The imminent revival, part 19: The ‘blue tsunami’

I for one was glad to see the Republican meltdown of two weeks ago surrounding the midterm election. You may remember that Democrats made unprecedented and unexpected gains in not only the U.S House of Representatives and Senate but also state legislatures and governorships, having Republicans wondering what they did wrong.

But I don’t say this because I’m a registered Democrat, though I am. I say this because, for way too long, politically conservative evangelical Christians have placed their faith for spiritual renewal in the hands of the political system, wrongly believing that placing folks in office who believe as they do would stave off spiritual decay. Basically, they didn’t trust God for anything, especially the results, one woman even recording a video saying that “Satan won.”

One mistake Christians made was to support Donald Trump as president. I don’t need to go into the numerous things he’s said and done over the years that fly in the face of Scripture, most recently his refusal or unwillingness to forgive enemies the way Jesus instructed.

The deeper issue here is that they themselves didn’t want to obey God in their own right, especially when it came to political matters. A couple of years ago Russell Moore, who was pushed out of the Southern Baptist Convention for opposing Trump on spiritual grounds, famously said that he had heard from pastors preaching from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and people in the pews asking where they got those “liberal talking points.”

And then you have a group of people telling the lies that the Democrats were embracing “socialism” and Islam and especially the whopper that the two forces were combining to overthrow the United States as we know it. You do that only when you have nothing else to offer — recall that gasoline and diesel fuel prices are at their consistently highest in history due to Trump’s illegal and irresponsible war with Iran.

Basically, what we’re seeing is using Jesus as a prop but then moving “in the flesh” and then wondering why folks aren’t supporting the conservative mindset. We last saw this in 2006, during the last GOP meltdown — that year Focus on the Family Action sponsored “Stand for the Family” rallies in eight battleground states, including one here in Pittsburgh, to bolster the candidacies of Republican U.S. Senators. (They all lost, leading founder James Dobson to pull back from politics.)

Which leads me to the revival. God can move only when He’s trusted and only when His people commit themselves to sacrifice, service and spiritual warfare and leave behind the trappings of “political religion.”

In that context, losing might lead to ultimate victory as long as people keep their eyes on Jesus and commit to obeying His words come what may. Earlier this year I wrote that folks in Minnesota repelled the forces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — who not only acted illegally but killed two people in cold blood — in part with their willingness to be arrested for their beliefs (about 100 clergy were).

Although I can’t say just when, where and how the revival will take place, we saw a good start this year. And part of that is due to folks willing to confront forces of evil the way the Prophets did, even among their own people.

That’s why I believe that God Himself engineered this “blue tsunami” — not that He supports abortion, transgender rights or any of that stuff but to let folks know that they were barking up the wrong tree. We thus need to let that stuff go.

The ‘party switch’ explained

Over the past few months, you’ve likely been hearing videos from conservative content creators, many of them black, insisting that the Republican Party was the true home of black Americans and the Democrats were always the racists. Most notably, they’ve been saying that the Ku Klix Klan is the aegis of the Democratic Party and it hasn’t changed in all that time.

The charge is clearly false, but not for the reasons most people think.

It’s true that the founders of the Klan, a Christian nationalist organization founded in Tennessee in 1865 by Confederate Civil War veterans, were registered Democrats — no surprise given that the Republican Party was formed in 1854 and was expressively anti-slavery. But it would be a stretch to say that the Republicans wanted to oppose slavery to free blacks for their own sake — the party, funded by merchants who decided that they couldn’t compete with slave labor, took that stance for economic, not social-justice, reasons. And in fact, the opposition to slavery was originally limited to its expansion; Abraham Lincoln tried to broker a compromise that would mandate one free state admitted to the Union for every slave state, and he also said, “If I can save the Union without freeing a single slave, I would do it.”

(Indeed, the 1876 presidential election put an end to the decade-long Reconstruction era, when Southern electors threw the election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes after he promised to remove Federal troops from the South, which had the effect of selling out the newly-freed slaves.)

