04 December 2011

American Christians are more outraged over Socialism than they are a false prophet…

A few comments on the effects of Sacralism on the Church with regard to politics, morality, social narrative, race, and authority

I’ve been watching for some time, looking for Christians to speak out about Mr. Herman Cain. Why?

This man presents himself as a Minister of Christ’s Church, a leader of God’s people. He also has declared himself a prophet, one who has conversations with God. God told him, he claims, to run for president. Whether he takes the label of prophet is irrelevant. His claims identify him as such.

I regularly listen to American Evangelical leaders blast European morality and the loose morals of their society. Admittedly Europe is not as strict when it comes to sexual morality.

Of course loud obese Americans gobbling up slave produced cheap plastic goods and dropping bombs all over the world, (in many cases claiming God has all but directed them to do so)…don’t carry a lot of moral authority in Europe either. I guess from their perspective a topless beach is less of a big deal than blood-soaked babies.

The American Church is permeated with scandal and sin. While I’m certainly not advocating Wesleyan Perfectionism, I’m suggesting there’s something seriously wrong with the American Church.

Many Worldview teachers look with dismay at the statistics. The American Church doesn’t really live or even think any differently than the hordes of lost people that surround them. There is very little in the way of conscious thought-through antithesis. You can pretty much take any sin and find the Church is just as permeated with it as the rest of society.

It’s because they haven’t been taught….is what we frequently hear. If we can just get these people to learn the Biblical Worldview concerning, family, politics, economics and so forth…the Church will change.

I would suggest the majority of these people probably aren’t Christians to begin with. The Gospel has been so perverted by various forms of Consumerism and Easy Believism that there are very few who can even begin to elaborate the basics. Words like Justification and Atonement are pretty foreign to most Evangelicals.

And the concept of Authority is patently absent. We see it with the flood of pagan ideas and syncretism entering the Church and we see it in the loss of any concept of delineation or discipline. We know of many Churches in our community tolerating open sin, in some cases spouses divorcing and without missing a beat taking up with someone else in the congregation…and in some cases before the actual divorce (whether right or wrong) is actually completed. We have open adultery in the Church. And I’m not talking about the Mainline United Methodist and Presbyterian (PCUSA) congregations. They’ve had cohabitors and others openly attending for years.

Evangelicals seem quite eager to apply Old Testament Law to the polity of the United States. So what about Herman Cain? Deuteronomy 18 is pretty clear concerning the prophet who speaks in God’s name and is proven false. I’m not advocating for Old Covenant law to be applied to our nation, but many Evangelicals, even those who aren’t avowed Theonomists, make this appeal. Why isn’t any one calling him out and denouncing him for what he is….A False Prophet?

Regarding the adultery charges…well, they’re certainly not proven but I don’t think too many people are impressed with a man who was financially supporting ‘a female friend’ for years without telling his wife. I guess what I’m saying at this point is…I don’t think there’s really anyone who doesn’t think Cain is pretty shady and less than faithful to his wife.

Now in the Church we have forgiveness…of course there hasn’t been a lot of honesty or repentance has there? We can forgive…but that hardly means that we just forget and allow someone like this to press on with their lies and agenda.

I must forgive an employee who steals from me. But am I obligated to keep him in my employ? Is part of forgiveness allowing him to continue working in my store or warehouse, or if I work in other people’s homes…do I allow him to have other opportunities to steal from customers/clients?

When it comes to Cain, Gingrich or Bristol Palin, the Church is very forgiving. Palin was lauded for her decision to ‘keep’ her out-of-wedlock child. What a pro-life statement.

If Chelsea Clinton had turned up pregnant during the Clinton years, we would have heard endless dronings by the Dobsonites about the lack of moral character in the White House and the message this sends to the youth. But with Bristol Palin, her sin and the utter disarray of her mother’s lifestyle become…a message of life.

Gingrich the arch-hypocrite is forgiven, but Mitterrand of France is lambasted because he simply had his mistress and didn’t care.

Of course in the United States our leaders have long been notorious for their private misdeeds…notorious that is to those who are paying attention and who bother to read.

Those who consume mass media usually have no idea, for in our system the supposed ‘liberal’ media usually protects the establishment figures unless they make a grievous public error or if it’s something that cannot be hid, because other media outlets are reporting it. Thankfully our media landscape is changing…there’s more chaos, but also more truth.

Europeans tend to be a little bit more mature about these things. Don’t misunderstand me…I’m not saying it’s mature to accept sin. I’m talking about their society in general. They’re less inclined to play these games and try and maintain the façade that we do in America. The majority non-Christian Europeans seem to have a better and more honest understanding of human nature than the ‘Christian’ citizens of America. The United States has this narrative about its moral standing and leadership in the world. Adulterous leaders don’t look good raising the flag atop the Shining City on the Hill.

All of this works together to shape a consumerist media that in the past (before Clinton) wouldn’t report on the adulterous affairs of American Presidents. Candidates for office are not granted the same protection as those who are actually wielding power.

