The American nation is severely, maybe even fatally, divided these days, and the greatest force driving that division is the hate filled division of the Christian church in this nation. This ongoing tragic/comic process of division is caused by both the left and right, both the conservative church and the liberal church. The probable first response, being voiced by many at this moment, that the only real problem is the wrongs of the other side, is the heart of the problem. We have fallen for a never ending “what about-ism”, finger pointing at the sins of the other side and using that as a rationale to ignore the gaping holes in the Christian integrity of our own side.
To begin this analysis, let us consider the one big sin that both sides of our divide cherish in common, which is materialism. First of all, the prosperity doctrine infects both left and right with its presumption that gain equals godliness. It is admittedly more solidly rooted on the right, but many on the left believe it, even if they are quiet about it.
There is also a deeper meaning to materialism which both liberal and conservative Christians, to their shame, buy into. That is the idea that the material is more real than the spiritual. In its extreme iteration, it is the conceit that the material is the only real aspect of life. In ways this is the worst sin of all, because it leads us to diminish human beings, denying the spiritual nature of humanity. Both sides do this, even though they do it in slightly different ways, which is how it so viciously divides us.
To illustrate this point I must embark on a personal narrative. I belong broadly to the conservative side of the church. I do this not because I agree with them on every point, but because the conservatives at least give lip service to adhering to biblical standards. When I have attended liberal churches, I have found bringing up the Bible as a normative authority makes me very unwelcome very rapidly.
On the other hand, when I bring up biblical passages which bolster some liberal cause, such as defending the poor, while my conservative brethren are rarely persuaded, they at least put up with me making the case. For years I have advocated for the homeless. Some of my co believers here in rural Kansas have let me know that the one or two times they visited the urban poor, they were told that the homeless consider themselves to blame, that they should just try harder, and so I should not take the cause of the poor so seriously.
When I inform them that I have as many years working with the urban poor as they have hours, they don't like it. Then I agree that most of the poor should look to themselves for the solution to their problems, and that I tell them so when I minister to them. But then I add that when I talk to the movers and shakers, the developers and bankers, and even those in the middle class, I focus on the structural causes of poverty and homelessness, and changes that could be made. That conversation, in small town USA, usually ended, with a mumbled “I doeknow”; until recently.
I had occasion a couple of months ago to read one of my favorite passages, Psalm 82. Among other things, that chapter says, “Defend the poor and fatherless
Do justice to the afflicted and needy.
Deliver the poor and needy:
Rid them out of the hand of the wicked.
With that Psalm, and some other new ideas, fresh on my heart, I went to fellowship early one morning. When the conversation came around to that subject, I let them know that the biggest thing I have against socialism is that it has taken the plight of the poor out of the heart of believers. Since the socialistic programs seem to take care of their needs, conservatives not only don't work to relieve that kind of suffering, they kind of resent the poor for being so shiftless and dependent..
Part of what was motivating me at that moment was a recent quote heard from Elon Musk, talking about the homeless industrial complex, something I have experience with. Many contemporary homeless ministries don't seem to exert any effort to get the homeless back on their feet. This is because the ministries are now subsidized NGO's, which get government funding based on how many folks they feed, clothe, and house. So they prefer clients to stay in a mode of having given up, just hanging around everyday for sustenance. Worse, in some big cities, Mr. Musk noted how some of these organizations have become “zombie farms', looking the other way at drug dealing and severe drug abuse, as long as the clients stay in the area to pad the numbers which convert into government funds.
So on the left, the dehumanized poor are simply the recipients of materialistic support, while their worth or destiny as spiritual beings is denied. On the right, that material support is assumed and used as a cover for indifference. The poor are then resented and once again dehumanized as nonspiritual beings. Neither side sees them, or treats them, as potential and precious children of God. Socialism is thus used by both sides as a rationale about why they don't need to follow biblical guidance regarding the poor and downtrodden.
A number of years before that I was in a heartfelt discussion with a liberal Christian brother while we ministered together at a Christian coffeehouse (before it was an NGO). He made the assertion that if one were to remove every statement regarding helping the poor from the Bible, it would be a much thinner book. I agreed, but then I responded that if one were to remove every warning in the Bible regarding sexual immorality it would likewise become a much thinner book.
I think that God emphasizes both sins, that of sexual immorality and economic oppression, much more than other sins because unlike sins like murder, theft, or even lying, it is often not intuitively obvious to us that those things are wrong. It is, and always has been, easy to sit on the top of some economic pyramid and blithely ignore the suffering of those doing your bidding, and increasing your wealth. It goes on today, and it went on in ancient times. Look at Ezekiel 16:49-50 to see that that was the root of the problem in ancient Sodom.
