Evangelicals on "Religious Freedom"...Again

In a 20013 study, the Barna Research Group found that fifty-one percent of American "evangelicals" were "...concerned that religious freedom in the U.S. will become more restricted in the next five years."  (http://www.lookoutmag.com/in-the-world-april-7-2013/)

We frequently hear that "chip-on-the-shoulder" attitude of "evangelicals" about their "religious freedom" being denied.  It usually turns out to be some kind of self-serving political ploy, more than a matter of Christian principle.  The commercial wedding-chapel in Idaho, for example, which advertised it did Buddhist, Christian, Moslem, Hindu, Shinto, and other kinds of weddings: but screamed its Christian "religious liberty" was under attack when the local city-council ticketed the business for refusing to do a gay "wedding."

Interestingly, Barna also found that a majority of "evangelicals" believed "traditional American" religious values (i.e., Protestant Christianity) should be given preference in public policy.

David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, well and rightly called out that "cognitive disconnect"...or rather, hypocrisy:

“Evangelicals have to be careful of embracing a double standard: to call for religious freedoms, but then desire the dominant religious influence to be Judeo-Christian.  They cannot have it both ways.”

Evangelical Hypocrisy on Religious Liberty

Dr. Russell Moore is head of the ultra-"conservative" Southern Baptist Convention's "Ethics and Religious Liberty Committee."  He was critical of candidate Trump.

He is currently under attack by "evangelicals" for his comments about post-election American Christians' situation.  Mike Huckabee (himself a Southern Baptist) has said he is "...utterly stunned that Russell Moore is being paid by Southern Baptists to insult them."  Some Baptist leaders and organizations have called for Moore to be fired, or defunded.

Moore's comments actually seem thoughful and conciliatory to me, urging that we act toward each other, and toward the president-elect, with gospel-righteousness.  His essay is posted on his website:

 http://www.russellmoore.com/2016/12/19/election-thoughts-christmastime/

The dispute seems to point up the blatant hypocrisy of much "evangelical" culture: which finds a violation of "religious liberty" in baking a cake for a gay wedding, but itself turns furiously on anyone who questions the "evangelical" politics.

I wrote Dr. Moore a letter of appreciation:

Dear Dr. Moore:

As a former Southern Baptist, I was encouraged to hear on N.P.R. about your comments on American Christians' situation after this year's election.  I came to your website to read your full blog.

The critical responses to your comments highlight a problem among American "evangelicals."  Religious liberty is under attack in America less from a few well-publicized government actions (many of which, in my opinion, are over-blown and "spun" by political manipulators, for their own purposes): religious liberty is under attack from within the "evangelical" movement, when it deviates any whit from the party-line.

More important than our religious liberty in civil law is the attack on any Biblical criticism of "evangelical" politics.  Criticism not only of the personal morals of "evangelicals' " current political darling: criticism of his moral formula, that the unrighteous policies he has promised will "make America great again."

You rightly cite Romans 3:8's reference to the teaching of "do[ing] evil that good may come."   That teaching is wholly contrary to the moral law guaranteed in God's Own Character.  It didn't work for Adam and Eve.  We must be skeptical it will work to "make America great again."

Thank you for challenging American Christians to measure our culture, including the political culture Christians themselves have so widely embraced, by Jesus' righteousness and teachings.  Without such challenges, our faith is entirely a creature of our culture (including our "evangelical" culture), and no good for anything except to be thrown out (Matthew 5:13).

blessings,  ----- -----

 

Merry Bogus Christmas

Anyone who’s ever read my blog during the Christmas season knows I consider it a bogus holiday.

Not totally bogus: Jesus was born: though almost-certainly not on the day we celebrate His birth.  Not that that's a big deal, or at all unusual.  Even as recent an event as July 2nd 1776, we celebrate on the 4th.

That God was born into the world in human flesh, and lived in this world among human beings, IS a truly big deal.  It's the most important event that ever happened, for the human race, and for our understanding of God . . . except when He willingly died an unjust human death to set human beings free from death, and sin.  Which was His reason for being born as a man.

In previous years, I've gone into the bogus history of Christmas in detail, at length.  That Christians of the first centuries didn't celebrate Christmas, for example: that Christian writers in those centuries ridiculed pagans for celebrating their gods' birthdays.

One of the major pagan "birthday" celebrations in Rome was for "Sol Invictus" ("the unconquerable Sun") on December 25th.  It also fell on the last day of Saturnalia, the great feast of the god Saturn: a period (which got longer, and more riotous, through the centuries) celebrated by giving gifts, and drinking, and decorating trees.

