The call has gone out for unity. Public figures are talking about the necessity of unifying a divided nation. Religious leaders lament the divisions within their fellowships. Somehow or another everyone is now supposed to find a way to come together, to put their differences aside, and to find common cause.
But the question is, What is the unifying cause?
Unity for unity’s sake is doomed to failure. Its fabric is too thin to hold. The innumerable differences that distinguish us one from another are too sharp. They will not long remain suppressed by the artificial gauze of abstract mantras like “unity.”
Genuine unity, like authentic community, emerges as the byproduct of a common purpose, a shared mission. Why are we here? What moves us? Where are we going? How do we get there? Why is it worth the effort?
The many Trump supporters who remain convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from their leader know how to answer those questions. They are already united, and they have little if any interest in compromising their political principles – however unprincipled anyone else may think them to be.
The fusion of white evangelicalism with conservative, Republican politics – especially with devotion to Donald Trump – means that millions of church goers now measure spirituality by the yardstick of fervor for a particular set of political outcomes.
Working for those outcomes, such as prayer in school, outlawing abortion, denying homosexuals the right to marry, is what unifies political conservatives and white evangelicals in their spiritual mission. They labor together for (what they believe is) a righteous cause.
No “true believer” is going to compromise their conservative commitments for unity. Unity smunity! That kind of unity is actually compromise in the world of the Religious Right.
White evangelical faith now most powerfully appropriates the immaterial realm of conspiracy theories, evidence-free assertions of election fraud, and the ipsissima verba of Donald Trump. The most important moments of fellowship throughout the week occur as everyone sits at the feet of Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, Breitbart, and Infowars. These are the prophets and spiritual leaders of white, American evangelicalism.
I heard a sermon a few months ago calling the church to unity. “We need to come together!,” we were told. But we were never told why or how.
The New Testament, however, is very clear in addressing those issues.
Scripture tells us that the adoration, service, and glorification of Jesus Christ is the purpose for unity in the church.
A community of saved sinners collectively overwhelmed by God’s abundant grace, working to conform themselves to the example of Jesus of Nazareth, ready to suffer, to serve “the least of these,” to lift up the downtrodden, and to cultivate humility, that is the brand of unity pleasing to God.
So, when I am told to seek unity within the church, my first question is, “Which Jesus are we linking arms around?” Is he the suffering, crucified Jesus of the gospels or the gun-toting, warlord Jesus who attacks his enemies in the streets? Is it the Jesus who “came not to be served but to serve” or the macho Jesus who ridicules others with demeaning nicknames. cursing, and licentious hands that assault innocent women?
I am sorry. Genuine unity is a function of a common cause, a shared adoration. And I simply do not find that commonality with the vast majority of the white evangelical church today. We are now worshiping different God’s. We serve different Saviors. Our expectations for sanctified living have drifted eons apart.
The evangelical church has crossed a watershed in this nation’s history. The Religious Right has proven itself victorious; victorious in convincing far too many that exchanging their devotion to the kingdom of God for a bowl of secular, political pottage is the right thing to do.
No, now is not the time to call for unity.
Now is the time to call for confession and repentance.
Now is the time for real leaders to require authentic discipleship in following the real Jesus of the New Testament.
Now is the time to emphasize that neither patriotism, nationalism, militarism, nor American exceptionalism have anything to do with service in the kingdom of God. In fact, they are all enemies that work to undermine God’s kingdom, every last one of them.
I cannot be “unified” anyone who does not understand these basic theological truths. I can help them to understand, if they are willing to learn. I can teach the scriptures to them. I can pray with them as we together seek the Holy Spirit’s correction and maturity.
But shapeless, amorphous, contentless calls for abstract unity…well, that’s just a waste of time.
I believe that political engagement is an important task for the Christian church. I don’t buy the rationale that says secular politics is a distraction from gospel priorities. On the contrary. Political engagement is demanded by gospel priorities when properly understood.
If believers in Jesus Christ take his Lordship seriously, then submission to our Savior King requires us to behave as citizens of God’s kingdom in every element of our earthly citizenship. Politics in the public square is unavoidable.
The question is, what does that mean in practice?
I know that I am not alone in believing that the church needs to be
Rev. Jerry Falwell
politically active. The African-American church has always understood this fact. Jerry Falwell helped American fundamentalists and evangelicals finally come to grips with this, too. Obviously, maintaining this conviction makes for strange bed-fellows nowadays.
So, is Christian political activism nothing more than the public expression of privately held religious preferences; preferences created by the kind of neighborhood you grew up in and whether it was on the right or the wrong side of the tracks?
Answering this question is crucial in the present era of “Christians for Trump.”
I am firmly convinced, and quite happy to debate anyone who cares to
MIAMI, UNITED STATES – JANUARY 03, 2020: Evangelical supporters of Donald Trump are being led in prayers inside the El Rey Jesus church. – PHOTOGRAPH BY Adam DelGiudice / Echoes Wire/ Barcroft Media (Photo credit should read Adam DelGiudice / Echoes Wire / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
disagree, that the evangelical church’s uniform support for Donald Trump, the Republican party, and their policy agenda, has exposed the thorough-going secularization of American Christianity.
It is symptomatic of the wholesale debasement of genuine Christian faith into unabashed, nationalistic civil religion. And that is the definition of American apostasy.
This damning secularization of Christian thought and action is, perhaps, the most influential legacy of the Religious Right. Anyone who takes his/her
Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition
marching orders from partisan political strategists (like Ralph Reed, for example) has abandoned the Lordship of Christ. The ethics and righteousness of God’s kingdom do not align with any of the Republican or Democratic party agendas given to us.
