Pulpit 'freedom?'

If you haven't heard — and I hope that you haven't — today was "Pulpit Freedom Sunday." For the uninitiated, it's an annual campaign by the Alliance Defense Fund to protest Internal Revenue Service rules enacted in the 1950s about politicking by churches. The organization believes, and says, that pastors aren't permitted to speak out on "moral" issues lest their churches lose their tax-exempt status.

Here's the problem: The ADF is wrong. On several fronts.

One, I don't know a church in this country that hasn't done so at some point. However, churches have historically never been directly involved in the political process anyway, and until fairly recently states barred pastors from seeking political office. Reason? The church needs to retain its independence and ability to speak God's Word regardless of whoever is in power. Two, even according to IRS rules, pastors are allowed to speak for or against candidates or office-holders in the pulpit. (That has always happened regularly in black churches.)

I suspect, however, that the ADF wants churches to have the ability to work directly for or against candidates. That's inappropriate for a number of reasons, as well as illegal.

For openers, when you examine the entire Scripture, you'll won't find a political candidate that fits every single issue, especially considering that even Christians disagree on politics. My church is as politically divided as any assembly you'll ever see; were my pastor to take sides he'd alienate half the congregation.

Second, working for specific candidates would get in the way of the church's spiritual goals, which are to demonstrate an allegiance only to a different, unseen world. Were the church to get involved in a worldly pursuit as partisan politics it would say that God Himself endorses or opposes such-and-such — in essence, putting words in His mouth.

Third, the church would forfeit its ability to speak truth to power. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition gained strength when Bill Clinton was president but withered when George W. Bush went to the White House. (Recall that Robertson ran for president in 1988 on the Republican side.) Even before that, I never heard any pastor critique Ronald Reagan, especially the rampant corruption that took place during his administration; I suspect that's why their legitimate complaints about Clinton's tomcatting fell largely on deaf ears, especially during his impeachment.

And most important, it shows a lack of trust in God to get His work done regardless of the political leadership. This became clear to me when I hear about Christian fears whenever the Democrats get the upper hand in Congress or a Democratic candidate becomes president. Before the 2008 election I received a request to pray for the defeat of Barack Obama; I responded to a e-mail that God wouldn't answer that prayer.

The Binghamton, N.Y. church of Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry took out full-page ads in USA Today and the New York Times just before the 1992 election warning Christians not to vote for Clinton and taking donations to pay for it; for that the IRS slapped it. (I don't know what the penalty was.) At first, I resented that a church was going to tell me how to vote and wrote the church to say so; today, however, I realize that it was acting just like the world, and that's why the ADF appears to be doing as well. Churches need to be free to proclaim liberty, justice and reconciliation — a concept not always accepted by the politically obsessed.

What we should have learned from Watergate -- but didn't

Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save.

-- Psalm 146:3

Today marks the anniversary of the fulfillment of the first prophecy I ever made, in 1974.

That spring, as a seventh-grader at a Christian academy in suburban Pittsburgh, I was telling anyone who would listen that then-President Nixon "would be out of office in six months" -- and, like a lot of prophecy, no one took that seriously at the time. (I would soon leave the school and, with that, my "voice" was silenced.) However, I turned out to be right, as he did resign his office in disgrace after evidence surfaced as to his participation in the coverup of the Watergate scandal.

I wasn't simply a being a soothsayer, however. To get my drift, you have to understand that the families of almost all of my classmates were Nixon supporters, as I learned the previous academic year -- the teacher had polled us as to whom we favored in the presidential election then and I was the only one who definitively said, "McGovern." And while it was never stated openly, I did detect a sense that Nixon, who at the time had been friendly with Billy Graham and courted evangelicals, was somehow "God's candidate."

Having been burned, Mr. Graham subsequently, and permanently, removed himself from partisan politics. However, that episode with Nixon hasn't stopped some Christians from seeking yet another political Messiah, the next one being Ronald Reagan, whom Christians supported even more openly. Yet Reagan's actual record as president was at best spotty -- he raised taxes more often than he cut them, did little if anything to address social issues that evangelicals supported and presided over arguably the most corrupt presidential administration in my lifetime, with four members of his cabinet leaving under a cloud. Then you had George W. Bush as the next "anointed one" -- he even "spoke the language" -- but we as a nation are still paying through the nose for his mistakes. Right now some folks are calling Texas Gov. Rick Perry to get into the race, with perhaps more than a few convinced that he's destined to win.

