Why did the followers of Jesus, who after 280 years of persecution, when they had finally received recognition, upend the attitudes of Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament for the next 1700 years?
I’m not a scholar, nor a historian, but I know enough to be dangerous. I know that wherever cultural Christianity has gone, societies have been changed for the better. Infanticide has ended, wife-burning has ended, often democratic norms have followed. Care has improved for the sick, elderly and helpless. And yet… here we are, in the United States of America, founded as a Christian nation, now finding a strong anti-Christian sentiment in our society. What happened?
Let’s go back… waaaayyy back to Bible times. Jesus came into a God-fearing Jewish society, to be their Jewish Messiah. However, he upset their status quo, preaching a gospel straight out of their Bible, but foreign to their ears. Jesus was a social and religious outsider, a nonconformist, not so much a progressive as a revolutionary. He was counter-cultural. They had been following the Old Testament Law for a couple thousand years, and he turned it on its end. Actually, did didn’t turn it upside down — he turned it right side up.
Jesus said we shouldn’t retaliate, but yield to those who attack us. We were to love our enemies. We were to take care of the powerless of society, feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, the sick, the widows and orphans, welcoming the stranger and the foreigner. We were to rejoice when persecuted, pray for those who persecuted us. We were not to seek power, but to become servants. He said that at the end of life we will be judged by how well we treated the hungry, naked, imprisoned, etc. We were not to seek places of honor or power, but of service. He said the broad way most people follow was to be avoided, that ours was the narrow way, and few people would actually find it. We would be hated by all kinds of people, but that’s ok, because we’re following Him. He said not to look for rewards here on earth, but that our faithfulness will get us rewards in heaven… eventually.
Now Jesus presented himself as the Savior of the world. He gave his life as payment for our sins, so that if we believe in Him, we will live forever with Him and God the Father. To become His children and be assured of that eternity, we are but to believe in Him. However, as his born-again children, we have a calling to honor God by living according to the principles he lived by and taught, as summarized in the preceding paragraph and taught throughout the Bible.
Jesus indicated that we would be hated by “all men” for his sake. People don’t want to hear that they’re evil, and need salvation from a perfect God. And for the first 200 years or so after Christ his followers were indeed persecuted. They were tortured, killed, made fun of, imprisoned, and rejected by a world not accepting of their message.
Then Emperor Constantine, after a dream in 312 A.D., suddenly made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire. A few decades later, it became the official religion of Rome. And it’s been pretty much downhill ever since.
The movement we now call Christianity was never intended by Jesus to be a majority, or powerful, segment of society. Ours is to be a minority voice calling the world to repentance and faith. But once the Roman Church received power, it was not the power of the Holy Spirit, promised in Acts 1:8, to be witnesses for Christ, but it was political power.
The unchecked power of the Church, over time, led to persecutions — this time not being persecuted, but being the persecutors, not only of unbelievers, but of those who believed in Jesus the wrong way. Of believers whose practices did not measure up to the Church’s understanding. Many would-be reformers died at the hands of the “Christ-followers” who had the power structure of the Church to back them.
In the 16th century, after Martin Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and others brought a new light into the world, church and state were still combined, wielding sometimes merciless power over all who would not conform. Anabaptists were put to death (by drowning), for rebaptizing those the Church had baptized as infants, thus nullifying the Sacrament of the Church. In the New World, where nonconforming groups from England founded their own colonies to be free of persecution — they then persecuted those who did not conform to their practices, killing four Quakers for practicing their form of Christianity in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
When we think of the founding of America, we think of the Pilgrims, the Puritans of New England. But who settled in the rest of the colonies? Beggars, prisoners, adventurers, merchants, Anglicans, a few Catholics and Jews, many total unbelievers, etc. In the founding of the nation we had John Adams, one of the New England descendants of the Puritans, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Anglicans in Virginia, and many more with various degrees of Christian knowledge and/or commitment. Very few of our founding fathers would be readily accepted into Evangelical churches of today. What they brought to this continent was the same old sterile Christianity of Europe.
In the New World, “Christians” brought along the practice of acknowledging and taking advantage of holding slaves, owning human beings as chattel. When the nation was formed their Constitution made little mention of God. Interestingly, when, less than 100 years later several states seceded from the Union (over slavery) that seceding group made much more mention of dependence on God in their constitution.
