Has American Christendom Finally Come to Her Kairos?
The Oct. 3rd, must-watch interview of Tucker Carlson with Victor Davis Hanson was both relevant and revealing.
“If you’ve ever wondered why it’s taken you so long to figure out what’s happening now in American politics, don’t blame yourself,” Carlson said. “It’s not your fault. It’s hard for most Americans to comprehend the total dishonesty of American liberalism. Virtually nothing the liberal says is true, and the lies are not ordinary lies.
“The lies are so brazen, so aggressive and unending that it’s difficult for a normal person to understand what’s happening. Thirty years ago, for example, liberals began to lecture us softly at first and then in an increasingly high volume about tolerance.
“How could you have known then that they planned, in fact, to usher in the most intolerant age in American history? They’ve done that now, but few people saw it coming. We shouldn’t make the same mistake again. Liberals are now telling us they plan to protect American democracy, and that’s the clearest possible sign that they intend to end it.
“[For example] Liberals have decided to strip Donald Trump’s name from the ballot in states across the country. Trump is the frontrunner in the presidential race. He’s currently beating Joe Biden in the polls. Yet liberals have decided that you should not be allowed to elect him president.
“Donald Trump appeared in court in New York in a civil case brought by the state’s attorney general. This was designed explicitly to keep him out of the White House. That case is part of a larger legal barrage against Trump that so far includes a total of 91 felony counts, every one of them politically motivated. That’s not democracy. It’s the opposite.
“It’s totalitarianism.”
Dr. Scott Huffman, Executive Director of the Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research at Winthrop University, noted in 2018 that polling found that then President Donald Trump’s standing amongst Evangelicals came not from the public perception of him as ‘godly’ or ‘moral’, but from being considered a bulwark against an increasingly hostile and all-powerful secularized State.
The former president is now the messenger of a movement that represents a fairly large swath of the American electorate. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich pointed recently to that trend on The Ingraham Angle by saying that Trump is “not simply a candidate, but the leader of a national movement.” Evangelical and Pro-life Catholic Christians are likely a large segment of that movement.
These are perilous times.
The State’s pagan-ish evangelization, indoctrination, and proselytizing of America’s youth through public education over the last 50 years is nothing short of defilement and sacrilege. No less of a perversion are the more recent woke military inculcation, the U.S. Supreme Court’s obscene edicts exalting and normalizing homosexual intercourse and marriage, the glamorization of the plague and blight of transgenderism, as well as the inordinate $33T national debt left by politicians for their posterity to pay off.
These manifestations of a pernicious ideology are destroying the American culture, yet, secularists will, unless challenged, persist in steering our nation toward the figurative falls of Niagara, with its eventual collapse and demise being all but guaranteed.
There may be some hope on the horizon with the imminent exposure of the Biden Consortium’s shakedown of foreign enemies and governments and the 80-year-old ‘great lion’ of Delaware’s unmistakable involvement. All this is the undiluted reflection of the nation’s afflicted overall condition through compromised politicians.
American Christendom has, thankfully, come to her kairos. The customary standard for measuring success in Christian ministry—attendance, holdings and portfolios—has been tried and found wanting. This model actually empowered secularism’s takeover and domination of the culture as believers started taking their leave in droves.
Pastors and spiritual leaders are now entering America’s public square. Their participation and counteractions will in the course of time greatly diminish secularism’s control of the nation’s spiritual, intellectual, educational, economic, vocational, and cultural levers of power. American Christendom as an institution, meanwhile, needs to be reformed.
J.B. Phillips [1906-1982], the English Bible translator, author, and Anglican clergyman began working on his classic, “The New Testament in Modern English,” during his time in the bomb shelter escaping the WWII German bombardment of London. He started with Apostle Paul’s letter to the Colossians.
Prior to the Luftwaffe’s assault, Pastor Phillips had discovered that young people in his Church of the Good Shepherd in Lee, South East London, didn’t understand the King James version of the Bible, commissioned by England’s King James I in 1604, and completed in 1611. Although majestic in tone, the Authorized Version didn’t speak to the youth group that met weekly with the pastor.
Great Britain was in great danger at the time of Pastor Phillip’s pastoral activities. France’s surrender to the German Führer Adolf Hitler on June 22, 1940, had put Britain in a bad and seemingly helpless position. The Nazi General Alfred Jodl (1890-1946), Chief of Operations at the German Armed Forces High Command, declared on June 30, 1940, that “the final German victory over England is now only a question of time. Enemy offensive operations on a large scale are no longer possible.”
On Saturday, September 7, 1940, the German Luftwaffe began its 8-month systematic day and night bombing of Britain.
Pastor Phillips’ own parish took in that time more than a thousand high explosive hits. The pastor sometimes held 40 or 50 funeral services a week during this precarious period, as one million homes were destroyed and 20,000 Londoners lost their lives.
American Christendom has to pull out of its century-long apathy, hand-wringing, despondency, and waiting for Jesus’ return as the means of evading responsibility for abandoning the culture. Christian renewed involvement in the culture should take the form of electing like-minded candidates to political office who represent Christian values, who then draft and pass virtuous legislation, and so codify into law Biblical values that will safeguard the nation for our children and grandchildren.
A Republic requires foresight and action.
The filing deadline to run in 2024 for public office in North Carolina is Dec. 4-15, 2023. The American Renewal Project is hosting its NC Pastor & Ministry Leader Candidate Training School on Friday, Nov. 17, in Greensboro. Please join us.
Absalom’s rebellion and insurrection against his father didn’t cause David to become slothful or careless. He acted with diligence and wisdom as he mustered and strategically marshaled his forces, placing them under the command of his most experienced generals.
While we acknowledge that America’s hope for a future lies solely with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, we pray that America’s Christian leadership will emulate the David of the Bible’s diligence and wisdom.
With gratefulness to Jehovah God, Gideon’s and Rahab’s are entering the public square. {eoa}
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David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.