That can go the other way as well. In the early 1990s, Operation Rescue head Randall Terry prayed for the death or Christian conversion of Supreme Court justices. Many conservative Christians willingly participated in the smear campaign against President Bill Clinton, and Philip Yancey, retelling the story in his book "What's So Amazing About Grace?", mentioned that he received a ton of hate mail in a response to an interview he had done with the president that placed what some would have considered positive spin and which was published in Christianity Today. And just before the end of the general election campaign of 2008, I received an emergency prayer request calling on God to defeat Barack Obama. (I called that prayer blasphemous.)

Bottom line, we Christians can't afford to be Manichean in our attitude toward political candidates, suggesting that "our guy is necessarily good and our opponents are hopelessly evil." Sin in the human heart is far more pervasive than we want to admit; occasionally we've even seen outspoken Christians who become powerful fall into temptation (e.g. Tom DeLay). Whomever we support is a matter of opinion and personal preference; let's never say, however, that having or removing (depending on our preference) so-and-so from office will by definition cause our nation to become more prosperous and moral. To do so is to put our ultimate trust in the political process -- and God will never allow that for very long.

Spiritual warfare

While talking with a couple who visited my church today -- they're both musicians I've worked with in the past -- we got to talking about the anti-Obama campaign waged right now across this country. She actually brought up something I had considered but not said publicly, and I think she's right.

This is not simply a political or ideological fight and, at bottom, not really about President Barack Obama. When you get right down to it, this is spiritual warfare due to a situation where people fear what they consider upcoming cataclysmic change that is completely out of their control because, basically, they have lost their trust in God. And when that happens, well ... people get irrational. When I see all these "tea parties" complaining about overreaching government, hear about Obama being denounced as a Communist or read about pastors praying for his death, I detect more than political posturing; I will even go out on a limb and say that this campaign is the work of the Enemy. If that sounds harsh or presumptuous, did you notice that they never give any alternatives to what they say is "bad government" or considered that the policies they actually subscribe to just didn't work? At this point they're just making accusations -- and keep in mind that the term "Satan" means "accuser."

I'm a student of the civil-rights movement, and similar phony charges were made against Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, much of the opposition to him was based on his use of the Federal government to overturn state and local laws that codified the racial discrimination he was trying to destroy. And in the same way, people became nutty, saying that he was making a mint through his civil-rights work, in league with Moscow or visiting white prostitutes, none of which were true, in order to de-legitimize him. (I wonder what Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck would say if they were on the air back then.)

And therein is the reason I believe this to be spiritual warfare: Before we can deal with sin it has to be exposed and recognized as such, and that's precisely what King did with his nonviolent demonstrations -- he correctly surmised that the racist power structure would act up and thus make a fool of itself. And since God is not the author of lies, hatred or conspiracy, only one other entity can come up with that.

In one section of the book Wild at Heart, John Eldredge mentions that his wife Stasi had been under spiritual oppression, specifically with daily dizzy spells. So, after a time of prayer, they commanded that oppressive spirit to leave her -- but it initially got worse before it finally did, permanently. Eldredge says that such a spirit will not usually leave willingly but, when discovered, put up a fight.

Of course you remember that Bill Clinton in the 1990s was accused of all kinds of things, to a point where there was a new "scandal" every few months. However, the machine that was making all those accusations was exposed right around the time of the impeachment -- it turned out that when Hillary made that complaint about the "vast right-wing conspiracy" she actually had the goods -- and the gossip stopped. Today Obama's enemies have no such cover; they just went right after him without pretense. And that to me is a sign that they're going down. Hard. And very soon, never to rise again.

And that is why, even though things may look crazy today, I'm actually rejoicing in seeing the LORD about to work; after this is over -- or even perhaps beforehand -- we may very well see a spiritual awakening in this country. The Sunday after last year's general election my senior pastor had all us African-Americans stand and the rest of the congregation lay hands on us, saying that "a spiritual stronghold has been broken."

You think for a second that the devil would take that lying down?

None of this is to say, of course, that Obama's actual policies are beyond scrutiny; I certainly don't agree with his stance on, say, legal abortion. And I will not say that the opposition to Obama is based primarily on his race, though it is a factor. But that's the point -- after the rancor ends we can certainly address those differences with clarity and honesty and not with this wild, mostly non-factual charges. I'm looking forward to that day.

A message to my conservative friends

Those of you who subscribe to a conservative ideological agenda and have tangled with me over the years probably consider me unnecessarily argumentative and unwilling to back down. I'm sure you look at me funny and think, "How can someone who calls himself a Christian believe what he does? Doesn't he believe in Christian unity? Doesn't he understand that we're only fighting for Biblical values?"

Well, there's a specific reason why I get in people's faces. Aside from my basic disagreements with the conservative agenda, mentioned elsewhere on this blog, there's another issue: My upbringing -- more specifically, my earthly father.

