When they write the history of this benighted age, they ought to devote at least one volume to the lackluster performance of the institutional church. When it was time to stand, the church was lying down. When it was time to speak up, the church was silent. And so on.
https://leeduigon.com/2015/11/30/christians-letters-to-the-volcano-goddess/
I’m going to bring up articles from the archives that most of you never had the opportunity to see.
For the next three days it’ll be articles on “Paganism in the Church,” which were part of a series published by The Chalcedon Foundation in 2006. This was a journalistic project for me, chosen by my editors to be the first items posted on this blog when it was created in 2010.
To the objection that “Those articles are ten years old–so what good are they now?”, I can only say that I doubt the the problems have gone away and things have gotten better over the intervening seven years. “Feminist theology,” anyone? You’ll find it at your nearest seminary. God save us.
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.
When people in a Christian country actually start doing pagan things, that’s a sign of cultural decay.
Here’s a shiny new example from my own neck of the woods: a woman was arrested and charged with harassing her neighbor by planting dolls–yes, dolls–with “vulgar writings” on them, “at or near the victim’s residence on three separate occasions,” to quote the police report ( http://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/local/middlesex-county/2015/11/27/elizabeth-man-arrested-alleged-woodbridge-carjacking/76393680/ ). [Note: to find this item, scroll down to where it says “Dunellen.”]
Would you find that menacing? We are not told whether the dolls in question were, well, voodoo dolls, used to put a curse on someone. Just that the dolls had “vulgar writings” on them.
Oh, churches! Yoo-hoo, wakey-wakey… Could you take a little time off deciding what kind of espresso machine to order for your lounge, and devote a few moments to the state of Christianity in today’s America? Pastors, do you have anyone in your congregation who might be into voodoo dolls–and yet still consider herself a Christian in good standing?
I have no idea what it’ll take to wake the churches.