The Money God

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Here in Ohio, we have yet another voter referendum on casinos, Issue 3. In the course of the last 25 years of my life, pro-casino forces have tried to shove gambling down the throats of Ohioans with one voter referendum after another, but we’ve always gagged and spit them out.

Churches and police have stood arm in arm against gambling. Church leaders cited the studies that showed without a doubt that gambling destroys families.The Ohio Fraternal Order of Police was relentless in detailing the studies that prove that casinos lead to exponential jumps in crime.

But that was then. Now the police endorse the casinos.

Why? Sadly, I can reduce the answer to one character on the keyboard: $

Not only will law enforcement get two percent of the casino tax (which would make their share $19 million a year), but they will certainly drain additional money from taxpayers when crime increases—along with the need for more police to contain it—and the casino tax mysteriously fails to cover the added expense, as “We Who Know How These Things Work” know it will. It’s the ultimate in cynicism from the police. Rather than seeing crime as evil, they now see it as job security, their fair share of the filthy lucre, plus an additional shot at more funding. And my momma always told me I could trust a policeman. Ha!

Honestly, it’s a short trip from there to endorsing street drug sales. And prostitution. Heck, why not let the state’s legislators run a human organ trafficking ring out of the capitol building? Next thing you know, the state budget will be met by selling your liver and kidneys or mine to the highest bidder.

No bottom exists when money becomes the raison d’être. Today, morals and ethics take a distant third to money and lining one’s own pocket with it. I hate to be a cynic, but our culture as a whole in America is doomed if the answer to everything always comes down to cold, hard cash.

Look at the Roman Catholic Church and abortion. The RCC itself is staunchly anti-abortion, but the people in the seats are, by majority, for it. Big disconnect. So it’s not hard to imagine protestant churches as entities being strongly against this vice or that, but later finding that the individuals within are less inclined to match the doctrinal line. And money is a big divider.

The churches in my area are standing against the casinos, but when you talk with people outside their hallowed sanctuaries, many of them are mumbling the mantra of the casino marketers: more jobs, money for schools, and on and on. They wonder how any of that can bad.

We equate our jobs with money, so we let our jobs define us. “So what do you do for a living?” is usually the second question we ask someone after “What is your name, please?” A person’s answer usually tells us all we need to know about his or her salary. And from that we decide whether this is a person with whom we can be friends or who can benefit us as we claw our way to the top.

Heaven knows we need the right people in our churches. We make the business owner an elder and relegate the convenience store cashier to dumping out the Sunday nursery diapers.

And it’s all about money.

Truth is, Jesus doesn’t define us by what we do for a living. In other words, you are not your job. Nor does Jesus care all that much about how many earthly riches you and I have, for He looks on the richness of the heart.

I think I can also say without qualms that Jesus doesn’t like it much when we stand for money more than we stand for truth. I once visited a rich church comprised of a number of fast trackers to the upper echelons of management in one of the largest companies in town. Those men talked a great deal about stopping this vice and that in the name of Jesus. But when their own company took an antithetical position on a vice issue, these fellas shut up pretty quickly rather than risk their ascent to the corner office.

And that’s pretty much how each of us would have played the same hand, if dealt it. We really do love our money more.

What this economic dive has taught me more than anything: When it all comes down to it, we Americans will always choose money over Jesus. Jesus or Money?That’s the real American Christian either/or. And it’s only becoming more apparent as our societal restraints unravel. (Which is why it’s no coincidence that Hollywood is rolling out a timely new movie based on the old question of whether or not a person, for a large sum of money, would push a button guaranteed to anonymously kill some random person in the world. Answer: I think most people would, regardless of their religious beliefs. Of course, Hollywood wants to impose unrealistic consequences for the sake of suspense, but you and I know that most people would not spend more than 30 seconds pondering consequences. Everyone dies eventually, right?)