You see, I was raised by a man with no real moral center and who believed that life was about meeting his needs, refusing to deal with folks wouldn't feed his ego and convinced he was always right. Deeply resentful toward people whom he feel wronged him, he subscribed to the wisdom of the world, that you should make as much money as you can as soon as you can regardless of any calling or spiritual commitment and whom you hurt in the process -- in short, he was, in practice, a Marxist who subscribed to the Machiavellian principle "the ends justify the means." When I first heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a pre-teen it was certainly a distinctive message from what I was hearing at home. And when I did respond just before graduating from high school nearly 30 years ago, it was for that reason: I wanted something different from what I realized was the nonsense I grew up with.

Less than a year later I saw my first deviation -- the following January, while a student at Georgia Tech, in an independent evangelical church in an Atlanta suburb I attended with other students. The pastor before then had been recuperating from major surgery and had been out of the pulpit for several months; when he returned he started preaching conservative politics from the pulpit, especially against the Soviet Union, and punctuating each point with Hebrews 12:29, "[F]or our 'God is a consuming fire.'" At that time the church publicized an anti-Equal Rights Amendment rally (I was an ERA supporter) and improperly endorsed then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan (consider when this was and who was in office at the time). My spirit became uneasy because this didn't sound like the Christ I had pledged to follow, but it would take just one visit to a downtown church just off campus, where I ended up staying, to understand just what the problem was.

You see, there was no love in the first church -- for Christ, people or God's creation. It was all about fear about losing privileges, power, position -- the very opposite of Jesus' good news to me. And looking back now, the second church was warm and nurturing, while the first church was kind of cold. Just like my household.

Dad also had considerable racial resentment as well; I can't tell you how many times he used to refer to the "white man" -- of course, in a negative fashion -- which also began to turn me off. Granted, there were historical injustices perpetrated on African-Americans and I would later learn the specifics; however, growing up I had become an admirer of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- whom Dad didn't care for -- who decided to choose a different path, and I later became an early advocate of racial reconciliation in the evangelical church. (Oh, those two churches in Atlanta were white.)

That said, I would eventually learn that the ideological right has had its own issues with race and racism that it has never faced. In an interview with the New Yorker, Pat Buchanan, than an aide to President Nixon (whose whole political career was based on resentment), related a 1971 memo in which he recommended, among other things, that "bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country ... We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention" because doing so could help to "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

Reagan, however, would bring that to a whole new level, as he would ride some of those anti-black resentments all the way to the White House. Indifferent to the civil-rights movement and dismissive of King, during his 1976 campaign he referred to "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" and kicked off his 1980 campaign in Neshoba County, Miss., near where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, stating that he favored "states' rights" (read: "I would have opposed desegregation"). In fact, his "big government" shtick actually had a racist tinge to it, as guess who was perceived as benefiting from it? That pandering to racists might explain his endorsement from a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, saying that "the Republican platform could have been written by a Klansman." That's why I'm not a Republican.

But I digress. Anyway, in August of 1983 Mom, fed up with Dad's tyranny and fatigued by fruitless attempts to change the situation, decided to leave the marriage. Dad tried desperately to get her back but wouldn't change his outlook or way of dealing with things, so Mom filed for divorce, which was finalized in January of 1985. (She would later marry a more solid, stable man I referred to in another entry.) But even then he refused to humble himself and admit his failings; he remained resentful toward her to his death in 1993 from complications of his alcoholism.

What's the conservative analogy? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

According to David Brock's book "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," conservative activists went so far as to file suit in Federal court in Little Rock, Ark. in 1992 to have Clinton removed from the ballot -- because they knew he would probably win. And all during his presidency the political right, especially its media, hounded him, sabotaging his program and spreading unsubstantiated rumors about his corruption. Eight years later, after having failed to knock off Bill, they decided they needed to sabotage his wife, Sen. Hillary, then the junior U.S. senator from New York, on her road to the White House; a number of folks I talked to said that they would cross over to the Democratic primary to support Obama to keep her out. It never occurred to them that Obama would himself become a viable candidate.

There's a saying, however, that "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Two years ago the Washington Times published a story with the false assertion that Obama had attended a radical Muslim seminary in Indonesia, and a number of people also filed suit to have Obama removed because of questions about his citizenship -- again, because they knew he could win. It was the political equivalent of getting back at a rival for "stealing his girl" -- never mind that she willingly left with him.

And there's still considerable resentment over Obama's victory -- I chided a man at dinner a couple of months ago for blaming the media for trashing vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin during the campaign; he became angry when I told him that she didn't need their help. There's also a Facebook group called "Nobama in '12" -- they're not even going to give him a chance?

