America Needs True Prophetic Leaders

Christian historian William J. Federer asked, “How can we get pastors to encourage church members and pastors to get in a position to impact Republican primaries in 2018?”

Bill has an educated opinion on these matters since he ran for office himself in 2000, challenging sitting Democrat Minority Leader Dick Gephardt.

Before we fly off on a tangent, let’s first define the utilitarian value of political parties. There’s nothing good or bad about the Democrat or Republican parties, they’re merely holding vessels. Like-minded constituents are housed there. Yet, I can say without fear of contradiction that evangelicals and pro-life Catholic Christians, largely, are not housed in the Democrat Party. Democrats believe in abortion, same-sex intercourse, and marriage, transgender bathrooms and so on–all incompatible with biblical behavior and morality.

What about Democrats in the judiciary? Democrat judges consistently rule in favor of homosexual marriage, abortion and transgender rights (“bathroom-bill” laws). When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Democrats controlled only one of the 13 United States Circuit Court of Appeals. Eight years later, Democrats now control nine of the 13.

Consider the 2015 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on Obergefell vs. Hodges. After two and a quarter centuries of American history, five secularist justices discovered a right to homosexual marriage in the Constitution! Unconscionably, two of the justices who voted to codify same-sex marriage into law (both Democrats) refused to recuse themselves from hearing the case even though both had previously performed homosexual marriages.

Secularists endanger freedom, for virtue is a key component of freedom. As Nahum Sarna stated in Genesis Commentary:

“The idea is that humankind cannot undermine the moral basis of society without endangering the very existence of its civilization. In fact, through its corruption society sets in motion the process of inevitable self-destruction.”

America’s founders based Western legal philosophy upon natural law, placing principle and what’s right and wrong above reason. For if everything is truth, then nothing is true. The majority of the judiciary is now composed of cultural relativists, advancing the notion that there is no moral truth.

As Harold J. Berman noted in Law and Revolution II, Philip Melanchthon, co-leader with Martin Luther in the Protestant Reformation, is credited with “transform[ing] traditional Western moral and legal philosophy by making not reason but the Bible, and more particularly the Ten Commandments, the basic source and summary of natural law.” America’s founders asserted that the Ten Commandments are the ultimate source and summary of natural law.

Let’s appraise one additional example of the values of the Democrat Party. Prager University featured a five-minute video on race, The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party.” Democrats:

• Defended slavery
• Started the Civil War
• Opposed reconstruction
• Founded the Ku Klux Klan
• Imposed segregation
• Perpetuated lynchings

Now, as to current Republican leadership, who run as principled conservatives in order to be elected, and then govern as establishment moderates, Evangelicals are about tired of the charade. When the Democrats win they impose their secular, liberal values; they dominate. When Establishment Republicans win, they’re placeholders, and that’s all; showing definitively the lack of a principled worldview.

They are chameleons.

To this end, Speaker Paul Ryan apparently has decided to adopt the Denny Hastert/John Boehner pattern for leadership. Former House Minority Leader Boehner (in 2010) and Senate Minority Leader McConnell (in 2014) said that if entrusted with the majorities in Congress, they would storm the gates of hell with a super soaker. One can hear crickets chirping on the Christian agenda since they were given custody of the House and Senate.

Where is their leadership on?

• Repeal of the Johnson Amendment? (Christian Gag Order)
• Defunding of Planned Parenthood? (Murder defiles the land)
• Moving control of public education to the local level? (The decision to remove the Bible from public school, “led not to true neutrality with respect to religion, but to the establishment of a religion of secularism.” Justice Potter Stewart, (1963)
•  Immigration?
• Border Wall?
• Sanctuary Cities?
• Obamacare?
• $20 trillion debt piled on our children?
• $110 trillion of unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare?

To put the debt in perspective, every man, woman and child in America—you and I—owes $300,000. This amount exceeds the combined value of every U.S. bank account, stock certificate, building and piece of personal or public property. We’re beginning to look like The Crisis of the Third Century (A.D. 235–284), a period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague and economic depression.

Now, back to Bill Federer’s question, “How can we get pastors to encourage church members & pastors to get in a position to impact Republican primaries in 2018?”

Again, there is nothing good or bad about the Democrat Party, or the Republican Party, but if you’re a Democrat, leading with biblical values, you will have a problem.

EXHIBIT A
Washington, 4/21/2017: Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez became the first head of the party to demand ideological purity on abortion rights, promising Friday to support only Democratic candidates who back a woman’s right to choose.

“Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body and her health,” Perez said in a statement. “That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state.”

“At a time when women’s rights are under assault from the White House, the Republican Congress, and in states across the country,” he added, “we must speak up for this principle as loudly as ever and with one voice.”

As Dennis Cole wrote in Numbers Commentary, if America is to survive, we must unearth the likes of men and women who founded America and move them into the public square. We need true prophetic leaders who evidence a close relationship to God and a thorough knowledge of His Word, whereby he or she understands the full-nature of God. Then, out of that understanding, a person may speak for God in the public arena, a message of forgiveness and love, or judgment and justice, to a nation that is adrift and has lost its way.

The good news is, Gideons and Rahabs are beginning to stand. {eoa}