As you might expect, especially if you've been reading my columns for any length of time, I hold the two—the pollution of the Christian church and the lessening of traditional America—to be inexorably linked. What kind of pollution am I talking about? The kind that Larry Alex Taunton wrote about back in 2020 in the American Spectator:
Over the course of his career, Tim Keller has been a light for the Christian faith in the pulpit. He has also written several helpful books. Yet, bizarrely, he has recently embraced the so-called social justice movement. In a series of articles and tweets this year, Keller, confusing Christianity with the Democrat presidential platform, pronounced authoritatively on issues ranging from “systemic racism” to the “corporate guilt” of white America. All of this, of course, was simply a precursor to his inevitable conclusion:
when it comes to taking political positions, voting, determining alliances and political involvement, the Christian has liberty of conscience. Christians cannot say to other Christians “no Christian can vote for … ” or “every Christian must vote for … ” unless you can find a biblical command to that effect.
Such a position would seem reasonable in, say, the 1916 presidential election between incumbent Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican Charles Evans Hughes. But in 2020, a year when Democrats represent all that is unholy? I can think of several biblical commands that made the choice for any Bible-believing Christian absolutely clear in this election. I mean, would Jesus endorse a radical pro-abortion and pro-infanticide policy; every sordid sexual agenda, even the sexualization of small children; a complete disregard for the rule of law; and open hostility toward His followers? I don’t think so.
I will quote liberally from Taunton's piece. I wish I’d had it to hand the other night, when someone close to me started rattling on about how Christians had sold their soul for Donald Trump. Then again, I wish I'd had the copy I now hold of the Manifesto of Cole Allen, where he tries to redefine Christianity to suit his politics, as I mentioned in this morning's daily. Taunton goes on:
A generation ago, pop star Bonnie Tyler famously asked the question, “Where have all the good men gone?” Since then, the situation has only gotten worse, Bonnie. As C. S. Lewis noted, men in the Western world have largely been emasculated, and men in the Church are seldom an exception to this decades-long trend. To stand strong for one’s faith in Jesus Christ and push back at a culture that, in the words of Isaiah 5:20, “call[s] evil good and good evil” is today seen to be “divisive,” “unloving,” “bigoted,” and “intolerant.”
Think of it this way… was Jesus being unloving, bigoted, and intolerant toward the money changers? (Ref: John 2)
And again,Taunton:
This is because evangelicals in the English-speaking world have confused Christ’s command to love others with being civil as if that were an attribute of God. (It isn’t.) As a consequence, a superficial, self-righteous, good-for-nothing pietism that prefers tone to truth and style to substance has displaced authentic Christianity in many of the roughly four hundred thousand churches in America. This doctrinal malpractice has given us a generation of men, Christian and otherwise, who are what C.S. Lewis called “men without chests.”
Don’t know the sort of Christians I am talking about? I’ll give you a hint. They are the sort who will, upon reading this article, take great offense at what I have written here and waste no time in letting me know it, but are not particularly offended by the sixty-one million children murdered in the holocaust of abortion since 1973, by universities that are incubators of radicalism, by Democrats who are compiling a “hit list” of Trump supporters, or by the godlessness of the Marxism they openly advocate, which has killed no less than 125 million people in the twentieth century alone.
It’s no accident that what he describes here is a parallel to the liberation theology that was preached in the church that Barack Obama supposedly sat in every Sunday for 20 years. And finally:
One wonders how he knows Trump is unrepentant and why he is the one to blame for factiousness. Did the president concoct a Russia collusion narrative? Did he spy on Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Did he illegally use the FBI to push false evidence? Did he do anything justifying impeachment? Did he support the looting, burning, and rioting in our streets? Did he take money from China through a family member serving as a proxy? No.
As for his vulgarity and boastfulness, I suggest Piper get out more. Trump is fairly typical of the chest-beating, plain-speaking businessmen one finds in places like New York, New Jersey, Boston, and Philadelphia.
I am reminded of a quotation attributed (perhaps inaccurately) to George Orwell: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Meh.
The quote is probably attributed correctly when measured word for word, but the idea was in fact expressed by Orwell in different wording, as part of an essay on Rudyard Kipling: Orwell cited Kipling's phrase “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep” ("Tommy"), and further noted that Kipling's “grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can be highly civilized only while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.” (1942)
Orwell or not, the sentiment is true. Like many of those who do violence on our behalf for the sake of our freedom, Trump is a rough man. That’s too much for Piper. Oddly, Piper represents a segment of the evangelical population that demands his president bear the characteristics of a Mother Teresa. Does he make the same demands of his barber, his mechanic, his accountant, or his surgeon? One suspects not.
Indeed not — until, of course, it comes to the voting booth. I defy anyone to explain how a single member of the establishment — in either party — shares even one characteristic with Mother Teresa. (Snicker)
I have argued repeatedly in these pages, and I argue it again today: America could not have been founded with Islam, any pantheistic religion, or atheism at its cultural core. Even the non-believer must concede that Christianity—as taught and practiced at the time of the Founding—gave Americans their entire conceptual framework, and most critically, their concept of individual rights. That word “individual” is exactly what sticks in their craw.
When the left corrupts the Christian Church, it achieves — from a cultural standpoint— the same result as abolishing it outright. And abolishing it is precisely what Marx demands at the bedrock of his philosophy, as he makes clear in his Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844).
A book I worked through recently, Woke Church by Pastor Eric Mason, struck me as little more than a repackaging of W.E.B. Du Bois — a man who, among his screwball ideas, claimed capitalism directly caused racism. Harvard loved him for it. But that claim crashes headlong into the life’s work of Dr. Walter Williams, Dr. Thomas Sowell, and Glenn Loury — three men who spent the majority of their careers thinking and writing about race, and who all reached the same conclusion: capitalism is racism’s greatest enemy.
(So take a guess which direction this supposedly new Christianity actually points.)
As I have argued in previous columns, change the religion at a culture's root, and you change the culture itself. Change the culture, and you change how that culture understands human rights.
Thomas Jefferson understood this relationship. He described the new American culture and its ideas about exactly where rights come from:
“…we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights.”
No one should be surprised that the left works constantly to convince Americans that rights flow from government, not from God. I quoted Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) saying exactly that last September and ripped him a new one for it — as did Ted Cruz.
Make no mistake: that is the direction they are pushing us. Shift the source of rights from God to government, and government gains the power to revoke them on a whim. Christians need to recognize this for what it is — and push back, hard.