Obviously, many religious conservatives think otherwise. I don’t doubt the sincerity of their convictions, but sincerity alone doesn’t manufacture truth. Aristotle and Ptolemy sincerely believed that the sun orbited around the earth, and they were sincerely wrong.
The question becomes: Which partner is leading in the evangelical dance with politics?
Is your partisan, political commitment leading your life of discipleship?
Or is your citizenship in the kingdom of God leading your political commitments?
We all know what the correct answer is. And, of course, members of the Religious Right insist that they are living out that answer, for example, in their support of the “pro-life” movement, their fight for staff-led prayer in public schools, and their hostility against equal rights legislation for LGBT human beings.
All of this begs the question. How should the Christian’s citizenship in God’s kingdom transform the way we live out our American citizenship? If Jesus’ teaching about kingdom righteousness becomes our benchmark for public engagement, then what elements of our partisanship (whether to the right or the left) must be thrown away and replaced with Jesus’ new kingdom ethic?
Here is an historical example:
Members of the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer is in the 2nd row at the far left
When the “Confessing Church” (composed of German, Protestant leaders who opposed Hitler’s attempts to control their churches) began its resistance against Nazi religious policies, debating these questions eventually led to a deep divide in their movement.
Everyone agreed that resistance to Nazi attempts at manipulating Christian worship services and determining church membership was every leader’s duty before God. But where should they draw the boundaries? The leaders often disagreed over which acts of resistance were (a) necessary expressions of Christian faith (so everyone could support it) and which actions were (b) merely an expression of personal political preferences. Seldom was there unanimity on this question. In fact, bitter arguments sometimes erupted threatening the organization’s future.
Of course, those accused of being “too political” or “unspiritual” in their
A Nazi German “Christian” flag
proposals responded by pointing out that it was impossible to separate the gospel’s ethical requirements from one’s evaluation of a patently immoral government policy. (I will ignore the ghastly role played by Martin Luther’s “two kingdoms” theology in the German church’s submission to Hitler).
The angry differences that erupted among these sincere, committed
churchmen exposed the differing horizons of their moral universes. After all, isn’t immorality in the eye of the beholder? Well, it shouldn’t be if everyone claiming to be a disciple of Jesus actually “fixes their eyes on Jesus,” as the writer to the Hebrews insists we should (12:2).
Every Christian’s moral universe ought to align with Jesus’ example of living as a righteous citizen in the kingdom of God.
Among all the members of the German Confessing Church, the leaders most remembered and applauded today are those who traced out the most expansive moral universes, with boundaries unconstrained by partisan politics or subservience to government authority.
After the war, surviving members of the Confessing Church sometimes admitted that, for all the risks they had taken (and some were imprisoned and/or executed), they had not gone far enough. Their ethical boundaries had been too narrow. They had not always acted as faithful citizens of God’s kingdom.
Martin Niemöller (who was imprisoned) became one of the most outspoken in lamenting the fact that the Confessing Church had never publicly
Karl Barth’s statement on the failure of the Confessing Church to defend Jews throughout Europe
condemned Hitler’s policies of anti-Semitism. They had never publicly defended their Jewish neighbors. Nor had a single church leader publicly opposed the Nazi eugenics program that took thousands from their medical asylums and sent them off to die.
This is our challenge today.
Every Christian’s lifetime goal must be the conformation of one’s own moral universe to the righteousness of God’s kingdom as taught and modeled for us by Jesus of Nazareth. As our Lord said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Seek first the Father’s kingdom and his righteousness, and everything else will follow” (my paraphrase, Matt. 6:33).
I once preached a message on those words of Jesus in a white, middle-class, Protestant church where the elders nearly banned me from the pulpit. [There were two services. An elder walked out of the first service in protest. I was summoned to a meeting with the others before the second service. At least one of them believed that I ought not to preach again).
The goal of my message was to pose this challenge: How should our commitment to live as righteous citizens of God’s kingdom here and now shape the ways we think and behave as earthly citizens of an imperialist nation with a massive military budget that loves to make war?
IF we want to take Jesus’ words seriously, that we seek God’s kingdom righteousness first, then we MUST grapple with these kinds of questions. And change our behavior accordingly.
Tragically, those church elders were spiritually crippled, straight-jacketed inside a minuscule moral universe grossly deformed by their American first, nationalistic, Republican party world-view. They were not interested in seeking the Father’s kingdom and righteousness FIRST in EVERY area of life. They were not thorough-going disciples of Jesus Christ.
We are currently facing a spiritual pandemic that is killing evangelicalism and its public witness.
An American “Christian” flag
The church is infected with a deadly political virus called partisanship. That partisanship is an ugly symptom of our deeply rooted secularism. In pursuing the cause of militaristic nationalism, we have taken our eyes off Jesus.
Huge swaths of the church have been coopted by the commercialized, smoothly marketed messaging created by high-paid political operatives who began courting evangelicals during the Reagan presidency. Rather than seeking God’s kingdom, we seek victory for their side, predominantly Republican, in the next political campaign.
This brand of herd loyalty is easy to implement. Whereas, conforming our lives to the pattern given to us by the suffering, crucified Jesus of Nazareth is far more difficult and costly.
Following a crucified Savior entails suffering, but it also demands carefully focused, consistent thinking, from top to bottom. How must Jesus’ kingdom-directed life and teaching transform the way we address our contemporary problems? There is no political playbook from any party providing easy answers to that question.
Take for instance the “pro-life” movement. The label itself is an example of a very self-conscious political framing. The words pro-life do not honestly describe the movement. As many others have pointed out, the pro-life movement is not actually pro-life. It is anti-abortion and pro-birth, but the movement’s pro-life interests vanish quickly once a baby is delivered.