Still, at that time most blacks who could vote were registered as Republicans — until the 1920s, when many left the party over President Harding’s refusal to support a federal anti-lynching bill and President Coolidge became the only candidate not to condemn the Klan. Blacks started leaning Democratic during the New Deal even though the racial policies of that day limited benefits, though Eleanor Roosevelt became a voice for civil rights, for the first time being seriously considered.

The split in the Democratic Party began in 1948, when President Truman — a Democrat from former slave state Missouri — issued an executive order integrating the Armed Forces. That caused many Southern Democrats to form the States’ Rights Democratic Party, commonly known as “Dixiecrats,” and Sen. Strom Thurmond to run for president against Truman. Then you had the fights over desegregation in schools and public accommodations in the 1950s.

And speaking of which, this is where the modern conservative movement caught fire. The machinery, already built with think tanks and media as a reaction to the New Deal by industrialists sore at FDR, was jump-started with the Army-McCarthy hearings, during which Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, accused the Army of harboring communists, leading to a “Red Scare.” And that picked up in the South, with civil-rights demonstrators being accused of such (in fairness, small communist cells were operating in those days in Southern cities, which is why Martin Luther King Jr. was forced to disavow any influence of communism publicly).

But another factor largely overlooked was the rise of libertarianism in the Republican Party in the West and Southwest in the 1960s — and Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for president in 1964. Though never a racist, he had publicly opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Johnson, on the grounds that it overstepped the Constitution. (Goldwater, though crushed elsewhere, won the electoral votes of five Southern states.) Suddenly, opposition to civil rights for black Americans had justification — “big government.”

Two years later, another Western Republican, Richard Nixon, who lost the race for president in 1960 plotted a political comeback by unleashing what later became known as the “Southern Strategy” by exploiting the divisions he already knew existed in the Democratic Party. (Pat Buchanan, then an aide, gave the details in an excellent article, “The Fall of Conservatism,” published in May 2008 in The New Yorker magazine.) Slowly, white Southerners began migrating to the Republican Party, cemented with fellow Western Republican Ronald Reagan.

But by this time overt racist appeals had run their course, so Republicans started using “dog whistles” — “welfare,” “crime,” “busing” etc. — to oppose civil rights. It was in that context that Reagan used the phrase “welfare queens driving Cadillacs” when running for president in 1976, and he got even more brazen when, in 1980, he gave a speech near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil-rights workers were found murdered in 1964, in favor of “states’ rights,” clearly a thumb in the eye to the civil-rights movement, which led a Klan leader in Georgia named Bruce Wilkinson to endorse Reagan, saying that “the Republican platform could have been written by a Klansman.” (Reagan did reject the endorsement, to be sure.)

That, in a nutshell, is why labeling the Democrats as the party of the Klan and other white supremacist groups is obsolete. Yes, I’m aware of the late Klan recruiter Robert Byrd being feted by fellow senators upon his death; however, he left the Klan in the 1950s; repudiated it; apologized for joining; and, importantly, after white West Virginians began migrating to the GOP, voted for civil-rights legislation. Contrast that with Southern Republicans such as Bob Barr and Trent Lott attending meetings of the Klan-adjacent Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known as the White Citizens Council — which was arguably more influential than the Klan because it wasn’t terrorist).

This thus represents a cowardly campaign on the part of conservatives to run away from their own racism. And with the fear-mongering that’s become endemic on the political right, especially with the Make America Great Again and Christian Nationalist movements in serious trouble, I hope that people hear the truth.

The imminent revival, part 18: Touchdown, Minnesota!

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but Him. To love Him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

--Mark 12:28-34

Those of you who have read my blog over the years know that I’ve spoken about spiritual revival many, many times but in entries mentioned the specific conditions under which I believe has to happen. And I believe that those conditions are being met right now in the Twin Cities, people and churches being united and even some clergy being arrested for living the Word of God.

Basically, they’ve returned to “first principles,” as mentioned by Jesus above.

That’s right — loving God and loving neighbors is all that He asks for.

Over the decades many people have prayed for revival and even set up agencies hoping that God will heed and set up according to their own understanding of Who He is and what He wants. Two examples: The “Asbury revival” of 2023 and the Charlie Kirk assassination of last year. I know personally folks who have studied past revivals and suggested ways in which they could be duplicated.

