Everyone is obsessed with the 2020 election.
Understandable.
A socialist who we are told won the greatest amount of votes ever cast defeated a man who we are also told had character deficiencies, but whose policies have championed many traditional American mores. A solid position on the life issue, a solid defense of justice on behalf of people of color and every ethnicity, and judges who will interpret the Constitution as it is written (not as they wish it were) are all things that traditional God-fearing people have longed for.
But let’s step away from the election coverage for a moment to consider something additional.
President Trump has been more vocal about a specific issue than all of the previous Democrat and Republican administrations (in the modern era)—the persecution of people based on their beliefs.
It’s actually quite odd if you stop long enough to think about it.
Some will decry people who would tear down the constitutional “right” of “choice” though it is not a right embedded in the document. And we hear others proclaim the defense of things like speech, freedom to assemble (especially for family oriented holidays) and the right to protect oneself (in a culture increasingly dangerous from politically incentivized violence.)
But the freedom to practice, believe, and live out one’s faith has equal importance in the same document.
True constitutionalists believe that it is not merely a right here in America, but rather a divine right, authored by God, and merely encoded and affirmed in our Constitution.
Which brings us to the puzzling nature we find ourselves in today.
In North America many in the world of evangelical Christianity, and for many years now in mainline denominations, the churches have become increasingly introspective. The latest cause du jour is “social justice, critical race theory, and diversity” alongside adamant acceptance without question of organizations like Black Lives Matter—marxist in its worldview and antithetical to the basis of Christianity—the Bible.
Well-meaning believers even see the data, stories, and violence in front of them on their television screens and come to remarkably opposite view points.
Woke-ism as best as it can be understood (and in reality can’t really be due to the ever moving targets) is meant to replace long-held values of eternal truth. Yes all Christians believe in equal justice under law. No innocent soul should be choked to death while in police custody and handcuffed for “attempting to pass” a fake $20 bill. To make the leap from those things that all agree on to then advocate for violence in the streets, the murders of innocents (53 and counting in 2020 committed by the protestors), and to demand the church embrace these ideas as sound is beyond far-fetched, it is heretical.
Wokeness is also doing something else to the believers in the church. It is erasing the awareness, consideration, and concern for brothers and sisters who are TRULY suffering for their beliefs.
For every social justice warrior, hosting a zoom call with their racial reconciliation small group, demanding the American church supply resources that are pro-critical race theory, how many senior pastors have even mentioned the genocidal slaughter that is happening in Nigeria at the moment? People of color aren’t dying at the hands of prejudiced law enforcement. They are being butchered with machetes by terrorists named Boko Haram, and the Fulani Herdsmen, who are sweeping down by the thousands to violently rape and murder Christian believers in the Plateau State. They have a Fulani member serving as their head of state, and eye-witnesses attest to the fact that the military will not only look the other way at these raids, but oftentimes participate in them. An issue such as this is something the true church would be praying and fasting over, entreating the administration to use pressure against and to demand an end to. Opponents of the president were actually put off when he recently merely asked the leader of Nigeria why he was allowing the slaughter to occur.
In a completely additional area of concern, how many pastors, leaders, Christian celebrities and the like have used even a tiny blip of their platform to educate the church in North America about the plight of one of the oldest Christian populations on planet earth—Armenians—and the all out terror they face against Azerbaijan? Literally being propped up by an islamist radical in Turkey’s Erdogan, the Azerbaijanis are gaining reinforcements, supplies, and cover from a dead media in the west. But sadly the navel gazing, questioning its feelings, doubting if truth can be known church in the west presents the larger hurdle. In past conflicts in this very theater it was the American Christian community that rallied people named Rockefeller, Roosevelt, Wilson and others to speak out, raise money, and call for an end to such suffering. Now, Christians are best known in America for arguing about their favorite YouTube channels, and why that “celebrity pastor guy" cheated on his wife… or something.
Woke-ism is selfish, it can’t see past its own circle of feelings, and it is causing the American church to shrink to an ineffective level.
It’s defanging the power that God has given it to be used for good, and to advance His kingdom on earth.
Sadly it needs a sharp slap in the face, a wake-up call, and a call-to-action because our brothers and sisters are going through very difficult times.
We’re salt that has gone stale.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member