If I really, for sure, knew the answer to this question, I wouldn’t be sitting here. But for now, at least, I’m more in the role of a watchman trying to wake people up.
I want to answer you carefully, because you’re entitled to a careful answer, and trying to come up with one is pertinent to my ministry.
Let me start by addressing “separation of church and state,” which our country’s founders never envisioned as a means of driving Christianity out of public affairs and making government the exclusive province of unbelievers.
In fact, we got along quite well for most of our history before anyone realized that the First Amendment gives atheists the right to shut down all public expression of religious belief. Or at least of Christian belief: in my neck of the woods, atheists got rid of our town’s century-old Christmas parade, but don’t seem at all bothered by the annual Hindu festival.
The American people and the American church are to blame for allowing this state of affairs to develop.
If most Americans belong to your Group C, which I grant seems likely, then they won’t care, may not even notice, when Group B goes around Christian-bashing.
But how did so many of us wind up in Group C?
I think it’s because too many of the churches, for 100 years and more, sank into self-involved pietism first and then went on to mutate into “seeker-friendly” houses of entertainment, or even into heresy or outright paganism. About ten years ago I wrote a series of articles about paganism in Mainline Protestant denominations. [Note: most of those articles are available in this blog’s Archives.] It was pretty bad then. I doubt it’s gotten better since.
Long-range, I believe we need political victories which will eventually result in a Supreme Court whose members don’t see themselves as on a mission to disable Christianity and Christians, and who will have the courage to reverse certain abuses. We will also need both national and local leadership that embraces America’s Christian foundation instead of rejecting it.
Short-term, though, Job One has got to be to get Christian children out of teachers’ union-controlled, anti-Christian public schools. Without that, no other victories can be sustained and built upon, in the unlikely event that any victories are won at all. The anti-Christian Left has long known that controlling the culture leads to control of everything, politics included, and they have succeeded in totally dominating public education.
Christian-friendly “reform” of the public school system is simply not possible. It’s too far gone.
Tens of millions of Christian children need to be taken away from those schools and given Christian educations, either at home or in a Christian school. Homeschooling has never been easier or more practicable than it is today, and it will get easier still, less costly, and more efficient as the technology continues to improve and more and more people are involved in it.
Homeschooled children, by the way, routinely outperform the publicly schooled in every academic area.
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Everybody, please feel free to weigh in on these discussions with comments of your own. And pray for me to find good answers to the questions.
I fervently hope this isn’t boring for you. But if it is, blame my editor–it was her idea for me to post this material. And I guess you could blame me, too, because I thought it was a good idea.