In my view, they’ve missed the point. A creative God has access to infinite ways to demonstrate His intent and won’t be tied down to any one way of doing things, which I understand. Basically, He will never share his glory with another.

One thing, however, of which I’m convinced: No revival at this time would be complete without a complete and total repudiation of Donald Trump — for spiritual, not political, reasons. He has become an idol to much of the church of Jesus Christ, which has sought political power at the expense of its true mission of reconciliation — indeed, he’s shown that he’s pathologically cruel and has no use for God’s mercy, something that flies in the face of the very Gospel that Christians say that they stand for.

With recent shooting deaths of innocents at the hand of agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement this month, an issue because under Trump it’s targeted non-whites, especially those of Somali heritage, in Minnesota, folks decided to stand up for their neighbors. “Why didn’t they just obey the law?” some people are asking — but this is about the law of God, which Christians believe should supersede man’s law.

We can study the Bible and learn all the theology we want, and I’d never knock those, but if those get in the way of the personal and corporate relationship with God through Jesus Christ, especially if that doesn’t lead to obedience, they will have no effect. The folks demonstrating in Minnesota may not have their theology right or know the Scriptures as well, but they’re doing what Jesus actually said — and that cannot but bear fruit. May we all do the same.

The row over the “black national anthem”

Did you know that my hometown of Pittsburgh has a “national anthem?”

Yes, we do. It’s called “Sugar,” the title tune from an album released in 1970 on CTI Records by tenor saxophonist and composer Stanley Turrentine, a native of the city’s Hill District. It’s referred to colloquially as a “national anthem” because literally every jazz musician here, myself included, can play it in his sleep. (Indeed, the day he died in 2000 — and I co-wrote his obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — a bunch of us “cats” appropriately closed a jam session at a local club with that tune in tribute.)

I was reminded of that when certain folks decided that they would boycott the Super Bowl, being played tomorrow, over the performance of the “black national anthem,” claiming by doing so it would spark racial division. But if anything, it would highlight the division that has always existed but that some folks have refused to acknowledge.

The name of the song, more accurately the hymn, is “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” The words were written by James Weldon Johnson, an officer in the NAACP, and set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson in 1899 — that’s right, at the turn of the last century — and have been sung in most black churches ever since. In that context it might be considered a “national anthem,” understanding that the phrase is a figure of speech for a piece of music that people of a certain culture would know because they grew up with it — including the two-thirds of National Football League players who are black. (Ray Charles even recorded it over 50 years ago for the album “A Message from the People” — the same album as his classic rendition of “America the Beautiful.”) Indeed, if you ever listen to the words, they express not only a greater degree of pure patriotism than “The Star-Spangled Banner” but also a sense of hope for the future — and, for people who believe in God, a reference to Him.

The playing of the hymn at NFL games thus started in response to not only the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, which President Trump wanted to send in active military troops to shut down; but also then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s “taking a knee” in protest of police brutality in 2017 (which caused Trump to refer to him and other protesters “[S.O.B.’s] who should be fired”). And that wasn’t the first time something like that had happened — you may recall the football players’ threatened strike against the University of Missouri in 2015, which resulted in the resignation of both the president and chancellor for doing little or nothing to discipline those who smeared feces on the school’s black cultural center.

Clearly, a certain segment of America believes that the collective voice of black America should be silenced, witness Trump’s attempt to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs in the federal government and that filtering down into private enterprise. And that wouldn’t be news, as at the time of his death Martin Luther King Jr. had only about a 15 percent approval rating and other civil-rights leaders are similarly denigrated to this day.

If there’s a problem here, it’s that the term “national anthem” for “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is often capitalized, as though it’s a separate anthem for just one race or ethnicity. That’s not the intent — it’s simply a hymn with a great deal of meaning to the black community.

Jackie Robinson: “DEI hire”

Since Donald Trump, who over the years has demonstrated his racism time and time again, has returned to the White House, he has promised to, echoing much of the racially insensitive political hard-right, abolish Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs in the federal government, the belief is that having women and racial minorities actually waters down efficiency and that positions and promotions should be based solely on “merit.”