For example, it is a demonstrable fact that publicly funded preschool programs, the WIC nutrition program and Head Start, to name only a few, make significant improvements in the future prospects, health and well-being of young children, especially those growing up in poor communities.
Yet, conservative “pro-life” voters typically back policies intended to defund these sorts of community assistance programs that give a leg up to our most vulnerable citizens. In this regard, supposedly pro-life conservatives most often vote anti-life.
Worse yet, these faux pro-lifers support politicians who want to slash the budgets of social benefits programs and in order to channel those funds to
A US bomber over Afghanistan
the ballooning budgets for military contractors and our wasteful Pentagon. Instead of helping to enrich the lives of America’s most vulnerable, our tax dollars are spent on expanding assassination programs, and devising new weaponry intended for the efficient slaughter and impoverishment of hungry people around the world who happen to stand in the way of American empire.
That is the opposite of pro-life. It is pro-death, pain, exploitation, and suffering.
But what about the Supreme Court?! (I hear certain readers ask). This is the new clarion call among today’s pro-lifers. Overturning Roe vs. Wade is the end-all-and-be-all of to a pro-life political victory.
It’s true. Adding anti-abortion advocates like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the court may eventually lead to that result. But in the meantime, America’s highest court is now stacked with justices who regularly act to strengthen corporate power against the interests of the working class.
For example, Justice Kavanaugh only appeared on the president’s list of nominees after his decision as an appeals court judge to support a trucking company’s decision to fire one of their drivers. The driver violated
Brett Kavanaugh at his Senate confirmation hearing
company policy by leaving his truck unattended in order to walk to a nearby convenience store. The truck had broken down in a blizzard. After calling for help and waiting, the driver soon found that he could no longer feel his legs. He feared that he might die of hypothermia as he waited. Should he stay with his truck? Or should he walk to a nearby convenience store to warm up?
What would you have done?
Judge Kavanaugh, the latest pro-life darling, determined that the company was justified in firing an employee who refused to lay down his life for their sixteen-wheeler. That ruling won Kavanaugh his contentious nomination. And the vast majority of evangelicals stood to cheer. (I won’t even begin to comment on the vile conservative abuse spewed out against the women who accused Kavanaugh of sexual abuse).
Was Kavanaugh really a pro-life nominee?
America’s broken, corrupted “justice” system serves the political purposes of bi-partisan mass incarceration laws filling our jails and prisons with people of color who are slapped down by onerous convictions, while white people – especially wealthy white people – receive a slap on the wrist for committing identical offenses. This country’s “injustice system” has become a calcified showcase for the most racist, Jim Crow artifacts in a nation where all people are notequal before the law.
Why did the NYC police department implement its “stop and frisk” policy in black neighborhoods but never on Wall Street? I suspect they would have collected more cocaine stashed comfortably in the sleek suit pockets of hedge fund managers than they ever discovered in the hands of African-Americans walking to the market.
Yet, American evangelicals regularly rally around the bi-partisan flag demanding that officials get “tough on crime” – excepting, of course, the white-collar crime flagrantly committed by men like Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and their corporate donors.
Tell me again. What, exactly, is pro-life about any of this behavior?
America’s population is now separated by the greatest economic divide between the haves and the have-nots since the Great Depression. That divide expands and deepens year by year as a result of government, economic boondoggles ensuring that wealth redistribution is always moving upwards to further enrich the already rich. All the while, most evangelicals link arms with the wealthy, corporate interests who exploit the poor and the working class.
There simply is no excuse for any Christian supporting the policies of either party which perpetuate national behaviors so cravenly antithetical to Jesus’ teaching about the righteousness of God’s kingdom.
Let’s call such public behavior for what it really is, especially when it is endorsed by a majority of evangelicals: grotesque displays of hypocrisy, partisan blindness, and anti-Christian thinking.
Such misguided thinking is an investment in the work of the anti-Christ. The resulting behaviors reveal the overt repudiation of Jesus’ Lordship over his church.
Genuinely pro-life behavior begins among the citizens of Christ’s kingdom who live it out in the streets by enhancing the lives of those who most need help. That includes influencing the culture around us, our society, our leaders, and our nation, by working to enact consistent pro-life policies for all people everywhere.
To further stretch our moral boundaries, evangelicals should be in the forefront of calling for the US to abandon its budget-breaking quest for global supremacy, a quest that tramples other nations underfoot like discarded human refuse left behind for global scavengers to devour.
Now that would be pro-life.
Jesus is clear. His kingdom’s pro-life values declare:
The first will be last, and the last will be first
Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your reward
Woe to those who neglect to do justice
Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry
Our Lord welcomes every immigrant and asylum seeker with open arms.
Our Lord prioritizes the poor. He picks them up and cares for them. He does not ridicule them as lazy creators of their own hardships.
How can any society be positively influenced by a secularized church that long ago exchanged the mind of Christ for the distorted thinking of this evil age?
How can the church show others the importance of thorough-going pro-life policies when we are incapable of implementing them among ourselves?
American evangelicalism has become the useless salt described by Jesus: You are [supposed to be] the salt of the earth, but once that salt loses its saltiness, it becomes useless, good for nothing. It can only be thrown out onto the dirt (my paraphrase, Matthew 5:13).
Jesus’ words address the American church today.
No, Donald Trump is not the church’s greatest friend. He is another in a long line of anti-Christs. He is a parasite who has attached himself to the Religious Right in order to exploit their evangelical base for his own political benefit.
