularism. They are values
that were dominant in our country because of our Christian heritage.
But what about that law prohibiting
the involvement of non-profits and politics?
Actually the law only prohibits endorsing or opposing particular
candidates. This came about as a result
of an amendment to a bill by Lyndon Johnson in 1954. There was no debate or discussion of the
bill. The law should never have been
passed. That court we call supreme never
referred to the separation of church and state to rule against a church’s
political involvement.
But laws are changed all the time
when the public demands it. But laws
also never stopped the early Church from doing what is right, obeying God
rather than man.
Prior to this time, churches had
always been involved in politics and very explicitly evaluated candidates based
on their conformity to Christian principles.
These are the kinds of laws that get passed when Christians aren’t
paying attention or don’t speak up.
By the way, that tax exemption that
you have enjoyed and realize is often vital for your very survival may be on
its way out. That exemption is construed
by some as a government subsidy and hence an aid to religion. Your country is changing in ways you won’t
and don’t like, but Christians are too uninvolved to either notice or make a difference.
But that’s not even the issue
here. It’s the overall general
indifference of Christians to things political and the Church’s refusal to
speak on issues affecting the whole society and culture. Many of these issues have become
controversial, because Christian influence on society has been so muted for so
long that divergent views have taken hold and even become dominant.
But is this really the role of
pastors and churches today?
So what’s the alternative? If
society and the government try to solve society’s problems without the
influence and direction of the Church, it can’t help but make wrong
decisions. Why? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
It is not coincidental that when
the separation of church and state was redefined as a complete secularization
of our government, the role of government began increasing exponentially. Things that used to be the role of the Church
became the role of the State. The State
couldn’t acknowledge the role of the Church without giving the impression of
aiding or favoring religion or any one religion.
So where our government was small
for most of our nation’s history and individual prosperity was rapidly
increasing, now the government is large, a collective mindset as seen in socialism
and communism is gaining traction, and our country is losing all the things
that made our country the world leader in the first place as well as its
individual prosperity and moral framework.
If you don’t work to change the
government and the culture, who will?
(Hint: nobody) Why do I say
that? It is only the Church that has and
promotes the values that made our country. Without the benefit of Christianity,
the only values that our country embraces are fairness, tolerance, and
equality. There is no basis in
secularism for loving your neighbor, helping other people, or even being honest
if you don’t think you will get caught for not being honest.
When people grow up in a culture
where religion in general and Christianity in particular are considered archaic
relics of an unenlightened past, your work is going to be a lot harder to
do. If the prevailing cultural winds of
thought are not challenged, they are accepted as fact, normal, scientifically
validated, modern, and true.
If we don’t proclaim God’s truth to
our nation, who will? If political parties
or politicians do this, it will be just called partisan politics. Only the Church can proclaim it as truth.
Read again the prophets of the
Bible. They weren’t just concerned about
Israel or how the other nations treated Israel.
They spoke against ungodliness wherever it was found.
I know. You want to change the world one life at a
time. But the government and the culture
make the rules by which the world runs.
When the government redefines marriage and the culture promotes it, your
work is immeasurably harder. When the
government makes public expressions of religion unlawful, entire generations
grow up with no sense of a God and truth.
Yes, I know Christianity has done
quite well in cultures where the government has been hostile to it, but it is
absurd to let a government and a culture built on freedom of speech and
religion take away those same freedoms because the Church doesn’t believe it
should get involved.
You say that you want to change the
world, that you have a higher calling and mission than these earthly concerns, yet
most churches I know practically shut down for the summer because they feel everybody
needs a break from serving God. They
still have their main service, but they have no classes for adults, and most programs
are shut down from June to September.
Yet the culture doesn’t shut
down. They bring out their biggest
movies and relentlessly put out their contributions to ungodliness and
immorality while the churches are afraid of overdosing their people on the Word
of God.
You know from the Bible that God
always raised up leaders to turn a nation back to God or to deliver His
people. You don’t think turning a nation
back to God is a big enough calling?
