The Lie the World Now Tells to Silence Christians

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In November 2004, I sat in a movie theater and witnessed one of the most chilling, frightening films I had ever seen: The Incredibles.

“Aw, c’mon, Dan,” you might protest. “That was an animated film for kids. Pixar. Now Disney. How can that possibly be anything but rainbows and unicorns?”

This scene:

 
The film’s writer and director Brad Bird nailed it:

“And when everyone’s super, no one will be.”

For a while, that narrative played in real life. It was a story the forces that hate God and hate His Church attempted to promote. “If everyone is a good person, and we construct a story we tell that makes everyone good, then no one will be morally or ideologically superior to anyone else. And then we can do whatever we want because we will have killed off religion, especially those that draw distinctions between good and evil.”

It’s an insidious ploy. Problem is, it didn’t work. The reason? Human sin.

You can’t claim that everyone is good if people keep doing heinous things. This especially doesn’t work when certain groups of highly visible people repeatedly are behind those atrocities. The goodness lie can’t stand in a world of fallen people.

Here’s where the flip-side is beginning to creep in…

I’ve noticed a new narrative lately coming from those who are desperate to draw moral and ideological equivalencies so as to excuse themselves, while also taking down any exceptionalism claims by any belief system. It’s a concession that the “everyone is super” narrative failed. What we are now being propagandized with is its opposite.

When Alexander Bissonnette walked into a Quebec mosque and unloaded his weapons into the bodies of the men present, the headline the next day described him with a phrase I’d not seen before in the press: Christian terrorist.

This past week, when Cedric Anderson walked into a California school and started shooting, the press wanted to know why Christians were not denouncing this terror perpetrated by a Christian pastor that left people, including a mentally-challanged child, dead.

Anyone else see what is happening here?

There’s a lie building. And from the perspective of those who tried with the goodness message and failed, it’s a more effective foundation supporting this revised agenda, because fallen people tend not to act good. Therefore, instead of finding cases of wholesale good in any group, find instances of the opposite.

“If we want to establish moral and ideological equivalency, we must show that no one is exceptional. Because if no one is exceptional, then there is nothing exceptional about what anyone believes.”

The implementation as an attack on Christian faith is to find deranged, unstable, violent people who have some slim connection to something someone thinks is Christianity, and paint them as brightly as possible as stellar, A-#1 examples of Christian faith. Then say, “Look at this mass murderer Christian! Christians are just as bad as everyone else. In fact, they may be the real monsters we never realized lived among us.”

You see, Alexandre Bissonnette liked Pope John Paul II on his Facebook page and used an image of a crusader to announce his savage plan to murder.

You see, Cedric Anderson called himself a pastor in public and quoted biblical-sounding things on his Facebook page.

So, of course, these murderers and terrorists are shining examples of orthodox Christians. Orthodox Christians are terrorists too. Look! Look!

Except it’s a desperate lie.

Any 15-minute investigation into Bissonnette showed, if anything, that he is beholden more to an atheistic humanism with roots in rationalist philosophy than to anything Christian. The label doesn’t stick. At all.

Same for Anderson. A con man with a history of weapons and violence charges, who appears to have lied about his military service, had no church behind his “pastorate,” and who espouses some mangling of the Old Testament in a series of Facebook posts—he’s no more an orthodox Christian than Jim Jones.

Thing is, no one tried to draw an equivalency with Jim Jones back in the ’70s. No one looked at the People’s Temple and said, “I can’t see any difference between them and your typical Methodist or Presbyterian church.” Any reporter who tried would have been run out of town on a rail for being so blind and willfully ignorant.

But today? Well, that willful ignorance falls into the rotten “gift” the Web and social media have given us: That if someone says something loudly and often enough on the Internet, that person can find an audience and replace ultimate truth with alternate facts.

Fake news indeed.

This is a real problem for Christian believers.

For us, I don’t see any recourse but to engage this agenda of delegitimizing the Gospel and Christian theology through wide-brushing Christians as morally and ideologically equivalent to those groups that are committing atrocities around the globe. We must confront this forced equivalency and reveal it as the lie that it is. We must draw distinctions between genuine Christian faith and all the perverted forms that people desperate to undermine Christianity are trying to foist on the ignorant as the norm.