Speaking of Sodom, sexual sins are also not intuitively obvious to us. When we are involved in some kind of iniquitous relationship, it can often feel like the most right thing in the world. Which is why God warns us so sternly about both kinds of sins; they are not easy for us to see on our own..
Liberals are right to concern themselves with establishing justice, and relieving oppression, but they make a mistake in using those sentiments to give power to secular, materialistic authorities to carry out those good intentions. Yes, Jesus told us to treat the poor and helpless as though they were Jesus incarnate, and give them the help they need. But He most definitely did not tell us to use force of arms (state power) to seize wealth from others to carry out that commission, and that is what socialism amounts to. Quite often, as with the homeless industrial complex, such plans backfire, making the actual lived lives of the poor even worse. Look at what has happened to inner city communities since the advent of LBJ's socialistic “Great Society.”
In their turn, conservatives are right to stand for moral purity. The allure of adultery and fornication, of all stripes, is a kind of intoxicant by which the nations are made drunk. The selfish mind of the flesh then takes control, and society has thereby been gradually seduced into total depravity. Conservatives (often hypocritical on this subject) are nonehteless mistaken in rejecting the persons of those caught up in sexual and lifestyle sins, wrongly rejecting both the sin and the sinner. The right in this country comes perilously close to fulfilling a dire prophetic warning, that because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall grow cold.
We must pray, on both sides, that the good we see ourselves called to by scripture be something we embrace in holy and loving ways. We must pray that our balanced calls to establish justice and righteousness be carried out by us in warm, tender and loving ways, not by relegating our fellow humans to the status of material objects to be dealt with in material ways, nor to reject the spiritual lives of those who struggle with sins we don't share.
The beginning of the idea that the flaws of my side can be overlooked because of the enormous flaws on the other side is rooted in the mistaken, and deadly, notion that God grades and judges on a curve. Those who think that seem to think that God is going to accept them into heaven if they are merely better than some other people. To come to these conclusions they must think that God is egotistically driven in the manner of human rulers, and is thus desperate for followers. They then presume that God will accept some deficient followers in order to swell the numbers of His adherents.
They are completely mistaken, because God does not grade on a curve. God is not trying to raise an army, nor is He the gatekeeper for some kind of cosmic country club. Simply put, God is raising, or at least trying to raise, His children. Because of that, we must attain unto a very high level of purity and holiness, just to exist in His presence. As such, He has set himself a challenging task, because for us to be His children, we must, first of all and by definition, have free will.
Given that goal, and both our free will, and out nascent creative potential, we were placed into a world, that since the fall, is an insanely confusing place to raise children. So, in His grace and mercy, He anointed some specially chosen people, and through them imparted to us His Word, The Holy Bible.. By doing that He provided us with one stable point, a spiritual anchor, that we desperately need to make sense of our lives in this swirling ball of confusion What's more, in the process of imparting His Word over the centuries, He made it a point to illustrate that not only does His Word contain the wisdom we need, but that if and (probably) when we turn away from His guidance, disaster always follows. Just a cursory reading of the Old testament, with a focus on passages like Psalm 78, reveals how important it is to God's plan that we adhere to scriptural guidance.
Then, with that lesson firmly set (after many centuries) in the hearts of at least sincere Hebrew believers, He sent his Messiah, in the form of a helpless infant. With the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Creator provided a way for those who believe in him to make it through the process of becoming His children. Contrary to what some like to think, this is not an automatic process that all will survive. Jesus himself said that the way to eternal destruction is wide, and easy, and many go that way.
In fact becoming a child of God is an infinitely complex and impossibly fragile process, one which no one can complete on their own. It is only by accepting the sacrifice of Christ, and thereby receiving an unbreakable relationship with our divine Father that we even have a chance. The demands of the teachings of Christ, His Word, the balancing of tender, loving gentleness with a call to righteousness so demanding that it is likened to ruling the nations with a rod of iron, are so all encompassing that it is not possible for a person to do.
With man it is impossible, but with God, all things are possible, and if we believe in Jesus, we have God, in the Holy Spirit, to bring us through the demands of this divine obstacle course, and to forgive and guide us back to all righteousness when we weaken and stumble. That ongoing relationship with our divine Creator is ensured by our faith in Jesus Christ, but the process of being formed into His image and likeness must still be gone through.