You believe in the family, that institution
from God to provide companionship and to raise the next generation. “It is not good for man [הָֽאָדָ֖ם -
ha-adam, human] to be alone.” But
do you only care for the families in your own church?
Are you going to just sit back while
the government and culture work to reduce, diminish, denigrate, and weaken
marriage in the whole society by their examples and policies? Even their economic policies affect marriage. Years ago you could support your family
working fulltime stocking shelves in a grocery store. Now it would take two fulltime jobs doing the
same thing, but you would be hard pressed to even find one. It’s hard to raise a family when everyone is
working two part-time jobs. This
shouldn’t concern you enough to say something?
Do you care about children? Or is it only the children who go to your
church? The federal government has
essentially taken over public education, because the states through their
mismanagement of money have become dependent on federal money to run the
schools. Everything they teach the
children about life, history, sex, family, psychology, science is all presented
from the viewpoint that God has no place in any of this, that He is irrelevant,
and, in subtle ways, that He doesn’t even exist.
You believe in loving your neighbor. Certainly their biggest need is for the
gospel of Jesus Christ. But if your town
was flooded, or rocked by an earthquake, hit by terrorists, leveled by a
tornado, you would see your love compelled to take further actions to care for
the material needs of those who live there.
But when government policies destroy
jobs and the possibility of supporting a family, when they work to undermine
the family and the morals of the children, when the disasters are just as great
but a lot slower in coming, is the need any less?
The fact is that the Church in the
United States had always believed in full involvement in the life of our
country, even going so far as to endorse or not endorse political candidates
based on their positions compared with the Bible. But the government made a law prohibiting
that and that court we call supreme found many long practiced practices
unconstitutional, and the Church blinked.
The Church either didn’t know enough
to challenge the rulings or bought the lie that we are governed by rulers to
whom we must be subject. But their
actions set in motion a steady, rapidly increasing decline in our country,
morally and economically. And the Church
has found itself culturally irrelevant.
The churches that are thriving in most cases now are only succeeding in
drawing their members from other churches in their area rather than actually
winning people to Christ.
When you are only concerned about a
part of a person’s life, you show that you are not concerned about the whole
person. The world is crumbling and on
fire all around your building on Sunday morning, and you act as if nothing is
happening. Your church is a place to
come in out of the rain for a few hours once a week, but everybody else is just
getting used to living in it.
But politics is controversial,
divisive. And so is doctrine. So was the charismatic / tongue movement of
the 70s, but that didn’t stop churches from taking a stand and clearly defining
a position. Slavery was controversial too,
and so was civil rights, but churches took stands on those.
And there are a number of other
controversial issues that the Church will have to address if it wants to be
relevant to our culture: e.g. how do I know there is a God, how do I know it is
the Christian God, how do I know Jesus is the Son of God, is the Bible true, is
evolution true, what’s wrong with gay marriage, is homosexuality innate or
learned behavior, natural or sinful, is there only one true religion, and how
do you know it is yours, is religion even true at all?
A controversy only means that if you
don’t say anything, the issue will eventually be resolved and in a way that you
won’t like.
Our nation, Western Civilization
itself, is at a crossroads. As they have
become increasingly secular, they have lost their moral foundation and are on the
verge of collapse under the weight of their massive debt, which is the result of
their moral poverty and greed, the greed of those making the laws and the greed
of those who benefit from them.
The future of our country and the
future of Western Civilization is in the hands of the Church. If the Church stays uninvolved, they will
collapse, and the Church will not like the results. And it won’t be God’s will but its own.
Recommended reading
David Barton America: To Pray or Not to Pray
Keys
to Good Government
Original
Intent
The
Role of Pastors and Christians in Civil Government
Separation
of Church and State
Barton is probably the leading expert
on primary sources for the founding of our country, particularly as it relates
to our Christian heritage.
Glenn Beck The Original Argument
This is an annotated, abbreviated, updated
version of the Federalist Papers.
Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers
James Madison, These
papers were written to explain and defend the Constitution before it had
John Jay been ratified.
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America
This was written in the 1830s by a
Frenchman who came to America to see how America was able to achieve so much in
the short time since its independence.