Both those Roman "holy-days" continued among pagans into the early years of Christianity's official status as Rome's religion.  It seems pretty clear that the invention of "Christ's Mass" in that same period was a deliberate attempt to give the people a Christian holy-day like the ones they were used to.  Even the Christianizing Emperors weren't brave enough to tell people the new religion did away with their favorite, most licentious, birthday party.

It seems significant that many of God's purifying moves for His Church since the 300s A.D. have taken direct aim at the pagan custom of Christmas.  Particularly significant for American Christians, because most of the reforming churches of our colonial ancestors considered the celebration of of Christmas (in the words of Puritan Governor William Bradford) "pagan mockery:"
 
The story of how the celebration of Christmas became resurgent, and dominant over Christianity's teaching against it, is well told in a biography of Charles Dickens, The Man Who Invented Christmas.  The title says it all.  Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" (which notably does not contain the name "Jesus," nor the title "Christ," except as an element of the words "Christian" and, especially, "Christmas") was the origin of modern Christmas: not Jesus' birth.

Many people of course have warm sentimental feelings about the Christmas season. That's obvious.  Good for them.  That is, however, not what Christmas is about, or what Christmas celebrates.  Personal sentiment has no place in validating Christian truth.

I can testify that God still speaks past, or around, the bogus sentimental religiosity of churches' "Christmas," to anyone who will listen for Him.  But I can also testify that the Christmas season is, for anyone who wants to listen to God and worship Him, the year's greatest season of Spiritual drought.  For the whole month of December (and sometimes longer), all the Church' thoughts and efforts are mostly...sometimes entirely...toward, and for, and about, the holiday.

This basic incompatibility of "Christmas" and Christianity is particularly well-illustrated this year by the churches in my area.  Several area churches (including my daughter's church, in a nearby area) have cancelled their Sunday services on the 25th...because that's Christmas day.

I don't say this to censure those folks.  In our cultural context (and our "Christian-culture" religious reinforcement of it), their decision is practical.  Many church-members will be traveling, or have a houseful of out-of-town family.  Opening all the Christmas presents takes up the whole morning.  Preparing Christmas dinner (especially for a large family) takes hours and hours of exhausting work.

It is nevertheless a telling example of core Christian purposes marginalized in favor of the purportedly-"religous" holiday.  Church-people like to chirp that "Jesus Is The Reason For The Season."  Get down to it, I have to doubt that's anything more than an empty slogan.  It's something of a real-life parable this year, that worshipping God is canceled because of Christmas.

The Spiritual Question Today

"...there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good."
(Romans 13:1b-4a)

We have a political faction in our country who teach that government doing good for people is "socialism." They also teach that it's good to resist and rebel against authority...as they do.

They claim to be the "Christian" faction in American politics.

We know what Jesus' judgement is on hypocrites and liars. What is His judgement on those who believe, and follow, hypocrites and liars ?

Christian Political Correctness

It's very popular to be against "political correctness" these days.

Indeed, being "anti-p.c." is probably the favorite politically correct attitude in our society.

One reason it's so popular is that there's no cost in being "anti-p.c." "Political correctness" is something those other awful people do...not us.

No need to bring Jesus into the matter, questioning what speck or what log is in whose eye.

Doesn't apply. P.C. is something other people do. There's no "politically correct" log in the eye of patriotic American Republican conservatives.

If there were, wouldn't Jesus say to them what he said in scripture: "You hypocrites" ?

"In God We Trust" and "under God"

One of the perennial lies that goes around in "Christian" e-mails, and appears on "Christian" blogs, is that THEY (the federal government, the American Atheists association, liberals, President Obama, the A.C.L.U., etc.) are trying to rob America of its "Christian nation" standing, by doing away with our national motto, "In God We Trust." In 2010, this took the form of a letter from the Congressional Prayer Caucus correcting President Obama when he referred to "E Pluribus Unum" as America's national motto. It's worth sifting through this controversy to find out what truth it contains.

I've independently researched the "national motto" question over several years. Snopes.com's research on the 2010 incident summarizes the facts well:

"In 1782, the U.S. Continental Congress proposed the use of the Latin phrase E pluribus unum (commonly translated as "out of many, one" or "one from many") on the Great Seal of the United States as a reference to the original thirteen American colonies' having joined together as a single united entity. The phrase is still a component of the Seal of the United States and has appeared on U.S. coinage since 1795.

"However, although E pluribus unum was long considered the de facto national motto of the United States, it was never officially established as such by legislation. The only legislatively established national motto the United States has ever had is "In God We Trust," a phrase which first appeared on U.S. coinage in 1864 (and is now a part of all U.S. currency and coinage) and which was adopted as the official U.S. national motto through a law passed by Congress in 1956." (http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/mottoletter.asp#hRDuUHaYoRJFjkJj.99)

Those are the simple facts. But the controversy is (of course) political: and that always involves shaping facts to a partisan purpose. The Congressmen's 2010 letter is an example. Suffice it to say that the "Congressional Prayer Caucus" is an almost-exclusively Republican "conservative" outfit. Some might consider this proof that Republican "conservatives" are the only Christians in Congress. I find rather that the "Prayer Caucus" mostly functions to manipulate "Christian issues" to "conservative" purposes.