Honestly, I’m shocked that a few churches in Ohio haven’t publicly allied with the police to tout the need for casinos. If the casino referendum should—miracle of miracles—go down to defeat, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some churches lobbying for gambling next time the vote comes up (which it seems to every two years). If things get bad enough, we can always find ways to put a Christian spin on just about everything. Besides, selling your soul doesn’t hurt much when you do it one small chunk at a time.

I mean, we all have our price, don’t we?

The Real Sins of Sodom

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'The Destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah' by John MartinOn Monday,  I wrote concerning Christians who err by judging the failings of others while simultaneously forgetting to examine themselves to check for their own complicity in those failings.

Today, I want to look at the notorious city of Sodom.

Long the hallmark of wickedness, Sodom is repeatedly held up in the Bible as an example of how NOT to live. And if you’ve been around American Evangelicalism long enough, you’ve been drilled on the exact reason God destroyed Sodom. (Hint: We get the word sodomy from this particular association.)

If you’re still lost on the reason, Genesis 19 is the standard text. Lot’s life in the city and what befalls him, his divine guests, and his immediate family are laid out for all to see, as are the despicable actions of the denizens of the city of Sodom:

The two angels came to Sodom at evening. Lot sat in the gate of Sodom. Lot saw them, and rose up to meet them. He bowed himself with his face to the earth, and he said, “See now, my lords, please turn aside into your servant’s house, stay all night, wash your feet, and you will rise up early, and go on your way.” They said, “No, but we will stay in the street all night.” He urged them greatly, and they came in with him, and entered into his house. He made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate. But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, surrounded the house, both young and old, all the people from every quarter. They called to Lot, and said to him, “Where are the men who came in to you this night? Bring them out to us, that we may have sex with them.” Lot went out to them to the door, and shut the door after him. He said, “Please, my brothers, don’t act so wickedly. See now, I have two virgin daughters. Please let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them what seems good to you. Only don’t do anything to these men, because they have come under the shadow of my roof.” They said, “Stand back!” Then they said, “This one fellow came in to live as a foreigner, and he appoints himself a judge. Now will we deal worse with you, than with them!” They pressed hard on the man Lot, and drew near to break the door. But the men put forth their hand, and brought Lot into the house to them, and shut the door. They struck the men who were at the door of the house with blindness, both small and great, so that they wearied themselves to find the door. The men said to Lot, “Do you have anybody else here? Sons-in-law, your sons, your daughters, and whoever you have in the city, bring them out of the place: for we will destroy this place, because the outcry against them has grown great before Yahweh that Yahweh has sent us to destroy it.”
—Genesis 19:1-13 (WEB)

Cut and dried, right? Homosexuality was the primary reason God destroyed Sodom.

Well, maybe not.

I was reading in Ezekiel today and came across the following passage. The context is that God is chastising His chosen people for being even more sinful than the wicked nations that surrounded them:

“Behold, everyone who uses proverbs will use this proverb about you: ‘Like mother, like daughter.’ You are the daughter of your mother, who loathed her husband and her children; and you are the sister of your sisters, who loathed their husbands and their children. Your mother was a Hittite and your father an Amorite. And your elder sister is Samaria, who lived with her daughters to the north of you; and your younger sister, who lived to the south of you, is Sodom with her daughters. Not only did you walk in their ways and do according to their abominations; within a very little time you were more corrupt than they in all your ways. As I live, declares the Lord GOD, your sister Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it….”
—Ezekiel 16:44-50 (emphasis mine)

What is fascinating about this passage is that God explicitly names what it was about Sodom that caused Him to destroy them:

1. Pride
2. Excess food
3. Prosperous ease
4. Lack of love for the poor and needy
5. Haughtiness
6. Practicing an abomination

While not explicitly named, the abomination that was practiced surely included homosexuality.  Exchanging heterosexual practice for homosexual is an abomination because it mocks the created order and the character of God. (I have written about this previously in “Sex and the Created Order.”)

