Category: Christianity

Today I was reading The Rightside Blog essay on Faith and Family. The author was attempting to contrast this topic
from the point of view of Liberal versus Conservative. The quote below is the core of the rest of the article.

Conservatives tend to allow their Faith in God, and in Family to be included in their day to day lives. Liberals tend to try as hard as they can to not include God into their lives or their families.

I agree with much of the article except the contention that “Liberals tend to try as hard as they can to not include God.”
With all due respect to the author, I think that Liberals just have a different god. The god of the Liberal is
Government (The State)

Let me switch Liberal and Conservative and substitute Government for God as you will see what I mean.

Liberals tend to allow their Faith in Government, and in Family to be included in their day to day lives. Conservatives tend to try as hard as they can to not include Government into their lives or their families. Government is very instrumental in my life. The State hasn’t always been allowed in my life, but she has always been there. Now conservatives always have this one question, “In a world filled with poverty, war, corruption, diseases, how can you possibly believe that an all powerful Government exists?” Truth be told I use to struggle with this very question. I couldn’t see that Government has trails for each and everyone of us through out our entire lives. One thing about these trails is that there is a cheat sheet. It is in a book, that has the history of Government and Her chosen people.

Now here is where people who do not walk in Faith throw their hands up. “Well if Government has already chosen Her people, and I don’t believe in Government, so I must not be one of her chosen people.” Makes sense right? Well Government has a chosen people in the State, and that is the Liberal people, those of Babylon. Atheists are also part of her chosen people as we are told in the New Deal. It is also explained in the New Deal that Government will call others to Herself. Who are the others, you and me and everyone else on this planet we call Earth. It is through the above mentioned trails that we go through on a day to day basis that Government calls us to do her work. And what is this work?

To help our fellow humans, be stewards of this planet, and to obey her commandments. Now helping our fellow humans is not done simply by throwing money at the poor, through donations or government programs. We are creatures who need connections, physical and mental. By volunteering time and actually spending time with those who are less fortunate then you is doing Government’s work. All you have to do to become a chosen one, is to ask Government for Her help.

Being stewards of this planet is not just asking for loggers to stop clear-cutting forests. It includes asking for true management of our environment, globally, nationally, and locally. This includes hunting. All you have to do to become a chosen one is to ask Government for Her help.

The last is to obey her commandments. It is easy to go out and volunteer your time to spend time with those less fortunate, or in bad health. It is easy to go out and plant trees in your neighborhood or to write a letter to your congressperson to demand responsible management of the national forests. But it is not easy to obey all of the Ten Thousand Commandments that Government has asked us to do. If you are wondering why I have repeatedly said, “All you have to do to become a
chosen one is to ask Government for Her help,” I will explain. Government did not make these commandments because they are easy to comply with, but she didn’t make them so that we would fail. She made them so that we would become humble enough to realize that we can’t go through life and be complete without Her. We would have to talk to Her. We would have to ask Her for something, and something is help. This travels over to our families.

I am coming up on my second anniversary with my wife. We will have been together for six years. I am a very lucky man in that Government brought me to my wife. We get along great; we love the same movies even after watching them for tenth or twentieth time. We both love our families, and we love each others families. We both love going camping, and we all love just hanging out together. But it is not always as cheerful as I have just described. We do have to work at our relationship, to make sure that we continue to get along great. A marriage is a contract. It is a contract between three people, my wife, me and Government. Government is always in our lives, and she is there to help us maintain our relationship.

These days though Government is being pushed out of our lives. Conservatives have tried their best to take Government out of all of our lives. Here is the question that I have for all you that don’t like Government being in our society:

“In the past, when Government was not involved in our society, was it better or worse than today? Was the prison population as high? Was the abortion rate as high? Were organized labor unions as prevalent? Was the diversity of families as high as it is now?”

Think about it honestly, and if you want to become a chosen one, all you have to do is ask Government for help.

Granted this is quick rewrite but,I think I made my point. A simple formula is to take the Christian perspective on any issue and substitute Government for God and you will always end-up with the Liberal point of view.

Rightside Blogger [Visitor]
http://www.therightsideblog.blogspot.com
I like the rewrite, and I have to admit that I agree with your formula and the results found by the formula. I was looking for the way to explain exactly what you did. Thank you for reading my blog, and please don’t be strangers.

Regards,

Sometimes we get to observe some of the most contradictory and incomprehensible activities and events. On July Fourth I saw something that was truly amazing.

