With President Donald J. Trump up for reelection in 2020, the battle for control of resources and ideological supremacy in the public square will once again be the focus of interest. The disparities and contrasts between America’s two ruling political parties are so deeply rooted that the discrepancy couldn’t be any starker. Still and all, absolute truth is solely found in Scripture.
It bears repeating that the battle in America is not between the Democratic and Republican parties, but between two competing religions contending for control of the public square—Christianity versus secularism. Political parties are holding vessels where like-minded constituents are housed.
For that reason, evangelical and pro-life Catholic Christians face stiff competition from impious, reformist elements operating in both parties. According to Pieter A. Verhoef, the question is: Which worldview will rule over America’s “political, economical, international and military might”? The elevation of one worldview comes at the expense of the other. America’s sole hope is a return of and to biblical Christianity. Lamentably, contemporary Christendom appears to have forgotten how to apply faith beyond the four walls of the church building and, additionally, to accept that conflict is a calling as well. Just look at how Jesus was treated when confronting culture.
The Democratic National Committee seems to have a harder sell with evangelicals, at least politically. Congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California are partial to 70% top tax rates, sanctuary cities, LGBT ultra-uncompromising identity politics, open borders and tax-paid subsidized health care for all, including illegal immigrants. And if that’s not enough, Virginia and New York Governors Ralph Northam and Andrew Cuomo just the other day added accessory weight to the platform by espousing infanticide. This expressly demonstrates that, as Joseph Boot says, “when men turn away from the gospel and God’s kingdom law, social decay and every kind of evil proliferates.”
Blaise Pascal was of the sound opinion that the ability to judge requires a criterion or standard. The liberal Warren Supreme Court in 1963 tore that down with their 8-1 Abington School District v. Schempp ruling. Not to be outdone, the Burger Court overturned in 1980 a Kentucky law that required the posting of the Ten Commandments on the wall of every public school classroom in the state. According to the 5-4 majority ruling in Stone v. Graham, the Kentucky statute violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Authoring the majority opinion, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. opined that “This is not a case in which the Ten Commandments are integrated into the school curriculum, where the Bible may constitutionally be used in an appropriate study of history, civilization, ethics, comparative religion or the like. [See Abington School District v. Schempp.] Posting of religious texts on the wall serves no such educational function. If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible …” And so on and so forth. What Justice Brennan attempted to spell out was that the Ten Commandments are in violation of America’s newly minted “official religion”: secularism.
Western law has been drained of all truth to the extent that it has become what a majority of nine U.S. Supreme Court justices on any given day can agree upon. Unlike the Founding Fathers, who understood the intrinsic connection between morality and good government, today’s secularists lack any reference point to understand that, as Os Guinness records, “Freedom requires a firm refusal of what is false, what is bad, what is excessive, what is ugly and, above all, what a person is not and should never try to become. When everything is tolerable, nothing will be true; and when nothing is true, no one will be free.”
A.W. Pink offers valuable insight: “We can have no sure rule of obedience without knowledge. Although there may be knowledge without practice, yet there cannot possibly be practice of God’s will without knowledge. And therefore that we might be informed what we ought to do and what to avoid, it has pleased the Ruler and Judge of all the earth to prescribe us laws for the regulating of our actions.” The Commandments are to “restrain the wicked, who though they have no concern for God’s glory and no thought of pleasing Him, yet refrain from many outward acts of sin through fear of its terrible penalty. Though this commends them not to God, it is a benefit to the community in which they live.”
Secularists have established a woeful religion wholly their own in America. Pushed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, this new religion bears the name “socialism.” A violation of “at least three of the Ten Commandments, it turns government into God, it legalizes thievery and it elevates covetousness,” says Ben Shapiro.
As for present-day Christianity, Joseph Boot points out, Jesus said that He would build an “ekklesia, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18b). Sometime during the last century, the modern church adopted a different model, a kuriake oikia, or cloistered meeting place that expects “no transformation of society, no vast success for the gospel; no real Christianization of culture. Our only hope is in the Second Coming or the rapture and our escape from this world …”
It is the complete opposite of the robust theology of the American founders, who brought a warrior spirit and a vigorous Christianity to America’s shores.
Praise be to God that Gideons and Rahabs are beginning to stand.
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