With all that in mind, we can now take another look at the terrible division in the modern church. Both left and right sides of the church seem to recoil from that glorious path; that divine process of becoming God's children; of allowing Him to grow us into His image and likeness. Instead they have each been deceived into embracing some much less christianesque ideology or the other, one which aligns with the desires of their fleshly heart. They then justify their personal stance, along with the stance of their fellow travelers, and any personal or collective sins and failings, by pointing to the sins and failings of those on the other side of the (for now allegorical) barricades. This is “what about-ism” on stilts, and the division it engenders is destroying both our nation and our Church. Time for some specifics.
On the right, they are sure God and scripture are on their side. In ways, they are correct. But the right is so sure they are right that they figure they deserve to give themselves license to be greedy; greedy as all get out, greedier than any nation has ever been. God wants us to be prosperous, don't you know? So even though the poverty level income in America puts one in the upper percentiles of income globally, many prayers are sent up from conservative Christian churches, pleading with God to not deprive us of having more than enough. As already stated, many liberal Christians are also not innocent of this sin.
Along similar lines, conservative pew fillers hold militarism up as an idol. The movement of some obscure land marker in lower Mongolistan might somehow be construed as a dire threat to our national security, so we must maintain a military capable of projecting overwhelming force to every corner of a spherical planet. They thank God we can do that. The oppression (and oppressors) we must engage with to maintain our consequent global military/industrial empire are another of the spiritual failings our liberal brethren throw in our faces, even though they slyly manage to leave it in place when they are in power.
Speaking of the liberal church, the leftists. Their major spiritual malfunction is that they have abandoned the use of biblical scripture as normative. Many shy away from even considering Christ as the only way to God the Father, even though Christ specifically claimed that role. They like to say that everything is true, and that all paths lead to God, ignoring the fact that that idea is straight up Hindu doctrine. They find idolatry of every stripe more palatable than rubbing shoulders with bible clinging “Christians.” So Buddhism, Paganism, witchcraft, Secularism and even Islam are accepted as equally valid with their watered down Christianity. In many ways, their drift away from biblical fealty has caused them to see Jesus Christ as just another teacher, and maybe a good role model, only useful if his teachings coincide with the movement to bring about some man made paradise. Certainly not a personal savior.
Along with raging idolatry, the left has been incrementally seduced into embracing a wide spectrum of sexual deviancy and perversions, all of which violate God's Word and loving guidance we so need to attain unto our created destiny. In the Garden of Eden, Satan began the temptation of Eve by asking, “Has God really said?” That same question, “Has God really said,” has long been the slogan of modernism, and is now the battle cry of the liberal church.
The normative guide to liberal churches honestly seems to have shifted, from the Bible to the policies advocated by the Democratic Party. In the 1970's. it was no fault divorce and legalizing abortion. Then gay rights rose in the 1980' and 90's, and the doctrine of liberal churches changed with those times, while asserting they would never favor same sex marriage or anything like it. As late as 2008 the Democrat Party opposed same sex marriage, and so did the left wing church. They both changed positions, seemingly in lock step with each other, a few years later. Next came the same dance step regarding trans-genderism, with the same ending notes.
These days, the rising controversy is around pedophilia (re-branded minor attracted adults, don't ya know) with both the left wing church and the Democrat Party bravely holding the line, until, if history is a guide, they decide they won't. Bestiality will probably be the next issue, if the left continues to get its way. It is not that these sexual and lifestyle sins are worse than other sins, but it is the case that any sin, if not repented of, will not be forgiven. The ideology of the liberal churches denies that some sins, even though they are are clearly identified as such in scripture, are even sins. This greatly reduces the odds that those afflicted with these sins will ever repent..
So idolatry and adultery lead the list of left wing sins, and naturally amplify into heresy and blasphemy. (Asserting that God is so cruel that He creates a person in the wrong body is a deeply blasphemous concept, impugning the very character of our Creator) It is hard to pin point where any particular individual starts on this slide away from biblical Christianity, but the whole process is summed up in II Thessalonians 2:10-11 “...because they received not a love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:”
These ideas, and the delusional doctrines that grow from them, inflict dreadful spiritual wounds which severely cripple those fragile and developing children of God the church should be nurturing up.
These doctrines are as harmful as, if not even more harmful than, the oppression, greed and militarism of the right. But there is one more devastating sin unique to the left, one which grows out of their easy acceptance of idolatry and materialism. It is that they have come to worship the secular state, to see the government, especially the socialism we have grown into, as the ultimate source of good, and the appropriate vehicle with which to deliver Christian mercy. Both left and right must repent from this big government approach, and instead rediscover the free market, cultural and community based remedies to poverty that used to be so effective. Just as the right is flirting with fulfilling some bad prophesy about becoming cold hearted, the left is flirting, with its embrace of the socialist state, with worshiping the literal Beast of Revelation.
