Somehow the Supreme
Court has managed to not just legalize same-sex marriage, but to force it on
all of us. Two ordained ministers in Cor
d’Alene, Idaho are being fined by the state for refusing to marry gays in their
chapel. From there it isn’t much of a
leap to demand pastors marry gays in their churches. Yeah, except that it
violates Matt. 19:4-5 and Leviticus 18.
Two things bother
me. One is that Christians aren’t
upset. To have government force belief
and practice upon a faith—if that’s not a violation of the first amendment,
what is? Instead, Christians are
apathetic or worse, they side with the secularists. It’s not that this trend hasn’t been
observed. Barna measures poll
respondents of many Christians. There
are 9 articles (Barna uses 8) that are known as orthodox Christianity—those principles
taught by just about every Christian church in existence—salvation by grace,
virgin birth, existence of hell, etc.
Yet in the polls, Barna notes that only 9% of respondents agree with
these orthodox views. A lot of people
are more swayed by the Kardashians and the NFL than our Lord, Savior and Friend, Jesus the Christ.
Maybe that’s my
problem! I can’t keep up with the
Kardashians, nor do I care to. I’m a Norman Rockwell guy in an Entitlement
World. A Dietrich Bonhoeffer guy in a
soft-Nazi world. Or as Bonhoeffer asked
a fellow pastor who came to visit him in prison, “Why aren’t you in here too?” And the way I answer the Christian Apathy mystery
is that I suspect that most folks haven’t crashed and burned as many times as I
have. Thus, there is little fear of God
and besides, “do we still believe in a burning hell?!”
The second bothersome
thing is that America no longer cherishes the Constitution. We become just another nation of the Americas
without our Constitution--another Argentina or Peru. Our soldiers need swear on nothingness, let
alone our politicians. We scoff at property
rights, and think that government rules over the people rather than “We the
people, in order to form a more perfect Union.”
Buried at the core of this insolence is our loss of faith. For in the
formative age of our Founders, it was considered that all men should be free to
pursue their own relationship and destiny with the Almighty. To step on another’s freedom risked
challenging God. Such a sense of destiny,
known as the America Dream, made us work.
We truly did “ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can
do for your country.” Now it’s just trying to find out what they qualify
for. The American Dream just means ease
and money, not destiny.
The Constitution lost
its luster when our schools began to teach ambivalence. High school government classes went from
being year-long to only part of a semester.
D’Tocqueville observed an America where everyone was talking
politics. Today, a lot of people refuse
to vote or pride themselves in not voting.
You hear talk about how independent they are because no one running
agrees with their hallowed points of view.
(That ought to tell you something is amiss with your views, right
there!)
And so we lose our
faith and our founding and descend into fascism of government dictates,
multiplying rules and special privileges for the well-connected. Then, we lose our economic luster and go from
3.8% growth from 1982-2000 down to 1.8% since.
This is but a symptom of the destiny we have lost. But there’s a way out of this mess. We must educate those who never bothered with
the faith or the Constitution, a monumental task. Revitalize our economics by de-regulating and
reorganizing government bureaucracy, a monumental task. And we must reform
entitlement with responsibility, a monumental task.
But we have had big
jobs before. We are still the people of
the self-evident truth. And many of us
find that here in our senior years we have yet another challenge to bring back
America.
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