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

Monday, January 25, 2016

America is dying, and Christians can't make up their minds what to do about it

Christians came to the United States, before it was called that, to escape persecution, to live their lives according to their conscience.  Now persecution has followed us here, and there is nowhere else to go.  We had the freest country in the world to live out our faith, and that is being taken away from us.  And Christians have to decide what they are going to do about it.

If our Founding Fathers were alive today, there already would have been a Second American Revolution.  If the Christians today were alive back then, there never would have been a first one.
Christians today are divided.  Many of them see persecution as something that is inevitable and even something to embrace.  Then they should admit that the American Revolution was a mistake, and the United States should never have come into existence.  After all, people took up arms and fought a war in order to have it. 

What makes it all so confusing is that the Bible was written at a time when the world was ruled by kings.  There was no such thing as freedom, at least as we have come to know it in the United States.  Christians read Romans 13 and I Peter and see their place in American society as one of passively accepting whatever the government decides is right.

What they are forgetting is that we don’t have kings any more.  Or rulers.  Or Caesars.  We have representatives.  It’s like somebody came into your house and told you how to run your house and to give you half of your money.  Would you just let them do whatever they wanted, or at what point would you stand up and defend yourself, your property, your family?

It’s the same thing with our country, only on a bigger scale.  Government was an extension of the way you ran your house.  America respected your freedoms, but it came at a price. 

But what happened is that change came gradually, like the frog in the pot who didn’t notice that the fire was on until the water started boiling but then it was too late to jump out.

America is unique, or was unique.  But we forgot what made it unique.  We forgot what made us what we were.  So when people started changing things, we didn’t know we were giving up the things that made us what we were.

So what changed?  I could give you a list, but the list almost isn’t even important. 

Christians in the United States had the greatest blessing that God could give a human being in terms of an earthly blessing: freedom.  But they fought a war to get it.  But not just any war.  They fought a war against their very own government.  This was not a defensive war to protect their loved ones from an attacking enemy.  This was a war of resistance against a government that was stifling their freedom. 

Christians today seem unwilling to fight such a war, and as a consequence, they will lose their freedoms, and in a few generations, the United States will cease to exist.  The name might stay the same, but the Church will be irrelevant, and the country will be very unlike the one that was created. 

Don’t look for the persecution to bring revival.  What you are calling humility is fear.  What you are calling submission is timidity.  What you are calling love is accommodation borne of fear. 

The Bible had prophets, but they stirred up things and we don’t want strife.  We want everything to run smoothly.  We call that unity, but the price for that unity is weakness. 

We have reduced the Christian life to a ticket to heaven when we die, and Bible studies and small groups to keep us busy until we get there.  We have withdrawn from the world around us, because we are so focused on our own spiritual lives, like the monks of old but without the sackcloths, funny haircuts, and the walls that clearly define where their sanctuary ends and the world begins.

Our country is dying, and only the Christians can save it.  But they’re just not sure if they should.  They don’t know how.  They’re not sure if it is God’s will.  What will people think if they get excited, or angry, or if they actually say no to people, say no to the government.  They might lose their tax exemption. 

As awful as that may be, that just shows how disengaged Christians are in the world.  The government is just people like you and me.  When the government and the courts and the schools become hostile to Christians, that only means there weren’t enough Christians in government, courts, or the schools to guide and form the right policies. 

The First Congress was filled with Christians and pastors.  Now we have left all that to the atheists and the secularists, because we are too busy reading books about personal issues and sharing our feelings to get involved in the world around us. 

We are careful to give God ten per cent of our income, but then we give the government 50% of it and don’t get involved in how it spends it. 

We start Christian schools to give our kids a good education, but the rest of the kids can just go to the public schools and learn about atheism, naturalism, secularism, tolerance, homosexuality, and how every culture and religion are all equal, equally irrelevant, but mostly Christianity.  And you wonder why it is so hard to witness to people. 

Our public schools used to teach the Bible.  They probably didn’t teach you that in school or even in church.  Like I said, we don’t know where we’ve been, how we got here, so we certainly don’t know where to go from here. 

So what are we supposed to do about all this?  The first thing is to start talking about it.  And, of course, that includes the P-word: politics.  I describe it like this:  religion is your relationship with God and how you view the world.  Politics is everything else.  Christians have left the running of the world to the atheists, the secularists, and to all the people who hate everything they stand for. 

But why?  Because Congress passes a law that says tax exempt organizations can’t do politics.  Churches were the most political people and organizations in the country for 200 years, but we let one Senator tag an amendment to an unrelated bill that essentially shut the Church up, because now it was illegal for them to get too involved in politics.  Time to say, this is wrong, and we won’t be silent any more. 

When you start talking about it, you will find that you aren’t the only one thinking these things.  Maybe then you will begin to cry out to God for some leaders who will show you what to do next.  

Without a leader, Christians are nothing more than sheep without a shepherd.  With the right leaders, the Church can become “like a mighty army.”  But we don’t sing Onward, Christian Soldiers anymore.  The Church is afraid, afraid to take a stand, afraid of being criticized, afraid to challenge the thinking of the day.  It’s time to wake up.

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