During and following the Second Great Awakening (1790-1850), Charles Finney and other Christian leaders led efforts not only for personal salvation, but had a social agenda to end slavery and take on other reforms, including forming of public schools, beginning of the suffragette movement and reforms to give opportunity to the outcasts and disenfranchised to be educated and enter into society. The Christian elements of society in the middle of the 20th century largely came from that Awakening, not from the founding fathers.
Following the Civil War, people of African descent were still outsiders, denied entrance into much of society, including churches. And Blacks were not the only underprivileged group. The poor, the non-property-owners, the uneducated, Natives, were all left out of the opportunities in the “Land of Opportunity.”
But it was always a battle. It took another hundred years after slavery to put an end to Jim Crow laws in the South, and to begin to outlaw other ways of discrimination all over the country. And we have been powerfully reminded just in the last few months of how little we have accomplished and how much there is to do.
In the past 60 or so years, our country has become highly secularized. Church attendance is down, a large percentage of the population, especially the younger generation, claims no religious affiliation or preference. The religious practices of the nation’s founders is missing from textbooks. And Conservative Republican has become the go-to political philosophy of Evangelical Christians, those who believe in being born-again and following the teachings of the Bible.
What Happened?
So then, how in the world did Bible-believers end up favoring big business over people, present comfort over long-range responsibility, class warfare over the poor and minorities, possession of assault weapons over nonviolence, and a seriously divided “tribalism” in our politics?
I have a few ideas about that. Let’s begin with a man named John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, more commonly referred to as Lord Acton. This late 19th century English Catholic historian, politician, and writer is known for many keen observations of human behavior and attitudes. Perhaps his best-known observation is this: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Once the Church achieved power, in the fourth century, corruption followed. Today in the United States, most citizens would like to see term limits in Congress, because once a man or woman gets the power of legislating, with all the perks that go with it, they don’t want to give it up. But it’s not just legislators. Everyone in society resists losing any of his or her power, influence, or other benefits. Business owners don’t want to give up their control or their money for the sake of their employees. Whites don’t want to give up their white privilege. And, since societies are (and must be) governed by the capable, they are governed to maintain the privilege of the capable, or those deemed so by that society or by themselves.
And it apparently never occurs to those in power that the Bible — especially the New Testament — does not support their cries for the maintenance of that privilege. But let’s look a little closer at the circumstances in recent years that have brought us to our present situation.
The world has gone through a number of Renaissances, Enlightenments, Awakenings, Revolutions, etc. And someday historians will come up with a name for our time. Two innocent, secular, unrelated things in my early years made profound changes in society. The first was television, which enabled everybody to see what the rest of society was doing, and because it was sponsored by advertising, all of society was bombarded into a materialistic mentality. I personally believe that that was far more prevalent and damaging to the American psyche than all the sex and violence, though that didn’t help, either. The second was the invention of the birth-control pill. All generations of human history have tried to control conception via one way or another. But the pill was different. All previous methods required doing something at or around the time of intercourse to prevent pregnancy. With the pill, it was taken daily, generally in the morning; so at the time of sex there was no reminder of the possibility of pregnancy. Eventually, in the minds of the population, sex was separated from reproduction. This led to the “sexual revolution,” which was not really that for men, but it was for women. Suddenly they were encouraged to express their sexuality without fear of pregnancy. And the world has never been the same. And I’m not saying it’s bad, just that it changed society.
Also following World War II came the GI Bill of Rights, which enabled millions of Americans to become the first in their family to receive a college education. Unfortunately, for many reasons, this had little effect on African-American families. In the sixties and early seventies we had the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam war. And the White Church did not speak effectively to either of those two movements, but stood on the sidelines, still saving souls, but remaining largely silent on these social issues. And I plead guilty, carrying on my ministry in those years with no involvement in either issue. I still regret today my lack of involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
From that point I see two men who spoke up and spoke out, who largely changed the relationship between the Church at large and our society. The first was Rev. Jerry Falwell, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lynchburg, Virginia and founder of Liberty University. The second is Rush Limbaugh, a political radio talk show host.
In 1979 Falwell began a movement called, “The Moral Majority.” This organization was formed to enable Catholics, Protestants and other anti-abortion groups to unite their voices and stop legalized abortion-on-demand. But the group quickly evolved into becoming a political voice for numerous conservative values — some Christian, some not.” As outlined in the book Blinded by Might (written by Ed Dobson and Cal Thomas), this turned Falwell and other leaders into power-seekers. Though the organization did not last long (ten years), the concept still remains, and the great majority of white Evangelicals still support the principles — including anti-abortion, low taxes, small government, unrestricted gun-ownership, lack of business regulation, etc.
