Flawed religion, not God, is the problem
Many Christians find it comforting to cry out the injustice of taking God out of the Public Schools, bemoan the exclusion of God from the public square, and to complain that our once Christian nation has been given over to the godless heathens of secularism and extremist politics. People use judgments of morality, mass shootings, abortion rights, crime rates, illegal immigration, law and order, and countless partisan political justifications to promote the populist lie that every one of our modern social and cultural calamities are the fault of those who took God out of the schools, government, and society. Such an emotionally driven, politically charged, and biblically ignorant claim is actually a denial of authentic Christian faith in God.
The first fundamental point to be raised is the fact that if a person truly believes in an omnipotent, everlasting, and eternal God, to presume that such a deity can actually be driven out of schools, government, and society by the decisions of humans is a contradiction of reality. Either God is omnipotent and everlasting, or “god” is merely an ultimately insignificant ******* that is really under the control of human governance and action.
For many Christians the popular text is Romans 13, but this is to our detriment. Understandably, Romans 13 is a popular text to be referenced when one believes in, and supports, the governance at the time. However, an authentic Christian cannot have it both ways. Either one believes that all government is appointed by God for God’s purposes or reject the teaching of the Bible and declare that a government is in place by God’s will. The determination is not whether or not the presumed government agrees with one’s own personal partisan affiliation.
This toxic theology has been proven in the last two presidential terms. While some believe on matters of faith that Donald Trump was God’s true president and Joe Biden is a anti-Christian imposter, others of equally devoted Christian doctrine would argue the Donald Trump was an offense to God and Joe Biden is the promised messiah appointed by God to restore America. As much as partisan Christian propaganda would love to definitively defend one of these ideological perspectives, neither holds up to the standard of authentically biblical Christianity. In either case, unquestioned allegiance to either political figure is a demonstration of ignorant religious idolatry—worshipping a person and not God. Rather than absolutist arguments that a given leader is truly God’s will, a faithful Christian will ask, “What can the church learn from this leader?
History proves that ethics, morals, and cultural standards shift over time and Christian practice also shifts to embrace it. Slavery, the subjection of women as sub-human property of men, the superiority of property ownership, the virtue of white supremacy, the sin of women’s reproductive rights, and the legitimacy of genocide are just a few examples of horrifically flawed principles rooted in historical interpretations of scripture that have been idolatrously coopted for political expediency in the name of Jesus Christ. In defense of this narrow-minded, narcissistically positioned expression of presumed political ideology, entire church traditions, worship practices, and theological foundations have been forged in unwitting opposition to the will of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
God is just as present in our schools, our government, our political discourse, and our everyday lives as ever. The question is, will Christians listen to God and seek out the “still small voice” that God used to transform and renew the Prophet Elijah and truly learn, or will Christians listen to the loud and cacophonous poundings of cultural, political, religious, doctrinal, and traditional lies the seek to preserve an ideology at the expense of a genuine biblical faith?
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