restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations
America at the CrossroadsAgain!
I love my country. I was born in one of her territories (Hawaii, before it became a state), and I will always be humbled that I am an American. If we look at our great nation, and anyone says to us it is unsatisfactory, we are entitled to imitate the man who was asked how he liked his wife and replied, Compared to what?
And yet I am mindful that America is but a fleeting actor on the stage of history. As Walter Lippmann once put it: When Shakespeare was alive, there were no Americans; when Virgil was alive, there were no Englishmen; when Homer was alive, there were no Romans. Much of what I have written recently has been addressed to my fellow evangelicals, trying to review the spiritual truths that gave birth to this nation and the political blunders that have led us off the pathway. Here I want to direct my comments particularly to pastors and Christians in every state across the land.
Our forefathers founded this nation on principles basic to our Judeo-Christian heritage. And their greatest fear for the future of the nation was that one day the people would turn from these principles. That day has come. Christ demands our complete devotion, but the church has lapsed into a Christianity of custom and tradition. The result is that the church has allowed itself to be used for worldly purposes. The current cries for church reform in America do not proceed merely from church failings but from the desire by well-meaning but deceived believers to assimilate church and state.
Friends, I would rather the church be thinned down to a tiny band and go into the catacombs than make a compact with this doctrine. Whoever today preaches a Christianity rooted in American nationality binds Gods Word to an arbitrarily conceived Weltanschauung, thereby invalidating it, and places himself outside the evangelical church. Whoever talks this way imagines that he is able to serve both Yahweh and Mammon, which is impossible.
The evangelical church of today deserves sharp criticism for its flabby, compromising attitude toward what I call the New Patriotism and because of its enthusiasm for the nations arrogant empire-building. Under the guise of contending for liberty it is actually perpetuating the old compromise of nationalism and gospel. Paganism in the form of state worship is invading the church, and its leaders are silent. We who proclaim the Good News owe it to our congregations to oppose this falsification of the gospel with all of our being.
In this tragic state of affairs, I have four proposals.
First, the New Patriotism/Neo-Paganism is to be protested against because it is heresy and because it has become the prevailing doctrine in the church through usurpation.
Secondly, the protest has to be directed fundamentally against the source of all errors, namely, that adherents to the New Patriotism place their faith in government as a second source of redemption, and thereby show themselves to be believers in another God.
Thirdly, the protest can be raised only where there is a clear agreement about the essence of this sickness.
Finally, all this should take place within the bosom of the church and in such a way as to call the church and its individual members to repentance.
Nothing can be achieved by a cosmetic makeover of the church. We have tried that and it doesnt work. We need a reformation. Otherwise what is coming may be worse than what has been.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it, said Yogi Berra. America is at a fork in the road. May God grant us the gift to perceive our errors, so that we may again learn to hate the works of the Nicolaitans.
August 8, 2003
David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.