Looking back to the beginning of this article, followers of Jesus were always a minority. They were counter-cultural. Jesus’ words about broad and narrow ways indicated that his followers would always be a minority. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, in the 300s, everything changed. Once given that political power, the church degenerated into just another secular, power-driven and greed-driven organization. Once the United States was formed, the ruling-class people were all related to Christianity one way or another. So many laws reflected that Christian-majority society.
Unfortunately, the corruption that goes along with power prevents any society from being truly Christian. Hence, forcing the secular populace to adhere to certain “Christian” behaviors does not make them or the society “Christian.” The problem with Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” either the organization or the concept, is that using political power to make and/or enforce “Christian” behavior simply doesn’t work. In fact, eventually, it works in the opposite direction — it drives people away from Christ.
We’ll get back to that concept shortly. But on to Rush Limbaugh. Throughout history, there has been trash-talking — in sports, in the military, in politics, etc. However, in American politics that had been limited to newspaper editorials, political speeches, and other forms that didn’t really reach mass audiences. Then came Rush. He came on the radio for three hours a day. He put forth his ideas, using both logic and illogic. The fallacies of logic were prominent in his monologues. He insulted those who disagreed with him, called them names, and generally disrespected them. He called feminists “femi-Nazis” for years, and perhaps still does. He gained a large following, and his broadcasts were aired on hundreds of stations. With his politically conservative approach he gained many followers among Christians. He made millions of dollars, and was soon emulated by many other talk radio hosts — most of them also conservatives.
As a result of this talk-radio revolution, political people became more polarized, believing whatever their talk radio hosts were saying, whether conservative or liberal. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and other cable television stations became visual outlets for divisive language and demonization of “wrong” positions. Most of the name-calling came from supporters, rather than the candidates themselves. Then Donald Trump came on the scene and throughout his campaign, and throughout his presidency, he insults, calls names, and denigrates in the most vicious way, his enemies.
So then, how did we get to the point where political parties are not competitors with each other, but enemies? It has taken awhile, but it’s here. And Christians are participating at least as much as others.
The greatest problem in America is not liberals or conservatives, but the extreme polarization that drives people apart and unwillingness to work together to find acceptable solutions to the problems facing all of us.
Evangelism
Why does the church exist? Well, there are many reasons: it is the visible body of Christ on earth; we are to show the world what it means to follow Christ; it exists to worship God together; it unites Jesus’ followers in fellowship and love, ministering especially to the needy; it is to fulfill the Great Commission, making disciples from all nations; and many others.
Evangelism, or reaching the world with the good news of salvation through Christ, was strong in the early years. But when the Church and the government came together, evangelism slowed down. In the 1800s, beginning with the Second Great Awakening, the Church in America and in England revived, and numerous evangelistic ministries arose. The foreign missions movement, the YMCA (yes, in the early years it was evangelistic), the Salvation Army, numerous denominational mission boards, independent missionary organizations, etc. all began to intentionally reach out to introduce others to Christ. Following World War II many more organizations and missions were formed, trying to evangelize the world. As a result of that movement nations all over the world have become at least as Christian as the United States. Many of them are sending missionaries to other countries, even the United States.
Interestingly, evangelism has subsided significantly in America. And I don’t believe it’s just a coincidence that evangelism has waned specifically since the church began getting political. We have lost our fire for reaching the world with the good news of Christ, and spent our time and energy trying to gain and use political power.
After decades of evangelism and growth, the Southern Baptist Convention has been shrinking now for years. Southern Baptists have always been strongly evangelistic, both in philosophy and in practice. But it seems to be no longer working.
It seems that for the past 40 years or so, Christians have spent their energy condemning homosexuals and other non-conforming groups rather than loving them into the kingdom. Today’s growth of the “nones” (those who answer questionnaires with a religious preference of “none”) is not some unrelated trend of secularization. It is a direct result of the Church losing its vision, and choosing to use its time, energy and money with what appears to the public to be a totally negative message — against abortion, against homosexuals, against the poor, and being extremely judgmental on everybody else’s lifestyle. It appears to me that we have driven people away from Christ, and are continuing to do so.
Political power has corrupted the Church in America. We have brought our downfall upon ourselves. And getting all up in arms about it isn’t helping, either. We need revival — now!
