It panged me to read several of the articles in Christianity
Today (November) about the relationship of the church and the culture. They gave me the sense that Christians should
feel fortunate to have lived in a country that gave them such generous and
unusual religious freedoms and that they shouldn’t have been surprised or
alarmed that the culture turned against them.
On the contrary, our country was ‘fortunate’ to have been
founded by Christians who created a new kind of government that guaranteed all
kinds of freedoms for its people. I know
there is disagreement over the exact nature of the faith of George Washington,
Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, but the facts remain that the First
Congress among its first acts proclaimed a day of prayer and thanksgiving for our
nation, it published Bibles to be used in all the public schools, the Capitol
building itself was used as a church for a hundred years after our nation’s
founding, and Thomas Jefferson asked Congress for funds to help evangelize the
Indians.
Religion, specifically Christianity, and morality were
considered by our Founders as essential for the health and happiness of our
nation.
The culture in America changed basically because of the government. The court called supreme ruled that government
cannot aid religion (1947) and later removed the Bible and prayer from our
public schools (the 1960s), undoing practices in place since well before our
nation’s founding, hundreds of years. This
morphed into the removal of all mention of God in schools and public life
essentially establishing our country as a secular nation and basically changed
the definition of religion from a description of truth and reality to a
person’s private beliefs, along the lines of a person’s taste in music or food.
Few people anymore question what the First Amendment
actually means by “the establishment of religion.’ (Answer: the creation of a state church as
still exists in most of Europe.)
Christians and everybody else blithely accepted the expansion of this
principle to include essentially prohibiting any and all mention of God in our
public schools and public places and discourse.
This new definition, or view, of religion removed the idea
of religion as a worldview, so nobody questioned that secularism is as much of
a religion as Christianity, where government replaces God as the ultimate
authority, the people’s lawgiver, benefactor, protector, and savior. The government is now responsible for solving
everybody’s problems and ensuring their welfare and happiness.
Where were the Christians while all this was going on? In 1954, Congress passed the Johnson (as in LBJ)
Amendment, a little attachment to another entirely unrelated bill that linked
tax exempt status and political involvement, and churches afraid of losing
their tax exempt status stopped most or all of their political activity,
something they had been doing since well before our nation’s founding.
What the early Christians in our country knew that
Christians today don’t think of is that we don’t have rulers, kings, or Caesars
in our country; we have representatives.
The rules about submitting to our leaders don’t apply here, at least in
the way described in the Bible. Like an
employer who hires and fires people according to how the employees contribute
to the interests of his company or someone who may hire a lawyer to oversee
one’s affairs, government officials essentially work for us. And discussions public and private about
their policies and practices is what responsible people do. Forbidding tax exempt status to churches who
discuss politics and political candidates is a practice that the Church should
have challenged and demanded to be changed.
The articles discouraged Christians from thinking that
electing the right people will solve their problems. But Christians more than anybody should know
the value of leadership. Those who know
Biblical history know that how the leaders go, so goes the nation. Moses appointed Joshua, who led the people
into the Promised Land. Joshua didn’t
appoint a leader, and the nation couldn’t follow through.
The pattern is seen over and over through the stories of the
kings. A godly king brought about a
revival in the nation. An ungodly king
turned the nation away from God. It was
only when President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage that the courts and
the media showed strong support for it, leading to the overturning of 30 State
Constitutions prohibiting it and the eventual supreme court [sic] ruling
legalizing it. If he had not done that,
gay marriage would still not be legal in our country. Yes, the institution of marriage had been
breaking down for decades, but there was still a public consensus supporting it.
The Book of Acts seems to paint a new paradigm, where
society changes from the bottom up as people turn to God. Yet even today, as Christians well know,
churches thrive or die depending on their leadership. If Christians won’t lead the United States,
we leave it in the hands of the ungodly, and we shouldn’t be surprised by the
outcome.
The culture war should be a wake-up call to the Church that
it has become irrelevant in a society that for the first time in history was
put together in a way that gave it every advantage. Maybe the Church was unprepared for a
political fight or considered it unfitting for the Church, forgetting that our
government is not our rulers but our representatives.
The Church in America sees politics as distractions outside
of its area of concern and influence, yet every member of the Church has locks
on their doors and fences around their property to protect themselves from
theft and intrusion. And they wouldn’t
hesitate to hire a lawyer or call the police when their material property
rights were violated. If their bank was
skimming from their accounts every month, they would be in an uproar.
Loss of rights and freedoms are not as obvious as property
encroachments; and, since they happen incrementally, they are often not noted
or they are accepted as necessary compromises.
Christians are careful to give their ten percent to the Church
as good stewards of what God has given them.
And then they are supposed to let the government take another 50% (add
up all the federal, payroll, medicare, state, local, sales, property, gasoline
taxes and fees), and they are not supposed to have a say on how that money is
spent?
The Church is losing the cultural war in the West, and that
is seen as a good thing. Ooh, now we get
to be persecuted!
But the Church is losing the cultural war in the West,
because it failed the culture it lived in.
It showed itself as poor examples, as powerless to help people in their
problems, and unable to answer the challenges presented to it, like evolution
or moral and cultural relativism.
It doesn’t make sense to think that we as a Church can and should
only help people with their spiritual problems or material problems on a
personal basis. If we are not involved
in our school boards and our public policies, we will be presenting ourselves
to the world, not as conveyors of the truth, but like a commercial product just
trying to increase its market share just to make a name for itself.