But for us Christians in America who love to hold out the homosexual agenda as the worst possible thing to happen to our country, please note the five explicitly named sins that preceded the sixth.

I can wait while you read the list again.

When I read those top five, they nearly define American Evangelicalism circa 2009.

The pride of having somehow “arrived” with our Christian radio stations and our Jesus T-shirts, the Time and Newsweek cover articles proclaiming our ascendancy, and the whole of our Evangelical subculture that seduces us into thinking that we are somehow living in the world but are not of it

The gluttony evident by the number of morbidly obese “saints” who never met a pantry they didn’t like or an all-you-can-eat buffet they could ignore, and the hording of food that allows us to feel safe and well insulated against the “childish” idea of “Give us this day our daily bread”

The vacation homes, McMansions, iPhones, Playstations, spa trips, Christian cruises, and amassed luxury that we so often attribute to God’s imprimatur on our “righteous” lifestyles

The blind eye we turn to the destitute, the alien, and the least of these—the very ones who signify Christ Himself

The self-reverential belief that we are better than those around us who do not show the same outward manifestation of our blessings, and the certainty of heaven for us because we alone have done it right while our clueless neighbor has done every last shred of it wrong

Five devastating, explicitly named indictments of God against Sodom, yet for some reason, all we can think about is the sixth, because that final one applies to the other guy—you know, the flambouyant one with all the Streisand CDs.

Dear God, bring us to repentance before it is too late.

Links for This Inauguration Day

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Seeing as the incoming president pretty much trademarked the use of the word We, I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and fire up the ol’ linkage and share the blog love, adding a few personal remarks here and there.

Enjoy!

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Proving once and for all that they are more right than God, World Net Day jumps the shark with a post by their founder that illustrates Christianity at its ugliest. And I say that as an archconservative, born-again Christian. Obviously, in WND’s view, God’s grip on his sovereignty must be slipping, as it seems He’s a little befuddled about this government thing. His word on the issue is a bit too lax as well, ITHO. (Note: The “100 percent at odds” statement is especially braindead. If you need a reason why the prevailing conservatism crashed and burned, this kind of kneejerk thinking is behind it.)

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Sticking with the government theme, “Mish” Shedlock of Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, the best financial analysis site on the Web, states what should be the obvious in this post. His calls are not only completely correct, they will, sadly, be largely ignored unless taxpayers demand that the powers that be shape up or ship out. My commentary: The difference between great men and cowards is that great men understand they must be the ones who sacrifice first. Cowards make everyone else sacrifice before they do. I’ll leave you to guess what kind of men we have today.

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To add to the above, I have read in a couple different sources that my state, Ohio, has 37-39 percent of its citizens working for a local, city, county, state, or federal government agency. That’s insane.

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If you need anymore proof that believers are fiddling while Rome burns, witness this piece of fluff. It’s this kind of crapola that occupies the minds of Christians rather than the tough issues of life. No wonder we’ve become irrelevant in the U.S. to most people.

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Too little, too late?

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Is it me, or are more and more “About” sections of Christian blogs noting how much the blog authors love to shop, watch TV, play video games, and go to movies? Call me shrill, but those seem like the wrong priorities in this difficult hour.

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Tales of my demise are greatly exagerrated.

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An odd thing started happening with this blog recently. In Google,  keyword searches  are landing people on the variable  front page rather than on the specific post page that holds the correct keywords. In the past, the front page was indexed but was not the main source for specific keyword searches. If any of you WordPress/SEO gurus out there can tell me how to restore the proper functionality, let me know. I have no idea what changed.

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David Wayne of Jollyblogger is facing a difficult struggle against metastisized colon cancer. Would you take a few minutes of your time today to lift him up in prayer? Pray for healing. Come before God in expectancy.

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And while you’re praying, pray that our new president will govern rightly. Unlike some, I believe that we Christians are called to support our leaders, even when we disagree with some of their policies. That kind of humility is something that God honors all the time.