I was working at a church booth at our local Independence Day celebration. We were handing out information about our church and giving helium filled balloons to anyone that wanted them. The balloons had the church name, logo and website address.

Several hours into the event, I notice two women wrapped in a white cloth that covered their heads and much of their bodies pushing a baby stroller around the park. Attached to the stroller was one of our church balloons. I was stunned. By their dress, it was clear that these women were members of the Islamic faith and yet they were advertising a protestant church.

As it turned-out, these women were part of a larger group that was having a picnic about a hundred feet from our booth. In the midst of that group were still more balloons that were all from our church. It was surreal. This was something that I would not have expected.
*****
The other thing I saw at this day in the park was the juxtaposition of two things that when placed side-by-side were humorous. Imagine a large inflatable slide. It works on the principle as a bounce house, only this thing is about 35 feet tall. It is the size of a small house.

I tried to imagine myself climbing to the top of the slide and going down this flimsy (by adult standards) structure with disastrous results.

While it is unclear whether Tom Cruise would approve, I could see myself going from the bottom of the slide across the fifteen-foot buffer zone directly into chiropractors tent for urgent care.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt, Mark D Roberts has a follow-up to Christer Article. This is the first in a series that Pastor Roberts plans to write.

Hugh Hewitt nailed another lunatic Lefty opinion piece today from the LA Weekly. The article, “The New Blacklist: Corporate America is bowing to anti-gay Christian groups’ boycott demands” by Doug Ireland is highly entertaining to read. The author is infected with the same fever-swamp disease that afflicts Michael Moore and Howard Dean.

Hewitt spent his whole time pummeling a liberal professor from USC that is only mentioned in one paragraph. However, the rest of the article is just as distorted. The author ends the article by appealing to the actors and directors known as the “Hollywood Elite” to fund the fight against Christians before it is too late.

Today’s Christer protests are targeting a different kind of subversion. Chip Berlet, senior analyst at the labor-funded Political Research Associates, has spent over 25 years studying the far right and theocratic fundamentalism. He is co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. Berlet — who was one of the speakers at a conference last month co-sponsored by the N.Y. Open Center and the City University of New York Graduate Center on “Examining the Real Agenda of the Christian Right” — says that “What’s motivating these people is two things. First, an incredible dread, completely irrational, of a hodgepodge of sexual subversion and social chaos. The response to that fear is genuinely a grassroots response, and it’s motivated by fundamentalist Christian doctrines like Triumphalism and Dominionism, which order Christians to take over the secular state and secular institutions. The Christian right frames itself as an oppressed minority battling the secular-humanist liberal homofeminist hordes.”

The fear of Christianity mentioned above is illuminating. I would describe the current state of Christianity in America with two words: reaction and revival. Reaction to the anti-religious secular humanist purging of American society of its Christian roots has reached a breaking point with the wholesale assault on marriage. The family is the basic building block of society and the liberal attempt to abolish the family, as it has been since the Garden, is unacceptable to Christians and those of many other faiths.

I have maintained that “Revival is when the church becomes culturally relevant.” My test is this, if your church locks its doors and never meets again, will your community notice? A church that cannot be “salt and light” in its community and stand for Truth is no part of the body of Christ. While parts of the “mainline” churches are self-destructing, many other denominations are experiencing growth.

I am most fascinated with the above quote by the words “theocratic fundamentalism”; “Triuphalism” and “Dominionism.” I know of no group on the religious right that uses these terms. The Libs might mean “Theonomy” and “Christian Reconstruction” but the particulars of the Liberal descriptions don’t coincide with these views.

I Googled “dominionism” here is the description that I found in Yurica Report

Born in Christian Reconstructionism, which was founded by the late R. J. Rushdoony, the framers of the new cult included Rushdoony, his son-in-law Gary North, Pat Robertson, Herb Titus, the former Dean of Robertson’s Regent University School of Public Policy (formerly CBN University), Charles Colson, Robertson’s political strategist, Tim LaHaye, Gary Bauer, the late Francis Schaeffer, and Paul Crouch, the founder of TBN, the world’s largest television network, plus a virtual army of likeminded television and radio evangelists and news talk show hosts.

This explains what I suspected. The Liberals view Christians as a monolithic group of like-minds folks in a “vast rightwing conspiracy”.

