The announcement of the death of Rev. Jerry Falwell today (my sympathies go out to the family) really made me think again about the Cal Thomas article I talked about here and I really believe something is taking place right now.
The End of American Theopolitics Is Just Beginning
Why the end? Because we lost the ‘culture war’? I do not think so. I really believe that the end of American Theopolitics is beginning has more to do with God wanting the church to become the Acts based church again to ‘rescue the perishing’ (quoted from an old hymn) instead of the church being just another lobbyist action committee designed to ‘legislate the salvation’.
Even though Falwell was a righteous and just man who knew the Bible, founded a prestigious Christian university, founded a church from his living room that became known worldwide, built Christian elementary schools, homes for unwed mothers and a home for alcoholics, history will more than likely remember him otherwise as either the founder of the Religious Right / Moral Majority, the overtaker of PTL who rode down the water slide at Christian Disneyland, the propagator with Pat Robertson claiming that the gays caused 9-11-01 (later apologizing) and/or the General in the war against Tinky Winky Teletubby.
Falwell started out right in reference to preaching against abortion, homosexuality, and pornography in the pulpit but in 1979, something happened that happened to other Christian Americans.
Falwell got desperate and felt despondent and in despair. The byproduct of that desperation was the public image shifting from a pastor preaching righteousness from the pulpit to the image of making the American government the evangelistic judicial pulpit using law to legislate/preach Christian righteousness promising revenge against the abortionists, the ACLU, homosexuals, Democrats, college professors, and pornographers combined with the recreation of a New Eden to live in restoring a community, some ‘good-old-days’ from Leave It To Beaver, and lifestyle that they felt was forever ’stolen’ on June 17, 1963.
American Christians saw eight years of the Clinton Administration and never saw the ‘black cloud of doom’, the gays and communists fully taking over, the one world United Nations ‘Antichrist’, Y2K shutting us down, God leaving the nation, and economic collapse. American Christians are now seeing eight years of ‘W’ and to this day have not seen abortion overturned, homosexuality outlawed, school vouchers, overturning a lottery, the teaching of evolution eliminated, reinstatement of prayer in the public schools, persecution eliminated, world religions abolished, mega prosperity for sowing your seed to a politically minded gospel peddling televangelist, and the elimination of the Democrats.
They started asking questions about the broken promises………..
We have seen a church in hard times. We have seen a church being ravaged by not obvious Satanic wolves, but sheep who claim that we need a moratorium on homosexuality as we ‘emerge’ into a new church age, people of the cloth who took the Lord’s prayer and changed “our Father” to “Mother God”, sheep who think we need to find our purpose-driven life instead of trusting in the Lord God with all your heart, sheep who choose to call themselves members of ‘worship centers’ instead of churches. We became lazy believing that government will become our evangelist and that our outreach methods became more and more pragmatic where numbers and money measured anointing rather than Anointing of God breaking yokes. We really believed that if we just have nine home-schooled kids who in 20 years would outnumber the kids from secular parents (remember, they abort most of their kids) and vote out the ‘liberals’, that God could somehow become sovereign, omnipresent, and omnipotent once again while failing to realize that God is, was, and will forever remain sovereign, omnipresent, and omnipotent.
The Grand Design failed….
The Grand Experiment imploded.
God never wanted a church that depended on a vote to reach the world. God wanted a church that depended on him. God did not want people to place their faith in politicians, Supreme Court justices, or divinity demagogues. God wanted people to place their faith in Him to live, move, and have our being. God did not want us to focus on our families to the point of idolizing them. God wanted us to focus on Him to where the things of this world would grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and power.
What was the final outcome of Theopolitics, another Acts 26 answer “You almost persuade me to become a Christian.”
It’s time to start living out Acts 27 and begin the voyage. Yes, there will be tempests, shipwrecks, martyrs, and a persecuted church ran underground. However, the church of Acts never deviated from the scriptures and the church still survived and dealt with false teachers radiating with life. The church of today attempted to poorly reinterpret the formula and deviated from the scriptures and we see false teachers self-proclaiming their anointing and telling people not to ‘touch’ them while a church is dying while being comatose and on life support.
The winds of change is here!!!!!!
Excellent post
Diane:
Thanks for the comments. If you look at a Falwell sermon that did not have politics in them, the man was a solid believer in God’s infallible Word (even though a friend of mine thinks that he looked like Mayor Burnside from the old tv show ‘Carter Country’). He knew right from wrong and did not steer off into bad doctrine. In fact, you could say that he was one of Christianity’s better statesman of apologetics for his time up until the Moral Majority was founded.
It was when the turn from preaching in the pulpit to making government the Christian pulpit that American evangelism really took a downward spiral and left a bad taste about Christianity in the heart of many Americans.
There was something else that came to my mind when I thought more about Falwell. I remember sometime in the mid 1990’s, Falwell and the Moral Majority promoted on Falwell’s television show a controversial videotape entitled ‘The Clinton Chronicles” that supposedly exposed the real reason Vince Foster died and about a ’secret drug ring’ they claimed Bill Clinton was involved in.
I forgot about that documentary.