Evangelicals are president Trump’s useful idiots.
I am sorry, but any purported “Christian” who cannot perceive these facts about our president, American politics, and our nation’s behavior throughout the world has become a spiritual alien who knows little if anything about God’s kingdom.
Such people are spiritually malnourished, perhaps even dead, after suckling at the swollen teats of American civil religion, that secular, bastardized gospel which subverts Jesus’ kingdom values while substituting the depraved values of this fallen world.
God’s kingdom is what truly matters. The church is its citizenry. All of which entails much, much more than simply “getting people saved.”
Saved for what?
Jesus calls us to love indiscriminately. To prioritize people in need, no matter who they are. Yes, personal acts of benefaction are crucial, but that is not enough. The scale of America’s social problems is so vast that our government must play a major role in rectifying our problems. Only true citizens of the kingdom of God possess the vision necessary for developing the required solutions.
Will a mass movement of the Christian church stand up to demand that our government take greater and greater steps towards mercy and justice for all?
My title for this post is an attempt at summarizing a current online debate, involving Greg Gilbert, Scott McKight and others, about the nature of the Gospel message in the New Testament.
Honestly, I don’t follow “theological debates” online for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, so I confess that I am only responding to a good post I read today at Patheos from Michael Bird. (This is a very old, very tired debate.)
Michael is an excellent New Testament scholar, and I recommend that you read his new post, especially if you have been following the debate online. Michael is spot on in his conclusions.
(As a side-note, I originally tried to hook my blog up with the Patheos blog site, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to do it. Given the site’s drift towards right-wing craziness, it was probably for the best.)
“Gilbert wants to make the cross and a transaction within the atonement the centre of the gospel with kingdom and kingship as a kind of back story. McKnight and Bates emphasize Jesus’s kingship, Israel’s story, fulfilment of Scripture with justification and forgiveness as benefits of the gospel. Gilbert is not entirely absent of kingdom/kingship, but neither are McKnight and Bates arguing for ‘mere kingship.’
“Truth be told, I think that Bates and McKnight have the better end of the argument in terms of what the NT emphasizes. If one surveys Acts 2:29-36, 13:32-33, Rom 1:3-4, 1 Cor 15:3-4, and 2 Tim 2:8 then it is pretty hard to deny the fact that the gospel is a king Jesus gospel – it is a bit of slam dunk for my mind. The gospel is a royal summons to believe and obey Jesus as God’s messianic king, a king who has shown his might and power by laying down his life for his people to make them right, forgiven, and reconciled, etc. Or, as I define the gospel in my Evangelical Theology: ‘The gospel is the announcement that God’s kingdom has come in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord and Messiah, in fulfillment of Israel’s Scriptures. The gospel evokes faith, repentance, and discipleship; its accompanying effects include salvation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.’”
Further on in his post, Michael addresses the New Testament passages that explain “justification by faith,” the touchstone for evangelical orthodoxy in many people’s minds.
I would only add to Michael’s argument by pointing out something that is widely overlooked: the apostle Paul only talks about “justification by faith” in those letters where he is combating some sort of Judaizing influence within the church. “Judaizers” were the folks who insisted that Gentiles must become good Jews in order to become real disciples of Jesus. This meant circumcision and adherence to the Torah.
So, Paul’s argument for “justification by faith alone apart from works (signifying works of the law)” always (maybe I should say only) arose in a very specific polemical environment. That does not offer much of a basis for insisting on its “centrality.”
To my mind the conclusion is pretty obvious.
Justification by faith was not the irreducible, central component to Paul’s way of understanding the work of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
It was one important aspect of the gospel. But not its essence.
For both the root and the branch of the Good News, we must turn to Jesus of Nazareth. What was essential to him?
Read the New Testament Gospels and the answer becomes obvious: the Kingdom of God and the Lordship of Jesus over God’s kingdom.
The book becomes available on June 1st from Wipf & Stock publishers (also the publisher of my next book about Israel-Palestine). I have already pre-ordered my copy, and I am anxious to dig into it.
While the partisan political blindness of the “Court Evangelicals” (to use the extremely apt term coined by historian John Fea, professor at Messiah College) has gone a long way towards identifying the evangelical label with their own far-right, Christian nationalism, this new book is a much needed antidote to their hijacking of the movement.
Here is the publishers’ description:
What should Christians think about Donald Trump? His policies, his style, his personal life?
Thirty evangelical Christians wrestle with these tough questions. They are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. They don’t all agree, but they seek to let Christ be the Lord of their political views. They seek to apply biblical standards to difficult debates about our current political situation.
Vast numbers of white evangelicals enthusiastically support Donald Trump. Do biblical standards on truth, justice, life, freedom, and personal integrity warrant or challenge that support? How does that support of President Trump affect the image of Christianity in the larger culture? Around the world? Many younger evangelicals today are rejecting evangelical Christianity, even Christianity itself. To what extent is that because of widespread evangelical support for Donald Trump?
Don’t read this book to find support for your views. Read it to be challenged—with facts, reason, and biblical principles.