The signators of the 2010 letter (one of whom I know personally, having been part of the same congregation in the 1980s) had the obvious purpose of dinging President Obama...dinging him especially as "anti-Christian" for failing to cite "In God We Trust" as the national motto. Interestingly, Snopes' research mentions that other presidents: including the "conservative" demi-god, Ronald Reagan: have referred publicly to "E Pluribus Unum" as our "national motto."

But in point of one fact, "conservatives" are correct: "In God We Trust" is America's official "national motto," so designated by Congress in 1956.

"In God We Trust" has a long association with American government. It's first appearance was in the fourth stanza of "The Star Spangled Banner" in 1814: "And this be our motto, in God is our trust." The phrase was first added to American coins during the Civil War when a Pennsylvania minister wrote Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, that in that crisis our coinage should acknowledge God. The minister suggested the mottoes "PERPETUAL UNION" and "GOD, LIBERTY, LAW." At Chase' order, the Director of the Mint proposed "OUR COUNTRY, OUR GOD" or "GOD, OUR TRUST." Chase re-worked the latter to "IN GOD WE TRUST," which first appeared on the two-cent coin of 1864. (http://www.treasury.gov/about/education/Pages/in-god-we-trust.aspx) In all these permutations, the motto was a not-so-subtle claim that God favored the Union side in the war.

The motto did not appear continuously on all coins and bills until 1938, by act of Congress. In 1956 it became our official national motto. The first of several constitutional challenges to the motto, all unsuccessful, was Aronow v. United States in 1970. In that case a federal Court of Appeals held that "It is quite obvious that the national motto and the slogan on coinage and currency 'In God We Trust' has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion. Its use is of patriotic or ceremonial character and bears no true resemblance to a governmental sponsorship of a religious exercise." In 2004, the Supreme Court decision in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow cited the Aronow ruling in finding the pledge of allegiance' phrase "under God" and other such governmental and patriotic references to God are not unconstitutional, "... hav[ing] lost through rote repetition any significant religious content...", and are only expressions of "...ceremonial deism."

More salient to these phrases' use as "Christian" shibboleths was the public protest after "In God We Trust" was omitted from the $10 and $20 gold coins of 1907. President Theodore Roosevelt publicly opposed restoring the motto to coins, writing that "To put such a motto on coins or to use it in any kindred manner, not only does no good but does positive harm, and is in effect irreverence, which comes dangerously close to sacrilege.” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9406E2D8103EE033A25757C1A9679D946697D6CF). In 1908 Congress nonetheless legislated that the motto should thereafter appear on all gold and silver coins: in 1938, that it should appear on all U.S. coins and bills. And in 1956, that "In God We Trust" was the official national motto of the United States.

Just two years earlier, Congress had added the words "under God" to the pledge of allegiance. I'm old enough that my life spans the before and after of that official piety. The summer of 1953 was my first year in Vacation Bible School at Kensington Avenue Baptist Church in Kansas City, where my folks were members. My mother saved my certificate of attendance that year. The certificate (printed by the official Southern Baptist publishing house) was imprinted with the pledges to the Bible, to the Christian flag, and "to the United States Flag." The latter (see the image below) lacks the words "under God"...which only became part of the pledge of allegiance the next year.

Granted I'm a bit on the old side now: I can't help viewing any event that took place during my lifetime as "recent." By that criteria, America's official "godliness" is neither actually "Christian" (according to a "conservative" Supreme Court's decision), nor long-established: yet those are the operative assumptions on which "conservatives" vaunt themselves as defenders of "America's Godly Heritage" (as the false "historian" David Barton formulates the "Christian conservative" Big Lie).

God has certainly blessed America with some men after His Own Heart in our national history: even a few in our political history. We have had times when the Spirit fired the people of our nation to levels of fervent worship much greater than today; and times of disbelief much greater than today's. But always God has kept for Himself a remnant for His Own possession, as He promises. He does so even now among us, and does always, in all nations where His Name is worshipped. And He upholds His Own always, by His sovereign mercy over all who love Him ! Praise HIM !!

But those spiritual realities have no real bearing on America's official national "godliness." That shibboleth has always been what it is now, a creature of political pretense, in the spirit of proud hypocrisy.