What he and others truly don’t understand is that the concept of DEI is not only not new but has been practiced for decades to get opportunities to “underrepresented” folks into certain fields that had been previously denied to them due to their color or gender.

Exhibit A: Jackie Robinson.

Of late a number of conservatives have said that Robinson earned his spot on the Brooklyn Dodgers because he was a great player — and yes, he proved to be a great player — but that had nothing do with his being the first black man to play Major League Baseball in the modern era, called up from the Montréal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm club, on April 15, 1947.

See, there was never a statutory ban on black players, “Jim Crow” laws being illegal in many states where teams operated. (Recall that no MLB teams called the Deep South home until the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966, well after the start of the civil-rights movement; only in former slave state Missouri, where the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns, the latter moving to Baltimore to become the Orioles, was that even an issue.) In those days team owners had a “gentlemen’s agreement” to keep black players out, largely due to the large number of Southerners on team rosters.

Then-general manager Branch Rickey, who did want to integrate the game, had several things in mind. One, he saw MLB as stodgy and boring and wanted to bring the excitement that black players, then in the Negro Leagues, could provide, with their base-stealing and defensive flair. Two, he gambled, successfully, that having a black man in the lineup would bring a whole new fan base, not to mention money, into the Dodgers organization. (One of those fans was a black man in Puerto Rico whose name is familiar to us here in Pittsburgh: Roberto Clemente, who actually was a Dodgers farmhand until selected by the Pirates in that day’s version of the Rule 5 Draft.)

But it simply wasn’t sufficient to call up the best black ballplayer. Because he was headed into uncharted territory, with likely the majority of black men in general having the proverbial chip on their shoulder anyway, Rickey needed someone who would not react to the inevitable abuse, slights and insults, at least for three years — that is, exhibit the right temperament and let his playing do the talking. Which led to another goal of Rickey’s: Build team chemistry, with an “us-against-the-world” mentality that might carry a team to a championship, with those not accepting Robinson being cut or traded away. (And it eventually did, in 1956, a couple of years before the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, where Robinson grew up and was a four-sport star at UCLA.) Robinson’s presence was said to have inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent crusade to overthrow Jim Crow in the South.

And that is the intent of DEI.

Therefore, it’s an absolute insult to those black folks who actually meet qualifications but, because they’re black and/or female, were seen as less deserving. During his 2020 run for the White House, Joe Biden promised to put a black woman on the Supreme Court; as president, he nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson — who, as things turned out, had higher credentials than anyone already there. Then-vice-president Kamala Harris, after Biden was pushed out of running for reelection and inarguably more qualified than Donald Trump, received the Democratic nomination — but was subsequently blasted as a “DEI hire” who “slept her way to the top” (she did have a relationship with Oakland congressman Willie Brown).

No, the issue was never “merit” — it was a rejection of the power of the entitled-white-and-male “old-boys’ network.” And that’s what Rickey and Robinson blew up.

The untimely end of ‘Christian nationalism’

The bastardization of the Christian faith commonly regarded as “Christian nationalism” may have breathed its last. It may not be obvious right now, but it’s clearly headed for the scrapheap of history.

I say that for two reasons.

One, many of its institutional supporters are — just as in the 1980s, with the TV evangelists — victims of scandal because they wouldn’t police themselves due to their drunkenness on power. Most recently, the pastor of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo. was revealed to have abused a number of younger female members of that congregation, which has supported the heretical “seven mountains of culture” doctrine that suggests — with no biblical support — that spiritual revival will come when Christian “take dominion” over those pillars of society.

The problem, of course, is that evangelism, character development and service, the things that grow people in the faith as well as congregations, take a back seat.

The “prophetic movement” in some charismatic circles as a rule has ignored this basic truth, focusing more on outlandish predictions than a scriptural understanding of God’s intent. That’s why it’s making fools of itself and God in doing so, especially in insisting that Donald Trump was a shoo-in for reelection four years ago; and, even now, saying that he’ll return to the White House in 2025.