With contributions from: Michael W. Austin Randall Balmer Vicki Courtney Daniel Deitrich Samuel Escobar John Fea
Irene Fowler Mark Galli J. Colin Harris Stephen R. Haynes Matt Henderson Christopher A. Hutchinson Bandy X. Lee David S. Lim David C. Ludden Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Steven Meyer Napp Nazworth D. Zac Niringiye Christopher Pieper Reid Ribble Ronald J. Sider Edward G. Simmons James R. Skillen James W. Skillen Julia K. Stronks Chris Thurman Miroslav Volf Peter Wehner George Yancey
Please, order your copy now, and help to make this book an important factor in educating the church:
to regain its footing in the gospel of Jesus Christ, rather than Republican politics
to live as citizens of the kingdom of God, rather than “culture warriors” eager to destroy their enemies
to prioritize the poor, the needy, the sick, and the disadvantaged, rather than the opulent corporate enrichment policies of president Trump, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Shumer
to work as true peace-makers, at home and around the world, rather than cheering on the global war-mongers, happy to expand American Empire at the expense of destroying others
The El Paso gunman left behind a manifesto proclaiming his allegiance to white supremacy, decrying the dangerous hordes of brown immigrants “flooding” across our southern border. I haven’t heard any details yet about the shooter in Ohio, his motives or political ideology.
At least, law enforcement has begun to describe these horrific incidents for what they are: domestic terrorism.
The FBI continues to warn that the vast majority of these incidents are committed by right-wing political extremists who are, without exception, white men. In most cases, their targets are people of color. Nowadays, anyone who looks like they might be Hispanic or Muslim is scrutinized without mercy.
Look at YouTube to watch the many videos posted there showing the white vigilantes who have deputized themselves to harass people of color. They call the police because they overheard someone speaking a different language, or saw a black person walking through the neighborhood and “looking suspicious while being black.”
No informed citizen with an ounce of common sense can deny the overt,
Survivors of the El Paso shootings
blatant, explicit encouragement that such anti-immigrant, white, racist extremism is receiving from the White House.
If you don’t understand or believe that previous sentence then, I am sorry, but you are lost.
You need to be converted.
Your conscience has been swallowed up by the swamp of moral relativism and outright evil that has taken hold of this country’s public life, especially within the comfortable parlors of political conservatism, Republicanism and establishment D.C. power brokers.
And, yes, that moral degeneration includes the Democrats as well as anyone else who remains silent while the newest wave of neo-Nazis, skin-heads, neo-fascists and every other stripe of authoritarian race-baiter feels that this moment in our nation’s history is their opportunity to resurrect the Confederate flag and wave a banner of white, racial superiority over the graves of innocent men, women and children whose skin-tone carries too much melanin.
But I reserve my strongest condemnation for conservative evangelicals who continue to endorse this president’s policies and turn a blind eye to the daily dose of hatred spewing forth from his puerile and filthy mouth.
He is the latest anti-Christ who has risen up to deceive the church; like a false prophet crying, “Peace, peace!” while he sows seeds of hatred, lies and racial division.
Everyone likes to imagine they would have been a hero in Hitler’s Germany. We all tell ourselves, “I would have resisted. I would have hidden Jews in MY attic. I would never have allowed the Nazi flag in MY church. The Fuehrer’s censors would have never have been allowed to edit MY sermons.”
We swear that we would have been a faithful Israelite, never to be counted among the idolaters that sent the nation into exile.
We would have been faithful disciples. Unlike Simon Peter, we would have spoken up in Jesus’ defense when the time came.
Well, folks now is the moment, another moment of truth.
Another opportunity for faithfulness to Christ is staring us in the face. The question is – what will we, what can we, do?
I have a few suggestions:
Every church, and every member of every church, located in a town, village, city or unincorporated township with a population of dark-skinned immigrants needs to walk door-to-door through those neighborhoods, shaking hands and offering hugs, help and resources while welcoming those people of color into your community. Listen to their stories. Ask if there is anything you and/or your church community can do to help meet their needs. Then follow through, and do it. Make new friends. Have them over to your home; eat together and publicly testify to their humanity at every opportunity. Push for your church to become a more inter-racial community, if it isn’t already.
Challenge all racist, white-nationalist types of conversation whenever, wherever you hear it – especially among Christians. Remind people that Jesus of Nazareth was a very brown-skinned, Palestinian Jew who had once been an immigrant himself seeking safety in a foreign land (Egypt). We worship a dark-skinned Savior. Avoid fights, but faithfully and boldly represent the universal love of God for all people everywhere.
Remind people that there is a difference between illegal immigration and seeking asylum. Asylum-seeking is perfectly legal. In fact, I believe that America owes automatic asylum – even citizenship – to anyone fleeing a dangerous situation in a country that has been destabilized by U.S. intervention, whether military, political or economic. THAT, my friends, includes the whole of Central and South America. When the United States helps to destroy the social fabric of a nation by forcing it to adopt policies that serve American interests first, then we must take responsibility for the human fall-out. (Personally, I also believe that illegal immigration ought to be decriminalized. We would still have border guards patrolling the southern border humanely, seeking to care for the people they detain and send back, but what is the point of jailing these people as felons after their second capture? It serves no purpose but to enrich those who own America’s private, for-profit prison/detention system.)
I haven’t touched on the many related issues such as the American gun lobby, gun ownership, etc. because I don’t want this post to become a book. We could also talk about the policy of separating children from their parents when detained at the border, and the fact that our government admits to having “lost track” of nearly 1,500 of these children. Imagine if they were your children…
Urge your pastor to talk about these issues in the context of obedient Christian discipleship. It is obvious and easy to “pray for the victims” of a mass shooting. Perhaps, it is the pastoral thing to do. But think about it: what good did it do for patriotic, German pastors to offer nice pastoral prayers for those who were being arrested and tortured by Hitler’s SS guards, while remaining silent about the immoral policies being implemented by those unjust arrests? The church needs more than safe, pastoral prayers for victims. We need strong leadership and pointed Biblical teaching that identifies immorality and injustice in the public square; that gives direction to God’s counter-cultural ways of kingdom living in a nation wrestling with its own racist demons.