Here is one reality we must keep reinforcing. Unlike some other groups out there, terrorists and ideological deviants do not come out of orthodox (small-“o”) Christian churches. Those radicals that may identify (and be identified by outsiders) as “Christian” almost always come out of “churches” with deviant theology that in no way resembles orthodox Christian theology and practice. The distinctions are clear, and anyone should be able to see them if they spend even a little bit of effort to note the difference.

Except those with the equivalency agenda do not want people to do the checking. They figure if they “equivalent-ize” loudly and long enough, people will believe them. Sadly, that seems to work when left uncountered.

All I can say to fellow believers is that we cannot rest and ignore this. If we see someone on the Internet trying to force a moral and ideological equivalency between faiths or belief groups by appealing to examples of “Christians” who commit atrocities, we must speak truth to it.

Again, the most egregious lie is to look for “radicals” and to place them as coming from orthodox church congregations. However, “Radicalized Christians” always come from a “church” with deviant, unorthodox theology, belief, and practice, and almost always glaringly so.

Remember, that to work, this lie must force equivalencies, so it must also operate in the other direction, by excusing non-Christian groups that produce radicals. Fact is, these radicals ARE coming from orthodox versions of that non-Christian group. This is used against Christians by forcing the equivalency that if orthodox examples of these non-Christian groups are producing radicals and terrorists, then orthodox churches are too.

Except this simply is not the case. Radicals do not radicalize in Christian churches that are not preaching radically deviant beliefs.

We orthodox Christians must speak and stop letting outsiders who claim they understand us propagandize lies about us.

Sleeping with the Enemy, American Church Edition

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church demolitionIt’s hard to know where to begin to unravel the craziness behind the fallout of a Kentucky clerk of court saying she’s standing on the Word and refusing to issue–or let anyone else in her office issue–marriage licenses to homosexual couples. After a while, weariness is about the only emotion one can feel.

Yet not weariness that this has happened, but more the kind that comes from repeated efforts to awaken a sleeper who just refuses to wake up.

Christians who quote the Old Testament a lot are yelling about religious liberty and wringing their hands about the end of America. Christians who like to think they are more New Testament quote verses about obeying government authorities and seem bored with the whole fiasco. Solid Christians inhabit both groups, so it’s sad to see that neither group seems to understand the other.

I sit here somewhere in the middle, wondering if both sides are missing the point.

For me, the distress is not that this is the end of Christian dominance in America. It’s not that various Christian groups can’t come to consensus on the events in Kentucky.

If anything, what troubles me is that no one seems capable of understanding that the government of the United States is not the friend of Christians that Christians have always thought it has been, and that the Church has been doing nothing to distance itself from sleeping with the enemy, nor preparing for that day when the truth about that relationship finally crystalizes.

Friend Rick I. noted a case of the frankly delusional state of thought by some Christians. From the Answers in Genesis folks behind the Creation Museum (also, coincidentally, in Kentucky) comes this:

“Bowing to the pressure of anti-Christian secularist groups that have actively opposed AiG in the culture, the state was intimidated last year to withdraw a tax incentive for our Ark Encounter project that had already received pre-approval (see www.answersforfreedom.org). In order to receive the tax incentive, the state is now demanding that our future Christian facility open its hiring to everyone (which then would include applicants who agressively oppose the Christian message of the Ark project), and that the gospel message not be presented at the theme park. Christians increasingly are being treated as second-class citizens in this nation. Essentially it comes down to the fact that regardless of what the Constitution clearly states about freedom of religious expression, those who don’t have a Christian worldview will reinterpret the Constitution to make it fit with their own secular worldview. The Ark issue is a battle of worldviews.” (Source: AIG’s “Not Just Acceptance, But Coercion—Christians Now Being Told to Embrace Gay ‘Marriage’ or Else“)

It’s astonishing to me that any Christian organization can go to the government for money and NOT think there will be stipulations. Or that the government might bow to pressures from “enemy” groups. AIG looked for a handout and got its hand slapped instead. Wow, how utterly unexpected.  :-/

The even better question is to ask why a Christian organization is going to the government at all.