Which leads to another complication: The SCOTUS’ Dobbs decision obliterating Roe v. Wade.

Much political evangelicalism has believed for decades that making abortion illegal would mark another step in such revival. It never considered, however, that the pro-choice side would mobilize as never before, with six states passing laws or even ballot referendums to keep abortion legal. And rather than Trump thundering about it, he’s gone on the record calling it a “mistake” but also that it should be a matter for the states to decide.

Well, which is it? his supporters are asking. That’s the point, because one thing Trump wants is worship and a continued focus on the abortion issue threatens that. He’s now sounding like of one those mealy-mouthed politicians talking out of both sides of his mouth — indeed, one of the reasons the Christian nationalists supported him in the first place is because they believed that his anti-abortion stance was genuine (even though he’s flip-flopped on the issue). And they clearly don’t have the votes in Congress to enact a nationwide ban on their own.

Yes, the theory of “Christian nationalism” is dangerous. But as a practical matter, it never had much chance of being implemented. And God Himself would see to that.

Is the MAGA movement collapsing?

That the Donald Trump-speared “Make America Great Again” movement, inspired by a Ku Klux Klan-inspired slogan in the early 20^th Century and every bit as dangerous, has been a driving force in his campaign to retake the White House after his 2020 loss isn’t a surprise. Indeed, in certain “swing states,” including my state of Pennsylvania, he and current President Joe Biden are running neck-and-neck.

But two recent situations lead me to believe that “Trump fever” might be breaking.

The first is his walking back on an anti-abortion stance that he adopted to get conservative “Christians” to vote for him — specifically, his vow to have the Supreme Court reverse Roe v. Wade. That has, however, since backfired as numerous states have strengthened their own laws permitting abortion, whether by legislation or voter referendum. Trump has since occasionally called its repeal “a mistake,” disappointing anti-abortion activists, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who were convinced — with no evidence — that he was truly on their side.

The other is tying aid to the war effort in Ukraine to more control of the border with Mexico — or, at least, the ruse of such. You may recall that congressional Republicans were stalling on military aid to Ukraine, which had been invaded by Russia two years ago, to get an immigration bill passed (something that then-President Obama had pleaded for a decade previously). Well, President Biden eventually was able to broker such a bill but Trump, running for the presidency again, said that Republicans shouldn’t vote it because he wanted to bludgeon Democrats with the issue during the campaign, effectively killing it.

Thing is, aid to Ukraine recently passed. Why? Well, Trump of late has been distracted with the “hush money” trial in New York state court involving his alleged one-night stand with adult-film star Stormy Daniels and thus couldn’t comment on its passing; we all know that Trump, when he was president, tried to pull the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, rumored to be at the behest of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long sought to destroy that alliance because it crimps his imperialistic tendencies. (Keep in mind that paying off Daniels with $130,000 to keep quiet wasn’t itself illegal; it’s that he tried to charge that money to his campaign, thereby committing business fraud under state law.)

Even more recently, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of Trump’s strongest supporters, introduced a resolution to remove Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House for working with Democrats, which went nowhere in large part because Republicans noted — correctly, in my view — that they’re now being blamed for causing chaos but getting absolutely nothing done, thus giving more power to the Democrats. One GOP congressman even responded to Greene’s move with the sarcastic Southern saying “Bless her heart.” And it’s that chaos that Trump has always brought to the political scene that led Geoff Duncan, a former Georgia lieutenant governor, to write an endorsement of Biden in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

What I suspect we’re seeing is that Trump, who has always painted himself and been regarded as an “outsider,” with his response to the abortion issue turning against him, has been reduced to one of the mealy-mouthed politicians that he has always denounced in acerbic, insulting terms. To be honest, I didn’t entirely expect that the takedown of Roe would have this effect on the abortion-rights-supporting political left. But what we’re seeing now is a man trying desperately to save his own political skin by going back on his stated position because it’s now being used against him, which is why the approval of aid to Ukraine is also important

And that threatens MAGA ideology, because it has always wanted to dominate the political process by bullying its opponents into silence.