One more personal note: Just weeks before my parents split I read the wedding announcement of a woman I had desired in high school. That situation, of which I'll spare you the details, was quite acrimonious to say the least, and for quite some time I blamed her for that.

But after Mom left the LORD spoke to me, saying, "Consider your part." You see, He showed me that the dynamics between her and me were similar to my parents' marriage, which I already knew why had failed. Also reeling from the trauma of flunking out of school for the second time, I went into counseling, began attending 12-step recovery programs and fell in with a group of people who helped me get back on my feet. After years of healing I extended her an olive branch and we later apologized to each other; we're still in touch even though we'll never be close friends. (I can honestly say I harbor no bitterness toward her today.)

You see, it was through that experience that God revealed to me the depth of my sin. Because I had already believed in Jesus Christ I knew intellectually that it was already forgiven; that said, sin was still affecting my life in ways I wasn't aware of at the time. Because I've worked through all that in my own life, I see that in others.

My situation reminds me of a rumor I heard about one of my favorite music groups -- I don't know for sure this is true, so I won't identify it -- that had fired a talented newer member for being high on stage. Members of this band, like many others, had previously abused drugs and alcohol but eventually came to their senses and were not about to tolerate something like that again in their presence. In the same way, having dealt with my own issues, I recognize hatred, resentment and bigotry when I see it. So if you want to be that way ... don't do it around me.

Conservatives forgot their history, not their "principles"

With the disaster of the last general election, conservatives are taking stock of their future prospects for success — or at least they think they are. But as things stand now, get ready for the same old, same old.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks pointed out in a recent piece, the traditionalist school believes that conservatism lost because of its hypocrisy, preaching “smaller government and lower taxes” while spending gobs of public money on even their own pet projects and becoming entrenched in the ways of Washington.
 

That sounds good, except for one thing: It isn’t true.

What really killed the conservative movement was that its tactics of divide-and-conquer, reducing campaigns to class and culture wars as far back as the Nixon years but which found the motherlode in 1980, finally stopped working. Its political class from the start acted as though power and authority were its birthright, and its propaganda machine was exposed about a decade ago. In short, it never intended to answer to anyone else, let alone the public — and that cultural arrogance brought it down.

In fact, what we call modern conservatism had four distinct pillars that normally didn’t mesh: 1) libertarians, who really do believe in less government; 2) social conservatives, including the “religious right”; 3) business groups; and 4) neo-conservatives, including Cold Warriors. That coalition hung together as long as the Federal government remained the target, but things started to crumble with the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Iron Curtain.

As a result, libertarians became at odds with the neo-cons, who were often former liberals who believed in using governmental power to promote conservative ideals; the business groups, who contributed highly-paid lobbyists to subvert the process; and the social conservatives who, they believed, wanted a theocracy. Corporate honchos ran afoul of the social conservatives because of their tomcatting. And so on, and so on…

That’s why Bill Clinton became a threat when he ran for president in 1992.

Chairman of the business-friendly Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton managed to shear off the business wing of the Reagan coalition, causing no end of consternation for the conservatives desperate to regain dominance. They thought they had succeeded with the gimmickry of the 1994 “Contract On” — whoops — “With America” during the midterm election and became sure that they could build on it.

However, the next year Clinton booby-trapped the freshman House Republicans in a showdown over the Federal budget, offering a balanced budget but saving the social programs they wanted to be cut, the standoff leading to two government shutdowns for which the GOP was blamed. That skirmish ensured Clinton’s reelection and prompted the conservative apparatus to trigger a failed impeachment, in part because it now understood that the populace really wanted Social Security and Medicare, among other programs. Eventually, thanks indirectly to Hillary Clinton’s complaint about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” (which was true for the most part), the right-wing media machine was exposed.

Ultimately, however, it was conservatives’ failure, especially under George W. Bush, to govern properly that has driven them into exile — the debacle of the war in Iraq and the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, plus the Jack Abramoff-fueled lobbying scandal and James Dobson’s ineffective “Stand for the Family” rallies in battleground states during the 2006 general election. Still reeling, the early “October surprise” of the September financial meltdown not only finished off John McCain but, perhaps more importantly, gave more seats in both houses of Congress to the Democrats.

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum was quoted in an article, “The Fall of Conservatism” published in May in The New Yorker, as saying that “the problems in the Republican Party will not be fixed.” I think he’s right, because the political right is now in denial — trying to figure out how to sell its ideology to a public that has clearly rejected it. Incredibly, congressional Republicans have hunkered down and remained committed to the cause, evidenced by their unanimous opposition to the financial bailout — but for the foreseeable future they will continue to be little more than irritants with no real power. Serves them right.