Op-Ed: Hope for America Can Only Come from the Church
It is often declared that “everything is political,” as a way of saying that everything in life is tainted by dirty political games played for power and personal gain, as determined by partisan political agenda and bias.
It is well worth remembering that political parties are simply empty holding vessels housing like-minded constituents. Therefore what’s happening in America is not primarily the result of a Republican vs. Democrat conflict. The real battle is spiritual. Two distinct religions are vying for control of the public square: eternal and immutable Christianity versus transient and mutable secularism. These two distinct religions cannot coexist. One will ultimately destroy, as a consequence of the elevating, the other.
Democrats seem to have trouble getting it. Ominously inflated coverage of alleged Russian collusion; pretentiously rhetorical articles of impeachment by Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler; and Bernie Sanders’ explicit calls for socialism, open borders, criminals voting from jail cells and so on have placed the Democratic Party in an awkward corner.
Everyday Americans, who put in 50-hr workweeks, raise their families, coach Little League and teach Sunday school are puzzled by the Democrats’ apparently compulsive obsession with topics of minor importance in comparison to the much more significant matters facing the nation.
National security, technological innovation, political gridlock in Congress and Plato’s two essential questions: Who teaches the children, and what do we teach them?
It appears that the Democratic presidential candidates are taking a page from the British Labour Party, which had itself to blame for a historic defeat not seen before in the U.K. in 84 years.
As one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the representative of America’s most liberal congressional district, which comprises most of the city and county of San Francisco.
Nancy Patricia Pelosi was born in 1940 to a family established in politics. Her father was a Democratic Congressman from Maryland and later elected mayor of Baltimore. Coming from political privilege, Madam Speaker posted a picture of herself with President John F. Kennedy at his inauguration in 1961.
The speaker is socially liberal, regardless of how she couches her rhetoric. Yet to underestimate her campaign and political skills would be outright foolish, for there’s good reason why she is in her 17th term in Congress as well as being the first female speaker in American history. She is well versed in social networking and organizing.
To delve a little deeper into her beliefs, we recount her interview with Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press in 2008. Asked about what constitutes the moment of conception, Ms. Pelosi alleged that this “over the history of the church, is an issue of controversy.” Since Ms. Pelosi would have known full well that there is no controversy in Catholicism over the question when life begins, Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., rebuked her publicly.
In 2012, she placed herself in defiance of hierarchical Catholic Church doctrine on LGBT issues, asserting that her position grows from and reflects her own Catholic faith. Whereas Roman Catholicism defines marriage as the union between one man and one woman, Ms. Pelosi is of the contrary opinion that “My religion compels me — and I love it for it — to be against discrimination of any kind in our country, and I consider [the ban on gay marriage] a form of discrimination.”
In light of such opposition between professed beliefs and deeds or acts, the spiritual crisis engulfing our country is likely unprecedented in American history. An enemy invasion has occurred. While from no human adversary, a hostile, irresistible force is advancing and all attempts to check it to this point have failed because Jehovah God is not (yet) in the equation.
Jesus’ Kingdom assignment to engage the powers of darkness — his ekklesia found in Matthew 16:18 — remains hidden under a bushel within the four walls of a building. What might God be saying to the church in America about this?
Today’s real need for engaged activity in the public square requires spiritual men and women who know the times and what to do. “What God says to His Church at any given period,” wrote A.W. Tozer, “depends altogether upon her moral and spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need of the hour. Religious leaders who continue mechanically to expound the Scriptures without regard to the current religious situation are no better than the scribes and lawyers of Jesus’ day who faithfully parroted the Law without the remotest notion of what was going on around them spiritually.”
At the American Renewal Project, it is our firm belief that if Christian ministries don’t band together over the next 10 years to oppose and overturn carnal, pagan public inculcation of America’s youth, America is about to learn something that can be learned in no other way. Our children and grandchildren will pay a grisly price for our spiritual apathy and indifference. Mass departure from public education can only be accomplished by a devotional ekklesia, or as C.S. Lewis observed: “For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.”
Which brings us to former Texas Governor Rick Perry. As a Christian and sitting governor, Perry had the courage to lead a prayer event at Reliant Stadium in Houston on August 6, 2011, asking God for mercy for what we, Christians, have allowed to let happen in America. Not knowing the night before if even 300 people would show up, the organizers saw 30,000 people turning up to ask God for forgiveness.
The five signs and symptoms of the decaying culture of the Roman Empire (often misattributed to English historian Edward Gibbon) are the following:
1. Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth.
2. Obsession with sex and perversions of sex.
3. Art becoming freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original.
4. Widening disparity between very rich and very poor.
5. Increased demand to live off the state.
With these five being quite recognizable in today’s America, we might want to find Gideons and Rahabs in order to reestablish Jesus’ Kingdom assignment of the ekklesia.
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