Wikipedia notes, for example, that "The 1956 [national motto] law was one of several legislative actions Congress took to differentiate the United States from atheistic Communism." As in the Civil War's coinage, we still want to believe, and assert, that God is on our side. (Lincoln aptly skewered that prideful attitude, when he told a delegation of clergymen that he thought it more important to be sure we were on God's side.)

The 1954 legislation adding "under God" to the pledge of allegiance was another such case. The author of the legislation, Michigan Congressman Louis C. Rabaut, argued for its passage in Congress, that "... the unbridgeable gap between America and Communist Russia is a belief in Almighty God. From the root of atheism stems the evil weed of communism and its branches of materialism and political dictatorship." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_C._Rabaut)

Interestingly, Rabaut was a Catholic, and a Democrat. On either count, today's "Christian conservatives" would doubtless find him persona non grata.

Even more interesting, the original pledge of allegiance, containing no reference to God, was written by a Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy, in 1892. The absence of God in his formulation may seem surprising, but Bellamy's account of the pledge's origin (entered in The Congressional Record in 1945) emphasizes that its purpose was entirely patriotic:

"At the beginning of the nineties patriotism and national feeling was at a low ebb. The patriotic ardor of the Civil War was an old story ... The time was ripe for a reawakening of simple Americanism and the leaders in the new movement rightly felt that patriotic education should begin in the public schools."
(A Brief Synopsis of the Story of the Origin of the Pledge taken from the Detailed Narrative by Francis Bellamy, Author of the Pledge. Congressional Record 91 Cong. Rec. (1945) House. pp. 5510–5511.)

The "new movement" of which Bellamy was a leader was "Christian socialism." Given those origins, I'm surprised our current "conservatives" so vehemently embrace the pledge (George Bush Sr. campaigned for president on little else than being "for" the pledge of allegiance !). But ignorance of facts is a great shield against reality. Even were they aware of those facts, I'm sure "conservatives" would be able to deny it was true. Like all factionalists, they love truth only so far as it corresponds to their own worldview: in which "socialists" are America's greatest enemy, not "patriots."

But the only question that matters a whit in it all: what says God, Whom "conservatives" make the adjunct of their political posturing ?

God hates hypocrites. He hates most fiercely those who practice hypocrisy in HIS Name.

May God uphold His Name in power ! May He glorify Himself in the righteous judgement Jesus pronounced repeatedly, "Woe to you,...hypocrites !" (Matthew 23)

All praise to You, our King, for YOUR righteous rule and YOUR righteous judgement on evil-doers !!

Amen !!

Play-acting

"Middle voice from hupo and krino; to decide (speak or act) under a false part, i.e. (figuratively) dissemble (pretend) -- feign." -- Strong's Exhaustive Concordance


"ὑποκρίνομαι;

1. to take up another's statements in reference to what one has decided for oneself (middle κρίνομαι), i. e. to reply, answer (Homer, Herodotus, others).

2. to make answer (speak) on the stage, i. e. to personate anyone, play a part (often so from Demosthenes down). Hence,

3. to simulate, feign, pretend (from Demosthenes and Polybius down)..." -- Thayer's Greek Lexicon



"HUPOKRISIS...primarily denotes a reply, and answer...; then, play-acting as the actors spoke in dialogue; hence pretence, hypocrisy..." -- Vine's Expository Dictionary


It's a word Jesus used a lot, calling-out the social/political/religious fakers of His time. How are "religious" pretenders of our time, false in their hearts toward God, any less false in their "spin" towards man (His creation) and government (His rule) ?

And not those only who deliberately set their hearts to deceive. Every one of us who practices the scriptural discipline of monitoring our words, thoughts, and deeds to measure them against and keep them in line with Jesus' teachings, learns to keep a keen eye out for hints of hypocrisy. The beloved teacher Bob Mumford said one time he was convinced that any of us could turn hypocrite in an hour...or a minute.

I think of this every time I handle money. Every American bill and coin I pass proudly boasts, "In God We Trust." And every time I see that "national motto," I know in my heart, "No, we don't." Hypocrisy.

Of all Jesus' unchanging and unrelenting words to men, maybe the most relevant to America are those He addressed to social/political/religious fakers: "Woe to you !!"

If no one else hears Him, may the Spirit at least awaken the CHRISTIANS of America to repent !

In God We Trust

We've all heard the lie that goes around "conservative" circles periodically: that "they" are going to remove "In God We Trust" from American currency. That lie, of course, is supposed to make us fearful and angry against "them," and make us follow the "Godly" liars...who (we're supposed to believe) will KEEP that motto on American currency.

And keeping that motto on American currency will...what ? What is it supposed to mean ? That America is a Godly nation, that trusts God MORE than its wealth ?

Perhaps America SHOULD take "In God We Trust" off our currency. How can it not be an affront to God that we shout such a hypocritical lie on our every penny and every dollar ?