We need to wean ourselves off our psychological dependence on frantic voices of condemnation. I remember many years ago praying in church, “Lord, deliver us from following the loudest voices.” Dictators, Tyrants, Rebels, and even Evangelists gain followers by being loud and/or convincing orators. We need to back off, get back to the actual reading and study of the Word of God. Follow the example and commands of Jesus himself. Don’t be suckered into movements that promise great things for us, but rather promote those things that bring great benefit to others, the poor, the lame, the blind, widows, orphans, minorities, foreigners, all who have less than we do.
Conclusions
So does all this mean I don’t love America? On the contrary, I do love America. We were founded on principles never before embodied in such a constitution: Representative government unencumbered by a religious organizational affiliation; a system of checks and balances to resist tyrannical rule by any individual or group; rule by a set of laws, rather than the rantings of a dictator; a bicameral legislature; a Bill of Rights, etc. We have quite imperfectly carried it out in actual practice. But what bothers me is the continual claim by many that we are a “Christian” nation, when we have been so obviously “Not Christian” in how we have carried out our calling.
When Jesus began his ministry in Nazareth, he quoted from the Bible, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:18-21) So then why do we have by far the largest number of prisoners in the world? And why is the gap between rich and poor so high and growing so fast? And why have people of color been so persecuted for so long in our land? And why are loud so-called Evangelical Christians defending it?
In Matthew 25:31-46 Jesus says we will be judged on the basis of how we have treated the poor and needy. In Ephesians 4:28 Paul tells us that the thief should stop stealing and get to work — so that he will have something to give to the poor. In seven places the Bible tells us that homosexual acts are sin; but over 200 times in the Bible God tells His people to reach out and help the poor, the widows and orphans, the foreigners, the powerless of society.
We like to read about and think about heaven, and rightfully so. In Revelation 7:9 we read about a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. God’s will is that all of his followers be together as one, praising him. When we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” and put other races and nationalities down, we are hypocrites, and are taking God’s name in vain.
The United States has produced thousands of groups and organizations to reach out and help the helpless. We have the Salvation Army, Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, organizations for just about every disease known to our society. We have churches and service clubs. We have welfare and Obamacare. We have Family services in every state. And we need them, because our entire governmental economic system is designed from the ground up to protect the wealth of the wealthy. Our income tax code is over 8,000 pages of loopholes and exceptions, mostly to keep corporations and rich people from having to pay as much percentage-wise as the poor and middle classes.
And whenever the nation has a problem — disasters, recessions, pandemic, unemployment — the poor people suffer far worse then the rest of society. And that’s not by accident, it’s by design.
It’s time for real Christians, not just those who say they believe the Bible, but actually know what it says and try to follow it, to begin to pressure legislators on every level of government to level the playing field. One of the responsibilities of government is to protect the weak from the strong. Unfortunately, the strong have much better access and representation in government.
The Bible speaks warnings to the rich and commands against the desire for riches. Greed is condemned throughout Scripture. If our nation wants to claim some sort of “Christian” heritage or society, it’s time to begin taking the social messages of the Bible seriously. No doubt one reason so many people are eschewing ceremonial Christianity is because for centuries Christian society has avoided Biblical social mores.
When I was young and in seminary they talked about theological conservatives and liberals (not necessarily related to today’s political divisions with those names). Back then conservatives took the Bible much more literally than the liberals, who interpreted many of the events of the Bible as allegorical. Today it’s the Christians who are politically liberal who take the Bible more literally, while the conservatives believe Jesus’ teachings are not to be taken literally for us today.
According to recent studies, white American Christians are more likely to lean toward racist understandings than white American non-Christians. This is not just evangelicals, but also white mainline and Catholic church members. Unfortunately, white American Christians from the settling of the continent have practiced racism against both Native Americans and African-Americans. And, though that has been reduced greatly since that time, it still exists. Many Christians still think that Jesus was white. He was a dark-skinned Middle Eastern Jew, and didn’t look like the Europeans we came from.
It’s time we white, evangelical Christians began to take seriously the entire Bible. Paul taught in Philippians 2 that we are to have the attitudes of Jesus, and to humbly consider others to be better than ourselves. Jesus said we are to have the mentality and attitudes of servants. We need to stop seeking political power and begin to humbly share with the world the “Good News” of Jesus’ love for all and his offer of salvation. Maybe then we’ll quit driving people away, and they won’t associate Christianity with negativism and judgmentalism.
Jesus said, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples — that you love one another.” Let us love one another and the rest of the world, even our enemies. And may Jesus begin living in our society through our lives.
by Ken McGarvey