In an article entitled The American Evangelical Church Is in Crisis: There’s Only One Way Out, Russell Moore argues that the Evangelical Bible-believing church has taken the wrong turn. He concludes that we must now return to the basics and abandon the political arena:
· In a country exhausted by the quest to make America great again, perhaps what we need is to make evangelicalism born again.
Why not both! Do we not have a right and a duty to speak
against public and social evils like the sexualization of children,
pornography, abortion, and Woke racism, which is dividing the nation into two
camps defined by skin color?
When we fail to confront the evils of our day, we are accused of being irrelevant. This too had been Hitler’s strategy. He allowed the Church to pursue personal spirituality as long as it didn’t inference with the plans of the National Socialist State. It also had been the strategy of much of the southern church to ignore the evils of slavery and segregation because the Church had no business speaking out against these political evils.
However, today we are being denigrated for the very opposite thing—speaking out against the many destructive sexual and racial sins. When we do, we are accused of being white evangelical bigots, haters, and lacking compassion.
Because we desire to maintain the foundation Biblical principles which had once promoted growth, exuberance, and the social, economic, and legal welfare of West, we are termed “Christian nationalists.” Moore even accuses us of abandoning Biblical principles for the sake of politics:
· The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous.
Moore denigrates evangelicals by claiming that it’s a matter of either/or—either seeking God-given revival or taking a public stand against evil. However, we have no choice but to embrace a wholistic Christian faith. We cannot remain silent about abortion or the maiming of our children:
· Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work? (Proverbs 24:11–12)
To remain silent is to approve. However, according to Moore,
“There is Only One Way Out” – to remain silent in the social/political
arena
· If evangelicals deny the depths of the crisis in front of us, and simply opt for the sort of public relations that can preserve the coalitions and power structures of yesteryear, we will lose a generation longing to see whether the Gospel is real or just another means to mobilize voters or market to customers. We will find ourselves in one more contest to see what kind of power we can leverage to make that happen—which, as always, will put us on the side of the crucifiers rather than on the side of the Crucified.
Moore would have us surrender community and national involvement, since these aren’t the domains of the Church. Although this might now be a popular idea among those who hate the influence of the Church, social conformity, seeking social approval, should not become our model.
Christianity wasn’t an optional appendage for our Founding Fathers. It had to be part of the solid foundation of the new republic. In “God of Liberty,” historian Thomas S. Kidd writes:
· Whether evangelical or rationalist, most Patriots assumed that Christianity would, in some sense, be the cornerstone for the preservation of the new American Republic.” (112)
In his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington reiterated these broadly accepted sentiments:
· “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars…The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” (112)
These sentiments were broadly held. Kidd writes,
· Through the era of the Civil War most Americans would continue to believe that the Christian religion should assist government in lifting people’s moral dispositions, so that they might contribute positively to the freedom of the Republic. Even the skeptical Thomas Jefferson believed that Christianity, in it original purity, “is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty.” (114)
Our second president, John Adams, who became a Unitarian, expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to his cousin Samuel: “All projects of government, founded in the supposition or expectation of extraordinary degrees of virtue [apart from Christianity], are evidently chimerical.”
These weren’t just the sentiments of American patriots. The Frenchman, deist and lapsed Catholic, Alexis de Tocqueville, extensively traveled the States, starting in 1831, endeavoring to understand the stability and monumental success of this new republic. In Democracy in America, he wrote, “The religious atmosphere was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States.” While the French Revolution had taken out its vengeance on the clergy, killing more than a hundred priests, the American Revolution embraced the Christian faith. According to Kidd, Tocqueville observed,
· The partnership of religion and liberty lay at the heart of America’s political success. To Tocqueville, the American’s Christian ethos kept democracy’s worst features in check…Freedom by itself would inexorably degenerate into rabid selfishness, but religion nurtured the purposefulness of freedom. In the American model, according to Tocqueville, ‘freedom sees religion as the companion of its struggles and triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its rights.’” (246)
This position is diametrically opposed to today’s secularists who want to silence and marginalize religious expressions and symbols and to reserve the public sphere for their stealth religion of secularism – moral relativism, multiculturalism, and religious pluralism. In contrast to this:
· Tocqueville asserted that more than any other political systems, egalitarian democracies needed the ballast of religion. Equality of condition and opportunity, which was more evident in America than anywhere else in the world tended ‘to isolate men from each other so that each thinks only of himself. “People in an egalitarian democracy naturally become consumed with selfish lusts and desires, exhibiting a greater willingness to harm those who stood in the way of their advancement. Religion, teaching the obligation of love toward God and man, created motivations essential to healthy democracy.” (247)
Why is religion viewed oppositely today? Perhaps, as Tocqueville had suggested, we have become so “consumed with selfish lusts and desires” that the teachings of the Bible are now viewed with contempt and as an impediment to our immediate self-satisfaction? Although among the Founding Fathers, there were many who were either rationalists or deists, they were positively disposed to the Christian faith:
· Tocqueville manifested a view of religion not unlike that of several prominent founding fathers, including Jefferson…maintaining that it was essential for the masses to keep believing in Christianity—or at least in good and evil—and in the eternal rewards in the afterlife.
Should the evangelical church accommodate itself to modern
tastes and trends as many would like to see happen? Such conformity can only occur
at the expense of our neighbors, our families, our communities, and, inevitably,
our nation. As the Apostles confessed before the ruling Sanhedrin, which had
wanted to silence them:
· But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19–20)
Yes, we will be hated even by those who label themselves “Christian,” but we have no choice.
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