We have this kind of mythic narrative about our country and cultural Christianity (Sacralism) is wed to our politics. I’ve met so many Baptists who just loved George Bush while there were numerous Mainline United Methodists (like Bush) living in the same town (many of them Republican) that they would have nothing to do with. In fact these same Baptists found them to be spiritually repugnant and not Christian at all. They seemed to miss the fact that if Bush was living in their town, that’s where he would go to Church, not their Independent Fundamental Baptist congregation.

What is it? Blinded by celebrity? Majesty? Why do hard-line fundamentalists give a blank check to theologically dubious and morally loose characters like the Bush’s and Reagan…and in many recent cases Herman Cain?

Aside from all this…what if a Democrat in the style of Jim Wallis or Tony Campolo stood up and said, “God told me to run for president. I was like Moses, I didn’t want to lead, I didn’t want to speak, but He told me to?”

There would be a loud and very rabid denunciation of this, and rightly so.

But with Herman Cain, I heard very little. Because of his politics this arch-heretic false prophet gets a free pass.

It’s very telling about the state of the church and where people’s hearts are at. That is to say, what really matters to them, where their true affections are directed.

Let’s say for a moment I was Charismatic in my concept of Divine Authority and I accepted George Bush’s claim about God wanting him to run for president. Seemingly it was vindicated because he won.

But what about Herman Cain? His prophecy was obviously false! He’s obviously NOT supposed to be president. He just heard wrong? Well, it’s a little more serious than that. What if people believed him and voted for him because they thought…well, God told him so, so that’s what I’m SUPPOSED to do?

There is great evil at work within the Church. The Church does not know its right hand from its left and certainly knows very little about the Lord it purports to serve. And we’ve reached a point that you can’t talk about these things. If you raise them, all people hear is…you’re pro-Obama. I couldn’t care less about Barack Obama. He’s just yet another Caesar that lies, cheats, steals, bombs, and deceives.

But the Church isn’t clamouring after Obama. They are clamouring after a bunch of people that are just as bad, in fact worse, because they do it with Christ on their lips or claiming to be speaking for the God of Holy Writ.

Here is our war. What’s happening today is like the United States invading Madagascar instead of Normandy in 1944. Wrong war, wrong enemy, wrong tactics and so forth. The enemy is in the camp, within the walls. The watchmen…they’ve not only not done their job…they’re agents of the enemy. They’ve opened the gates.

Some have undoubtedly dismissed him because he is part of the ‘Black’ Church. American Evangelicals have proven quite schizophrenic in this regard.

Up until the late 1990’s, white Evangelicals were pretty universal in their denunciation of the ‘Black’ church. Martin Luther King was a Marxist and an adulterer. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were objects of scorn. The Civil Rights era was tied in with the anti-American liberalism of Lyndon Johnson and the anti-War movement.

But then suddenly Chuck Colson and others change the narrative…and a decade later Christian leaders and people like Glenn Beck are trying to ‘claim’ the Civil Rights movement as something Christian, something akin to what they are about. Anything perceived as good or positive has to be claimed by the Dominionist narrative. Unbelievers can't do good things. So no matter what the truth is...they're Christian.

Martin Luther King is suddenly a hero and Jesse Jackson and Sharpton…they become some kind of deviationists who lost the pure vision. They act like Martin Luther King were he alive would be working for FOX news.

I’m a little confused. While I can socially admire someone like Martin Luther King…the social values he stood for…I cannot stand with his theology. Racism is incompatible with Christianity, but so is theological liberalism that denies the Divine Authorship of the Bible. King was morally loose. But since I’m not buying into the Sacralist narrative, I can look at someone like King and say very good for society…but very bad for the Church.

I can look at someone like Gandhi and admire him and yet reject his religious ideas. But his social ideas flowed from his Hinduism some might say. Not exactly. Mainstream Hinduism’s caste system was hardly compatible with his ideas. Although there are certainly non-Brahmanic strains within Hinduism that support his ideas. Nevertheless what I find appealing is that a pagan stood against a Christian Sacralist Empire and shamed it into acquiescence.

Sacralist White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American Christianity was shamed by the people it had formerly enslaved.

But imagine Tories going to India and trying to claim they stood with Gandhi? The same is happening today with Colson, Beck and the African-American community.

But then when someone like Cain comes along and spews forth such blatant quackery…well, that’s the ‘Black’ church and they’ve got some theological problems. Indeed they do. It’s very sad. The African-American Churches in the United States have largely lost the gospel. Politics, the post-slave narrative, and self-help are their gospel in most cases.

We have a confused mess. Some perhaps wouldn’t want to call out Cain as a false prophet out of fear of being labeled racist. Others as I’m trying to say would at this point distance themselves from the theology of the Black Church…except when it is politically convenient to do otherwise.

Forgive this meandering ramble, but maybe you see that Biblical Truth has nothing do with how American Christians deal with these issues. It’s all about politics and power. And because of it…we tolerate false prophets in the camp.

My 9 year old son put it best… “He should go back to making pizza!”