Rest assured, this treatise is not intended as just one long two sided scold, but before we conclude with a restatement of our only real hope, we must take a look at one more big failing that both sides have in common, which is racism.
At first blush, racism seems to balance heavily to the conservative side. Just look at some of the language and comments online, some of the laws proposed, and some of the attitudes still present in everyday life in conservative areas. Racism is still deeply rooted there, although there has been some definite improvement. However, the sentiments expressed by Malcolm X, that he preferred the open racism of the red necks to the falsely friendly backstabbing of the White liberals, still rings true today. Many left wingers hide their racist mindset behind a thin veneer of loving smiles.
What's more, once we get past the idea that racism is a problem only in the White community, we can see that some of anti racist ideas, such as DEI and intersectionality are themselves deeply racist. Trying to get rid of racism by using racist tools is like trying to fight an epidemic by using infected needles.
Sadly, the situation gets even worse. In the last couple years I attended an historically Black church a few times. I was deeply shocked to see a weekly focus, in Sunday school, on how this or that biblical passage should be received by African Americans, and how the passage could be used to advance the cause of reparations for slavery. If it had not been a Black church, I would have walked out the first week, but since it was a Black church, and I have had wonderful fellowship in Black churches in years past, I gave it a few tries. Sadly, the racist emphasis seemed to be a permanent fixture, and it was and definitely is a liberal church. The upshot is that I don't honestly think either side, or any side, of the divided church can claim victory or innocence on the subject of racism.
In conclusion, we must acknowledge that THE Church has gone into a downward spiral because of our bitter divisions. That downward spiral gets steeper every time we engage in what about-ism; every time we ignore our own nakedness and our own sins by pointing out the unclothed status of the other side. The solution is obvious, which is to humbly pray the Lord will restore us to spiritual wholeness, to the path of becoming His children, as we turn from our wicked ways.
This will involve the liberals abandoning their never ending quest to wiggle out of scriptural guidance: all the well constructed equivocations, dodges and spurious logic. Yes, Jesus did not mention homosexuality or abortion, (or at least it isn't recorded that He did) but He also never mentioned torturing prisoners, or robbing banks, or a whole lot of other things. It is spurious to say that His recorded words constitute an exhaustive list of specific sins, and everything not mentioned is okay. Rather, we can infer His deeper meaning from what He did teach. On a subject like sexual ethics, He told us that if a man even looks on a woman with lust, he has committed sin. That is about the most common and mild sexual offense imaginable. It is disingenuous to assert that sexual desires which are more intense, actually committed, strange and unnatural aren't included in that original sentiment.
Likewise abortion. It is not mentioned specifically, but Jesus did mention how highly He treasures children, and murder is definitely a no no. It is once again highly disingenuous to dodge that kind of guidance, just for the foul goal (let's be honest here) of enabling convenient adultery.
On the right, they don't exactly reject the guidance of scripture, but there are many points, especially regarding justice for the poor and seeking peace, where they resort to a long practiced myopia. They are good at disingenuously ignoring the clear spiritual call to treat the downtrodden with the kind of love and care they would want for themselves in that situation. Similarly, they rarely take seriously Christ's advice to turn the other cheek, or to pray for those who abuse them.
The ruined lives and depravity engendered by their sin of indifference to the poor is hidden to their eyes by blaming society's moral decline on the immoral policies of the left. Then the solution they offer seems to be some kind of theocratic revival, the nebulous Christian nationalism so dreaded in some quarters.
Of course, that conservative mistake is mirrored on the liberal side. So many of the immoral policies the right legitimately complains about grew out of a kind of left wing theocracy, a Secular nationalism, which was imposed in the 1940's by some Supreme Court blunders. This same Secular theocracy (ideocracy?), threatens to morph into the most frightening thing of all (even worse than Christian nationalism), a Secular globalism, an international atheistic theocracy, with a fascist oligarchy behind it. That could become a real Beast of biblical proportions.
That is where we are, as a Church, today, and that is how we got here. God help us. No really, please God, HELP US, because we all must turn to Him, in deep humility and sincerity, if we are to come out of this. It might be cliche, but this passage from Chronicles, if taken sincerely, as we should take all scripture, and not taken in some myopic, allegorical, Pharisaical or phony way, is really the only path which can take us through this crisis.
II Chronicles 7:14
“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
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