Years ago I came across a great book written by Douglas Hyde entitled Dedication and Leadership. Hyde was a former Communist turned Roman Catholic who wondered why his Communist comrades had uniformly displayed deeper levels of commitment to world revolution than the typical Christian had for the gospel of Christ.
One of his suggestions for explaining this disparity focused on the church’s lack of anything resembling Bolshevik self-criticism. Recognizing that Communism required a complete reconstruction of the way people think about and interpret their world, the movement gathered members together into small groups for discussion and “self-criticism.”
Together these Communist study groups held each other accountable to purging old ways of thinking and behaving, while assembling, piece by piece, the renewed mind of a faithful, Communist ideologue.
Hyde laments that it is a rare church indeed that invests any deliberate effort into helping its members cultivate disciplines of healthy spiritual introspection, self-examination, and Christ-like self-criticism. Yet, this is precisely what Paul expects every Christian to be doing as a part of their daily discipleship. In Romans 12:2 the apostle says,
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is…
Fallen, sinful minds like ours (you will understand, dear reader, that I assume you too are a guilty sinner like me) do not renew themselves automatically. Yes, every Christian has the Holy Spirit to turn the impossible into the actual, but personal effort is the required fuel for all personal transformation.
Thus, far too many folks who call themselves Christians fail to think or to behave like people directed by the mind of God.
I was reminded of this personally a while back when talking with a friend about my time visiting my youngest daughter as she worked in the Kenyan slums surrounding Nairobi. I was struck by the near universal happiness regularly on display in the lives of these people living in the most squalid poverty imaginable.
I couldn’t get over the beautiful smiles and the hearty laughter that I saw spontaneously erupting from the poor and destitute.
My friend listened to me and then quietly asked – with a beautiful smile on his face – David, why is it surprising that the poor would be happy?
That sentence hit me like a ton of bricks. Good question, I said to myself. Why indeed?
I suddenly realized, with the help of a friend exercising some good Christian/Bolshevik self-criticism, that I harbored an unrecognized prejudice.
I had spent my entire life in Christian ministry teaching people that money cannot buy happiness; that the love of money is the root of great evil; yet burrowed deep inside my brain remained this hidden assumption that people who lack money certainly can’t be truly happy and content.
Figuratively speaking (I hate it when people say “literally” when they mean “figuratively”), this moment of critical self-awareness blew my mind.
It also reminded me that cultivating the mind of Christ is a life-time process that demands daily self-criticism as well as good friends who are in the habit of similarly criticizing themselves.
Only such genuine disciples can make other disciples.
Getting together in small groups to socialize and hang out together is all well and good, but in and of itself, socialization it is a not an effective recipe for growing serious followers of Jesus.
I was thinking about this particular problem as I attended a Saturday morning men’s breakfast at a nearby church.
The speaker began by deriding what he believed were secular society’s efforts at emasculating, even feminizing, modern men. The church needed to help men to proudly reassert their masculinity. Or so we were told.
(I found this a very strange thing to be saying in the age of the #MeToo movement. But evangelicals have lived in a cultural ghetto for a long time.)
To facilitate the growth of masculine, godly men, the speaker announced that he was starting a new men’s Bible study for the church. A handy video played on a big screen up front introduced the study’s content.
The 300 or so men present in the auditorium with me were all treated to a 5-minute action movie showing Navy SEALS fully armed, wading through water, jumping out of helicopters, and firing their weapons at (and undoubtedly killing) unseen enemies. A very masculine sounding narrator described how this new study (now available nation-wide) would teach us vital principles for godly manhood from the Navy SEALS handbook.
I groaned audibly and nearly regurgitated my breakfast.
I had spent my entire life thinking that Jesus of Nazareth was our perfect model for godliness. Silly me!
Worse yet, I now discovered that my personal Bible study needed to be directed by a military training manual. Rats!
Those of you who know me will not be surprised to learn that it took all the self-control I could muster to remain seated. Every fiber of my being wanted to stand up and loudly denounce the secular, unthinking, anti-Christian rubbish being shoveled out from the stage.
Sadly, I was witnessing another instance of American evangelicalism’s cultural captivity to the godless forces of social conformity. Political conservatism, militarism, patriotism, the myth of American exceptionalism, and gross nationalism had all conspired to trample the gospel of Jesus Christ into the ground, buried beneath the spit-polish black boots worn by “Christian soldiers” LITERALLY marching off to war.
And THAT is godly manhood?
We had been divided into groups of 10 sitting at circular tables. As the meeting drew to a close, we were encouraged to talk among ourselves about the morning’s lessons.
I believed that it would be irresponsible of me to say nothing. I had to speak my mind, fully convinced that I was speaking with the mind of Christ.
So, I grabbed the moment and told the other men at my table that this was a horrible example of un-Christian, anti-Biblical thinking infiltrating the church. I will spare you all the details of my little speech condemning everything we had just been subjected to, but I will mention the response of a young man sitting opposite me at the table.
This young man in his 20s had accompanied his father to the breakfast. As I spoke, his head began to nod heartily in agreement. As I finished, he said that he was glad I had spoken up. He told us all about how difficult it had been to grow up in Montana where everything in the surrounding society insisted that he become a tough guy, a macho-man, a fighter.
Not even the church provided any refuge from the cultural conditioning of a male dominated society where rugged individualism depended on a daily overdose of testosterone.
This young man, quite rightly, wanted to become more and more like Jesus, not a Navy SEAL. He finds words of life in the holy Scriptures, not in a military training handbook.
He was fighting against his church’s cultural captivity, not surrender to it.