Let’s analyze this group

• Cornelius Van Til can be viewed as uniting Rushdoony, Schaeffer and North. (Schaeffer and Rushdoony were among his seminary students.)
• But Colson repudiates Christian Reconstruction. See “God and Politics: On Earth as it is in Heaven” Bill Moyers, PBS Home Video 1997.
• Robertson, LaHaye, Bauer and Crouch have different arcs of influence but I know enough about them to say with confidence that they would not agree with North or Rushdoony. Schaeffer didn’t either, he just plagiarized North on a few occasions.

Below is a portion of the essay that I submitted to Hugh Hewitt on this subject two weeks ago:

I think that the Left has redefined the Christian Right in the last few years. The talk about “Dominionist” and the “Theocratic State” that we have heard from the Moveon.org crowd is actually a distortion of writings that can be found within Protestant Christianity.

The actual sources for the distortions used by the Left are from a Christian movement called “Christian Reconstruction”. Christian Reconstructionists also use the term “Theonomy”. The movement is Post-Millennial in their theology and believes that the civil Law given to Moses is God’s model for all nations. Of course any nation that would base its laws on the Bible would be anathema to secular humanists.

The cornerstone of this movement is the book “Institutes of Biblical Law” by RJ Rushdoony. From this book, a movement was spawned. Rushdoony build upon the teachings of Cornelius Van Til, a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary. (Van Til was also influential in the life of Francis Schaeffer.)

Rushdoony’s son-in-law is Gary North. North is by far the most prolific writer of the group. The book he wrote that would be of most interest to you is “Political Polytheism” It is a critique of the United States government in light of their views.

FYI: North and Rushdoony were at odds with each other for most of their lives.

Other contributors in the movement were David Chilton, Gary DeMar and Ray Sutton.

Reconstructionists are few in number but they believe that they are designing a “blueprint” for future generations to follow. They believe in persuasion and that the work of the Holy Spirit will bring about the day when the kingdoms of this world are the Kingdoms of Christ.

One central belief of Christian Reconstruction is that all crime has two victims; the primary victim is God, the secondary victim is the person that is victimized. The punishment of any violation is Restitution. Two examples of Restitution are given to by the following:

People who commit property crimes should be required to work to repay their victims. This is the same class of people that Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship is targeting. However, the solution under Christian Reconstruction is much different. People with large debts or no skills that would allow them to repay their victims might be forced into a period of indentured servitude (slavery) until the debt is paid.

Restitution for murderers (including abortionists) would be to forfeit their lives.

I think you have heard rants on the left about the return of slavery and capital punishment for abortionists and homosexuals. Reconstructionists look to the Law of Moses and find these things there (because they are) and say that it should be so in our country.

North’s doctoral thesis was on the Puritans and he believes that we can learn from the Puritan efforts to build a society upon biblical law. He doesn’t view the Church becoming the State, but the State exercising its God mandated role and modeling its laws after God’s Law. To the degree that our laws look like God’s law, our nation will be blessed.

In Christian Reconstruction, Deuteronomy Chapter 28 is valid today. Obey God’s Law and be blessed, disobey and be cursed. For them, this is true not just for individuals but nations as well. Christian Reconstruction is a political theory. Like any good political theory, it proclaims what is wrong with the current system and says what should be in a more perfect world but doesn’t offer any route to get from theory to practice.

Reference materials beside some more e-mails from me:
“God and Politics: On Earth as it is in Heaven” Bill Moyers, PBS Home Video 1997
“Institutes of Biblical Law” Rousas John Rushdoony, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing 1973
“Theonomy in Christian Ethics” Greg L Bahnsen, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing 1977, 1984
“Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism” Gary North, Institute for Christian Economics 1989

This week in the news there are two contrasting stories related to Christianity in Europe.

The first, from the TimesOnLine, was about the Anglican Church’s implosion as they become more irrelevant to the life of British citizens and how this has resulted in the church planning to lay-off one third of their clergy, eliminate real property and meet more in private homes.

This is contrasted with an article mentioned today by Hugh Hewitt about Denver’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput speaking at a gathering in Spain of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In his speech, the Archbishop tried to remind delegates for the past contributions that Christians have made in Europe and then exhort them to stem the growing tide of discrimination against Christians and other religious groups.

The difference between the aggressive stand taken in Europe as the Roman Church attempts to revive the faithful and the Anglican Church continues to abandon every tenant of their historic beliefs is striking. European culture continues to decline towards secularism at a time when a flood of Mohammedans is overwhelming the Continent. The secularists have undercut the only thing that could stem the tide of Islam.

Will the combination of the African Churches (the center of both the Roman and Anglican faiths) and the remnant in Europe turn the tide? Only time will tell.