Op-Ed: If America's Churches and Believers Don't Stand Up to Government Tyrants, the Country Is Finished
California Gov. Gavin Newsom was the first governor in the country to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, directing all residents on March 19 to refrain from leaving their homes indefinitely.
Apprehension of the threat to fundamental freedom by autocratic overreach should have been the immediate reaction of Golden State residents, but it wasn’t.
Newsom became mayor of San Francisco on Jan. 3, 2004. On his 36th day in office, Newsom, still wet behind the ears, issued a directive to the San Francisco city-county clerk to issue marriage licenses to homosexuals, falsely claiming that the California Constitution equal-protection clause gave him the authority to do so.
On Aug. 12, 2004, the California Supreme Court voided all of the licenses that had been issued in February and March.
This violation of constitutional law provides a glimpse into Newsom’s moral character, his directive single-handedly overriding 4.6 million Californians who on March 7, 2000, had voted with 61.2 percent in favor for state statute California Proposition 22, Limit on Marriages, which declared that only marriages between men and women are legally binding in California.
Newsom demonstrated then, as he’s doing now, his deliberate flouting of the law and the will of the people — except, of course, when it concerns his own brusquely imperious demands in his exercise of unwarranted power.
America’s 18th-century forefathers experienced a similar peremptory autocrat in the form of the King of England. Thomas Jefferson formally indicted such high-handed, tyrannical behavior in the Declaration of Independence: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act that may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
Not one to be dissuaded by disparaging First Amendment religious liberty rights, Gov. Newsom’s stay-at-home order of March 19 led to California churches being designated as “nonessential,” while liquor stores, marijuana distribution centers and abortion clinics were deemed “essential.”
With nothing but grace, love, compassion, humility and other demonstrations of the Spirit of Christ, California pastors closed their churches down across the state from March 22 to Pentecost Sunday, May 31, 2020. Next, on July 3, Newsom outlawed singing in churches.
Subservient subjection to totalitarian regimes only acknowledges and legitimizes the state’s absolutism, leading us to 1 Samuel 17:6: “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?”
Over the last 100 years, American Christendom has suffered an increasing departure from its articles of faith, elevating “political authority as though the Bible gives the state carte blanche to regulate individual, social and ecclesiastical freedoms out of existence if deemed necessary.”
Americans have willfully erased from both their memory and their nation’s history how we got here.
The American Founders established a republic, in which we the people rule through our elected representatives. Gov. Newsom and his fellow blue-state overbearing governors and mayors are in dire need of a refresher course for some updating.
Supercilious and self-absorbed, they will have to be removed from office in 2022 if liberty is to prevail. In California — with more evangelicals than any other state in the union, aside from Texas — time will tell whether Christians can rise to the occasion.
Evangelical pastors will have to take their civics game to the next level if America is to survive.
While preaching sermons, circulating petitions, or taking a Jericho march around the Capitol are needed, they are not denominations of political currency, in contrast to how many votes can be brought to the table. This civic precept needs to be deeply anchored into evangelical and pro-life Catholic Christian leadership.
Well-known British evangelist, pastor and author Alan Redpath writes in his 1962 Christian classic “The Making of a Man of God: Lessons from the Life of David“:
“His election was clear to everyone because the next thing that happened was that he came into collision with Saul. It is impossible for a man chosen of God to be at peace with the children of the devil. A man [or a culture] anointed by the Holy Spirit is immediately the target of Satan — the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman will always be at enmity until Jesus comes.”
COVID-19, the plundering and burning of America’s cities, the destruction of relics and monuments and the ruthless push to defund local police make abundantly clear that America is being targeted by Satan. We are engaged in a spiritual battle.
Exposing Satan’s sinister end game, former Ohio Rep. Bob McEwen said:
“Eighty-five cents out of every dollar that goes to the cause of global evangelism comes from the 4 percent of the world’s population who call themselves Americans. In other words, if you took the amount of giving from 96 percent of the people on earth (15 percent) increased it five times — to 75 — you still would not have as much support for the cause of Christ as Americans cheerfully give every year.
“The United States of America is the world’s lighthouse for the gospel. And while most Americans don’t appreciate that … rest assured Satan understands it very well. … The book ‘Rules for Radicals’ was written by Saul Alinsky. Barack Obama taught community-organizing courses using it as a textbook. Hillary Clinton had a mentor relationship with Alinsky in college and wrote her undergraduate thesis on him. Black Lives Matter is perfectly implementing the Rules. That book — now impacting all of us every day — is dedicated on page one to Lucifer. Satan understands the battlefield.”
Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland. https://t.co/lYWY0x8n8P
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 1, 2020
Commenting on the burning of Bibles in front of the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse in Portland, Eric Metaxas said: “A century before the Third Reich, German poet Heinrich Heine prophesied that where books are burned, humans will soon be burned also. Antifa/BLM has chosen the brazenly atheist path of Joseph Goebbels. Let the reader understand.”
A Gideon stands in California. His name is Pastor Rob McCoy.
Former Thousand Oaks Mayor and City Councilman Pastor Rob McCoy finally has had enough.
After shutting down Calvary Chapel Godspeak on March 22, he reopened on May 31. Last week he received a call from Rigoberto Vargas, Director at Ventura County Public Health. Responding to Vargas’ question of whether he would be obeying the health orders from Gov. Newsom, Pastor Rob asked: “Are you calling all of the churches?”
“No, just calling yours because we had a complaint.”
“Well,” Pastor Rob replied, “if you’re wondering if we are complying by the First Amendment, the answer is ‘yes.’ If you’re wondering if we are complying by the edicts of the governor the answer is ‘no.’
“My personal feeling is you had your chance,” he added. “We complied by all of the ‘social distancing,’ we worked through the process of you calling [churches] ‘nonessential,’ wearing masks, following CDC standards, because we didn’t know about the virus. But now we have empirical data.
“It doesn’t matter if you want to create censorship, stifle knowledgeable epidemiologists who put forward something that’s different from your narrative. We’ve looked at the data, we’ve done our homework.
“We abided by what the governor was requiring, we willingly yielded [as to] help our sheriff’s department and the like, but then when we saw the governor and mayor of Los Angeles, and every other elected official embracing, condoning and promoting the burning and looting of our businesses and our cities — it’s over, we’re not doing this game anymore.
“We just wanted to be left alone to worship our God. But you want to come and shut us down, you want to turn off our water and power, you want to fine us? You go ahead.
“We’ve had every opportunity to go national. You don’t want the optic or narrative of watching a pastor getting arrested … you may win at the Ninth Circuit, you may even win at the U.S. Supreme Court, but you’re going to lose the hearts of the people because Americans love liberty.”
On June 1, Gov. Newsom said to those burning, looting and demolishing our cities: “For those of you out there protesting, I want you to know that you matter. To those who want to express themselves, God bless you. Keep doing it. Your rage is real.”
After squandering the Biblically based culture, American Christendom has now only a faintly visible footprint left in the culture, meanwhile entering an era of struggle for sustainable freedom.
America is doomed unless Christians revive American Christianity by returning to Jesus’ ekklesia assignment in Matthew 16:18.
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