Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Preach Partisan Politics

(This post is the 4th in a series that deals with the cultural captivity of the church.  You can read previous posts here, here and here.)

“The political process has failed. Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. Libertarianism has failed. Marx has failed. Populism has failed. Anarchism has failed. I say this not because of any glaring flaws in any of those ideas (in theory any of them could potentially work in an alternate universe), but because we are hurtling towards extinction in the fairly near future, and none of them have saved us.”

That is the opening paragraph to a recent post by one of my favorite commentators, Caitlin Johnstone. The post is entitled “Your Plans for Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works.” (You can read the entire post by clicking on the title.)

Ms. Johnstone insightfully  discusses the many ways in which every political party and social movement has “failed.”

They have failed in the sense of not making this world a better place to live, despite all their promises; not lifting the world’s masses out of poverty and starvation; not ending senseless wars; not leveling the playing field for everyone, especially the disenfranchised, enabling them to have an equal say in their future; and especially, by not getting to grips with the inevitability of an uninhabitable planet overheated by global warming.

Despite her best efforts to sound hopeful, her post concludes on a note of despair:

“What we’ve tried up until now hasn’t worked, so if there’s anything that might work it’s going to come from a wildly unanticipated direction, from way outside the failed mental processes which have accompanied us to this point. We need to open ourselves to that kind of idea.

“That’s basically all I’ve got to offer today. A helpless but sincere plea for humanity to try something new, spat out onto the internet in the Hail Mary hope that it might plant some seeds and loosen the soil for something unprecedented to open up in human consciousness. Sometimes that’s all that we can do.”

My heart always goes out to atheists and genuine, secular humanists such as Ms. Johnstone.  I have heard many such laments over the years, going back to my own youthful days in the 1960s.

As a Christian, I want to talk with Ms. Johnstone and let her know that there IS a solution to all of humanity’s problems.  And it does, in deed, “come from a wildly unanticipated direction, from way outside the failed mental processes which have accompanied us to this point.”

Our salvation comes from heaven, from eternity, in the man who walked through Palestine 2,000 years ago and will one day return, the Lord Jesus Christ.

But I know exactly what she would say: “Your answer is one of the reasons I reject your religion. You offer the proverbial ‘pie in the sky, by and by.’ The human race needs rescue now!”

Well, Jesus intends his people to have a specific answer to that question, too. It should go something like this:

“Look to the Christian church! Look at the inter-racial, multi-cultural people of God and how they love each other. Observe their service to one another AND to the rest of this world. Look at their efforts to be peace-makers. Look at the practical ways they implement God’s commitment to equality, justice and forgiveness wherever they go. Look at how seriously they take their duty to care for and to preserve God’s creation.”

Yet, I suspect that Ms. Johnstone would laugh in my face. That gospel message is tough to communicate, mostly because it is so very, very difficult to see in real life.

Where is the evidence?  Where is that church?

God’s vision for his church is especially difficult to defend in Trump’s America where false teachers like Robert Jeffress (pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, TX and ‘spiritual advisor’ to the president) parade themselves on national television spouting the false gospel of Christian nationalism, and the church’s identity with Republican party politics.  (You can watch his most recent 9 minute appearance on Fox News here, complete with a much deserved take-down by another atheist commentator, Kyle Kulinski.)

I pray you are horrified after listening. (Hopefully, I can add to your horror when you read my dissection of these false doctrines in my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America).

I don’t disagree with Jeffress’ discussion about the growing number of American’s disaffected by organized religion.  But the hypocrisy embedded in his diatribe is mind-bending.

Mr. Kulinski’s  merciless roasting of pastor Jeffress is spot on and entirely deserved.

Coupled with his own utter lack of self-awareness, Jeffress and his ilk are cardboard caricatures of true ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

While mocking preachers that merely repeat the things that people “hear on CNN or the Rotary Club,” he goes home to offer the same repetitious, sectarian message from his pulpit as he does on Fox News.

He dares to equate “the never-changing truth of God’s word” with the chest-thumping partisanship that binds him to the heart of Fox News executives and the American president.

He maliciously likens Republican voter turn-out with Christian commitment, suggesting that it is a litmus test for piety.

He simultaneously, suggests that anyone who disagrees with him — people like Caitlin Johnstone, Kyle Kulinski, me, and many of my friends — anyone who does not vote for his Republican party-ticket as lacking in “deeper convictions.”

Apparently, the 70% of white evangelicals who put Trump in office and continue to support him do so because “they believe in absolute moral and spiritual truth and vote those convictions at the ballot box.”  Unlike anyone else who votes his or her conscience?!?

Are you kidding me?

This is the non-gospel according to Jeffress and most white, American evangelicals today: anyone who believes in the morality and the spiritual truths of the gospel will vote Republican.

It is false teaching, plain and simple.

It puts political partisanship over devotion to Christ because it confuses political partisanship with devotion to Christ.

Any and every “Christian leader” falling into this trap deserves to be defrocked. For they are not spiritual leaders at all, but wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Clan-Jeffress,  one and all, are false shepherds leading God’s flock in paths antithetical to the paths of our Lord and Savior.

All of us in the American church share responsibility for our failure to provide men and women like Kyle Kulinski and Caitlin Johnstone with genuine, thorough-going examples of real (which means radical), transformational Christian community in this world.

In many respects, we all continue to live “like sheep without a shepherd.”

But false shepherds like Robert Jeffress pose a heightened danger to the church, for they deliberately lead God’s people like lemmings to a cliff.

It doesn’t take a prophet to predict that the choppy, partisan waters below that spiritual cliff will one day drown Pastor Jeffress and his partisan congregation in the same brand of hopelessness and despair that now washes over Ms. Johnstone.