Rather than wringing our hands about what was surely the outcome the Bible predicted, why have Christians in America not been preparing for the day when the court of public opinion turns against us?

If we needed any preparation, Roe v. Wade provided the handwriting on the wall. Despite Christian groups’ repeated attempts to leverage supposedly pro-life forces in the House and Senate, Roe is still here, even when those forces held a majority. Despite the heartbreaking Planned Parenthood videos that should have galvanized our leaders, nothing has changed. Fact is, the powers that be don’t want it to change, no matter what they say they believe.

Yet Christians in America remain shocked at this. Shocked. Meanwhile, AIG is PO’ed that they may not get tax money to build their ark. We act as if Jesus never warned us that the world would hate us. That there would be consequences, difficult ones, for our faith.

The next battleground will be tax exemption for churches. I can almost guarantee that exemption will go away sooner than the Church thinks. Again, it was never a guarantee, but we have foolishly acted like it was.

What happens when the spawn of the Church Growth Movement, all these monster-sized churches with cathedral-like buildings sitting on a plethora of acreage, suddenly gets a million-dollar property tax bill?

What does it look like when a church goes bankrupt?

Whatever the outcome, it won’t look pretty.

I’ve been writing this blog since 2003. In that time, I’ve written extensively on the lack of preparedness by the American Church for times of want and for the day of persecution. Regardless of whether you or I think that time is now, we still are not getting prepped.

I’m not sure what it’s going to take, but I’m beginning to suspect the only way to wake up the Church here is the same way you wake of the board of directors of your typical Fortune 500 company: a string of brutal financial losses. I hate to think that for the Church in America it’s all about the money, but nothing else seems to be jumpstarting our efforts to future-proof the best we can.

Perhaps it’s time to sell off massive church buildings on gargantuan properties. Perhaps it’s time to stockpile food. Perhaps it’s time to draw up plans to secret ourselves. In countries where the church is actively persecuted, wise leaders have taken steps to survive. What are we doing here? Better yet, when are we even going to start talking about this in our churches?

Let’s get something straight, too: This is not panic mode anymore than is having a family escape plan should a fire break out in your home. It’s called being wise.

The American Church has slept with the federal government for a long time. Now we’re seeing that the lover is more a frenemy. Soon, the relationship will degrade even further.

Church, how are we being wise in all this? Does complaining about loss of funds for our fake ark really show any seriousness about the future? Yet that is where we seem to be as Christians in America 2015.

Time to wake up and start prepping for something worse.

When the Church Gets All OT on You

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Can’t stop thinking about this…

Whenever Church leaders talk about how great it is to be a follower of Jesus, does it ever bother you that they always go back to the Old Testament for props for their teachings and sermons?

In the Old Testament, the reward in this life for faithfulness included the following:

Health

Material prosperity

Freedom from want

Large families

Respect from the community

Long life

But then in the New Testament, something else enters that idyllic picture and seems to replace it. The reward in this life for faithfulness in the New Testament:

Persecution

Separation from family

More persecution

Martyrdom

"The Crucifixion of St. Peter" by Ventura SalimbeniAmid all those sermons on all the great stuff you’ll now get from claiming OT promises, no one seems to talk about the hallmarks of NT faithfulness and what its rewards now look like.

My son and I are reading through the entire NT together, and that thread of persecution for following Jesus is simply unmistakable. Not only this, but Jesus Himself states that much of what was thought to be the hallmark of Old Testament faithfulness and reward would look different in the Kingdom of God that Jesus was instituing and that expectations should change. Something larger was now here, and it eclipsed what was thought to be the be all and end all of faithfulness and reward.

We don’t talk about that though.

What if instead of thinking about the OT reward of long life and material prosperity we instead thought of the blessing of having our head lopped off at age 30 by people who hated us and our Christ?

What does that do to “counting the cost”? Can any of us who have bought into the OT reward mentality truly accept the NT reward reality? Or do we keep retreating to a place that lessens the likelihood that we should ever receive a genuine NT reward—the only kind that truly matters.

Because, hey, someone once called me a bad name on my Christian blog, and I felt all persecuted.  🙁