So, why was the “men’s pastor” employed by the church promoting a program developed by a nationally known evangelical media organization that will teach men to conform to American culture rather than stand against it?
I felt at least doubly blessed this Easter morning while worshiping with my local church.
Not only did I have the opportunity to be a part of a wonderful congregation that was singing and praying to our glorified, resurrected Lord Jesus. We all had the opportunity to watch numerous new believers be baptized into Christ’s body.
We heard that over the course of the church’s Easter services this past weekend over 50 people were baptized. These are the men, women and children who have taken that step of faith to entrust their lives to Jesus.
Now, that was a blessing to watch. In fact, it was a double blessing.
First, I am blessed to be a child of God, rescued and redeemed by the crucified, resurrected Savior who gave His life for me. And second, I am blessed to be a part of a Christian ministry that understands how the local church is home base for God’s mission in the world.
As I watched people pass through the baptismal water, I was also happy to have come across the painting of Jesus included with this post. The artist is a Mexican Roman Catholic priest who portrays Jesus as an Amerindian.
I was blessed to be reminded that Jesus is who He is, not whomever I want to make him out to be. He is neither white nor American. He is a Jewish man born and raised in ancient Israel-Palestine.
Yet, as the Savior who came to share in human existence, he came for us all, whoever we are, wherever we live. Whatever our race, ethnicity or national heritage, the resurrected Jesus died and rose for us all.
I had obviously taken the wrong bus. I thought I was going to the Kenyan Museum of Natural History. Instead, I was let out on the side of a road facing a large open savanna with a few scattered trees. I decided to try again tomorrow, but in the meantime, the savanna was new to me and waiting to be explored.
As I wandered into the grass, I quickly noticed a woman off in the distance praying beneath a tree. She was shouting with a loud voice in Swahili with her arms in the air. I decided to pray for her. Having no idea to whom she might be praying, I asked the Lord Jesus to show himself to her if she were praying to another deity, and to bless her with positive answers to her prayers if she were praying to him.
Wandering further into the open grassland, I discovered a large warthog who seemed quite comfortable with approaching strangers. So, I sat down close enough to share in his morning activities. After all, how often does one get a chance to share a seat with a wild warthog?
I communed with my new, multi-tusked friend for no more than a few minutes when the woman who was praying approached me and asked to sit with me. I said, Yes, of course, and asked her about her morning prayers.
A smile spread across her face as she told me about her relationship with Jesus Christ and her desire to preach the gospel, in America if possible. I quickly began to ask about the Lord’s work in her life. How did she become a follower of Jesus? Where did she live? What about her family?
I then heard a very sad but revealing story about faith and suffering.
She lived in the nearby slum; tin roofs covering cardboard shanties
A Nairobi slum bordering opulence
bordering the prairie just visible on the horizon. She had been a Christian for about one year. During that time, her husband had left her and taken away her children. He and his family objected to her faith in Christ and wanted nothing to do with her. The children were forbidden to see her.
She shared one successive story of heartbreak after another, yet each chapter of her loss was punctuated by some declaration about the goodness of God; how much He loved her, and how much he had done for her.
Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me. The details of her story were tragic. While the statements about the Lord’s goodness were non-specific. I finally asked, “Can you tell me about one specific way in which God has shown His goodness to you recently?”
She paused. I waited. After several moments of thought, she looked at me, smiled and said, “My heavenly Father sent His one and only Son to die on the cross and rise again so that He can forgive me of all my sins. Since my Father has done that for me, what more does He ever need to do to show me His goodness?”
I knew in that moment I was sitting in the presence of an African Saint.
Here was a poverty-stricken, maligned and persecuted disciple of Jesus who was also filled with the joy of the Lord. She was daily experiencing the power of Christ’s resurrection and the hope of eternal life made possible by Easter morning.
She was suffering but not beaten down; oppressed but not defeated. The world had been against her, but she knew that Christ was for her, and that was enough.
That woman will forever provide a model for me to emulate. I have never had reason to weep as she had. Yet, her eyes and her heart were set on Jesus, and no one could wipe the overflowing joy from her face.
I pray that this Easter season, I will take a few more steps to becoming more and more like her.
(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.”
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 thatchurch?
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 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.
(This is the third in a series of posts addressing questions about the cultural captivity of the church. You can read the previous posts here and here.)
During my last semester as a college professor, I came across a surprising article in the weekly student newspaper. At least, I found it surprising; though in retrospect, I should have been known better.
It was a detailed review of a newly released computer game. I didn’t pay any attention to the game’s title because I was so caught off guard by the fact that the student newspaper at a Christian college had no qualms about praising, and encouraging others to buy, the latest graphic game of military slaughter.
The reviewer described in bloody detail the game’s improved graphics, enhancements that depicted the bloodshed more realistically than ever. (I wondered how he knew what realistic blood splatter looked like.) The game was the newest “first person shooter” game. (That is, a game where the player holds the computer gun in his/her hand, then points and shoots at human figures on the screen in order to survive and accumulate points).
All in living color, of course.
I initially considered writing a letter to the editor to express my dismay, but I thought better of it. Why not wait to see if anyone else shared my dismay.
No one did, apparently. Or, perhaps they were biting their tongues like me. Several weeks passed with no response.
So, I devised a better plan. I would submit my own article reviewing the latest version of my favorite sex game. (No, I have never played any such thing, but I assume that they must exist. My imagination was not strained at all by concocting one ex nihilo.)
My review would go on and on in effusive detail praising the graphic depictions of the female (or the male) anatomy – in living color, no less – and the many arcane, sexual positions available as the player scored more and more points by scoring with more and more sexual partners.
Then, at the end of my imaginary review, I would admit to my satire and ask a simple question: Why, dear reader, are you preparing to write a letter to condemn my fictitious review when you had nothing to say about an earlier review glorifying a graphic, bloodthirsty game of war, complete with exploding bodies and crushed skulls?
What kind of moral calculus is that?
I wish I had gone through with my plan, but I didn’t. It was my final semester before moving on, and I didn’t quite have the energy needed for another campus-wide controversy. In my experience, many readers of that particular newspaper had difficulty recognizing, much less appreciating, the art of satire. And my days as an educator were coming to an end.
But my questions remain.
Why is bloodshed and human slaughter, the kind of violent acts that our Lord Jesus explicitly prohibits, so much more acceptable to Christian people than images of nudity and sexuality?
No, I am not diminishing the destructive power of pornography. But is pornography any more corrosive to the human psyche, any more more dehumanizing for those who participate in it than a blood-thirsty killing game that transforms a player into a butcher, that desensitizes him to the horrors of murder, pain and human suffering?
At least sexual intercourse was God’s idea, and He blessed it with the bonds of marriage.
But human violence arose from the sulpherous heart of original sin. Our Creator rendered his eternal verdict over this brand of wickedness when He cursed the first murderer, Cain, and banished his blood-stained hands from his presence.
Does the church think or act any differently than the rest of our violent society when it comes to this problem of casual, gaming violence? Murder as entertainment?
I don’t know the definitive answer to this question, but I suspect that on average, we are no different than anyone else in the neighborhood who relaxes after school (or work) by watching a computer screen filled with atrocious, bloody acts of human carnage created by yours truly.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has written a fascinating and disturbing book examining the psychological effects of violent video games on children and adolescents. It’s entitled Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing (Little, Brown and Co., 2016).
Grossman excerpts the findings of a medical report presented to Congress in July 2000 by a coalition of 4 professional medical, psychiatric and pediatric associations. Their congressional report concluded that:
“Well over 1,000 studies…point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children…[V]iewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting…[it] can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.” (10-11)
Grossman also compares first-person shooter games to the military training methods used to desensitize soldiers to killing on command. He says:
“Violent video games teach kids to kill using the same mechanisms of classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning employed to train soldiers.”
What happens when a depressed teenager who is addicted to violent video games and feels that the entire world has become his enemy grabs a family gun and walks to the local mall?
We all know the answer to that question. We have seen on TV time and again.
Sadly, this is the kind of world we live in.
What are the people of God doing to address the social plague of daily violence traumatizing our school children? Placing armed guards inside our churches is the devil’s own suggestion, though I have seen and read about many churches doing just that.
But surely, everyone can understand, that is not the way of Jesus.
We need to examine ourselves and confess to the many ways in which we have eagerly conformed to a godless society. We are unable to find wisdom in the mind of Christ because we are too busy entertaining ourselves (for hours and hours) with the latest version of Call of Duty and Modern Warfare 2. So, we turn to armed guards instead of the Spirit of compassion.
Ask yourself this question. Can you imagine Jesus sitting for hours in front of a computer screen, laughing with glee and giving himself high-fives over his rising body count as he plays Call of Duty: Black Ops?
How many throats could Jesus slit?
The question answers itself.
It is long past time for God’s people to return their eyes to Jesus, the lamb of God, prince of peace, our suffering servant who came not to kill but to be killed. What does he ask of his church today?
their support of the “pro-life” movement, their fight for staff-led prayer in public schools, and their hostility against equal rights legislation for LGBT human beings.
everyone claiming to be a disciple of Jesus actually “fixes their eyes on Jesus,” as the writer to the Hebrews insists we should (12:2).
describe the movement. As many others have pointed out, the pro-life movement is not actually pro-life. It is anti-abortion and pro-birth, but the movement’s pro-life interests vanish quickly once a baby is delivered.
of bi-partisan mass incarceration laws filling our jails and prisons with people of color who are slapped down by onerous convictions, while white people – especially wealthy white people – receive a slap on the wrist for committing identical offenses. This country’s “injustice system” has become a calcified showcase for the most racist, Jim Crow artifacts in a nation where all people are not equal before the law.
collected more cocaine stashed comfortably in the sleek suit pockets of hedge fund managers than they ever discovered in the hands of African-Americans walking to the market.
Let’s call such public behavior for what it really is, especially when it is endorsed by a majority of evangelicals: grotesque displays of hypocrisy, partisan blindness, and anti-Christian thinking.
long line of anti-Christs. He is a parasite who has attached himself to the Religious Right in order to exploit their evangelical base for his own political benefit.
For both the root and the branch of the Good News, we must turn to Jesus of Nazareth. What was essential to him?
Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. They don’t all agree, but they seek to let Christ be the Lord of their political views. They seek to apply biblical standards to difficult debates about our current political situation.
Catholic who wondered why his Communist comrades had uniformly displayed deeper levels of commitment to world revolution than the typical Christian had for the gospel of Christ.
about my time visiting my youngest daughter as she worked in the Kenyan slums surrounding Nairobi. I was struck by the near universal happiness regularly on display in the lives of these people living in the most squalid poverty imaginable.
water, jumping out of helicopters, and firing their weapons at (and undoubtedly killing) unseen enemies. A very masculine sounding narrator described how this new study (now available nation-wide) would teach us vital principles for godly manhood from the Navy SEALS handbook.
her arms in the air. I decided to pray for her. Having no idea to whom she might be praying, I asked the Lord Jesus to show himself to her if she were praying to another deity, and to bless her with positive answers to her prayers if she were praying to him.
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.”
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 