I rarely find Michael Voris's daily commentary compelling enough to follow, but here he says something meaningful about the state of the union (USA) that resonates in terms of the faith. Yet I disagree that Americans serious about their Christian faith and their eternal salvation are 'hiding behind politics'. Rather, right now, it is politics - the power of the ballot - that enables them to express how their faith informs the way they live their lives. And the popular vote in the recent US presidential elections, as it has done since the second Reagan term, show that the US electorate is pretty much split down the middle, almost 50-50, between 'conservatives' and 'progressivists', i.e., this is a deeply polarized country, and Mr. Trump will need more than 4 years, or even 8, to begin de-polarizing the country...
Hiding behind politics
churchmilitant.com/
November 28, 2016
It's impossible to not notice the massive division that exists in America, expressed most recently in the election: charges of corruption and hate and collusion and bigotry
[surely the issues that divided and will continue to divide were not such generic reciprocal accusations which are SOP in any democratic election, but the ideological abyss between the two major political parties, in which Republicans, who seem to have in their ranks more serious Christians motivated by their faith, are mostly politically conservative, whereas Democrats, who appear to embody the post-modern post-Christian me-centered generations, are overwhelmingly progressivist] — and two candidates deeply despised by each other and their opposing camps. But this is just what's bubbled to the surface.
What underlies all of this isn't really arguments over immigration policy and healthcare and the phoniness of man-centered climate change. What's really underneath all of this is a nation wrestling with its own morality — and morality is bound up with religion, no matter how much atheists deny it.
The arguments aren't really about taxes and jobs and energy pipelines; it's about which party, personified in its chosen candidate, will rule the day regarding morality. The fatal flaw in the American system is that we never decided as a nation, never even had the grand discussion, of what constitutes morality and which religion was correct.
The Founding Fathers simply kicked the can down the road and left it for future generations to deal with issues as they came up, perhaps never really expecting any issues would come up since a Christian morality, inspired by Catholic teaching, was the norm
But times have changed, with the ascendancy of a rabid anti-Catholicism spurred on by a love of immorality. Politics has become a cover for arguments about morality, and morality has become a cover for avoiding any discussion about God and religion.
Which religious view of God a people holds does matter. It matters for the very life of the nation — and not just for some philosophical, academic reason, but for the moral choices that will be made. No one who has a correct understanding of religion and God and consequent morality can ever condone abortion, and therefore will reject any politics supportive of it.
You can measure the vitality of a nation's spiritual health by monitoring its politics, not because they lead the nation, but because they reflect the nation. So what America needs is a real battle, not one over politics, but religion.
A society cannot long endure contradicting religions because of the contradicting moralities that flow from them. America has prided itself on its religious diversity, and that wrongheaded notion has now come around to bite us hard.
There is no way that all these religions can be correct, objectively correct. Not. Possible. So a gigantic national throwdown has to happen if America is to remain one nation.
We are now the recipients of the can that the Founding Fathers kicked so hard down the road. That sound you hear in the streets is the can rattling into place.
Our entire destiny is now being shaped. We will either survive as a nation, or we will perish as a group of warring, smaller nations who can no longer agree on first principles.
The only world religion that is "correct" is Christianity. And within Christianity, the only true faith is Catholicism. Everything else, inside and outside of Catholicism, is man-made.
The Catholic Church is Heaven-made. If you are Catholic, then you accept and embrace that. If you don't, if you think it's harsh or mean or not tolerant enough or judgmental, then get out of the Church formally, since you have already left it in principle.
Why would you belong to a Church you don't believe is the authentic Faith, and the true religion? How stupid is that? Think about it. "I belong to a Faith that I don't believe in."
If Catholicism is true — and it is — then every other religion is false, even if they might possess varying limited degrees of some truth. [Tsk-tsk! How un-Bergoglian! The current pope really believes every religion - or lack of one - is just as good as the other. So he doesn't want to convert anyone to Catholicism. What pope in his right mind would ever make such a statement? Well, Bergoglio did, and has done so more than once, so is he, in fact, 'in his right mind', or has his mind been taken over by Satan who has the daemonic ability to make his victims believe that they are really better than God, specifically better than Jesus in the case of Bergoglio who is always editing the Word of God for his own purposes!]
Until we start talking like men and stop hiding behind emotion-driven politics; until we start talking about the great, big elephant in the room, this division will cause the end of a nation.
Right now the battle is between those who believe in God and those who either don't or have wrong notions about God. [And how ironic it is that there are many among us who think that the present Vicar of Christ on earth does have wrong notions about God, or at least, about what the role of the Vicar of Christ and spiritual leader of the Catholic Church is!] It's never been about politics. Politics has just been the bucket for carrying and concealing the real issue.
Here's a more reflective look at the polarized America that Donald Trump is getting set to lead...
Recalibrating the 'culture war'
by Darrell Bock
November 29, 2016
We thought that the culture war was behind us and that we were entering a Brave New World in which
Christians would be a harassed minority in a society captive to progressive ideals of personal liberation. [That's still how it has developed in Europe and where America is headed to.]
November 8 proved that expectation wrong in the Electoral College — but not necessarily on the streets.
[Although these hate-inflamed demonstrations (mostly Soros-funded, and mostly composed of people who did not even vote, it is said) in some big normally Democratic cities - the numbers never rose to thousands and there were none in smaller cities - mostly marched to show their arrant disrespect for the results of a free and fair democratic election (i.e, sore losers in the worst sense of the word) and extreme hostility towards Donald Trump, they do represent everyone who has become so totally invested in the progressivist agenda (=Democratic agenda=UN agenda=Bergoglio agenda, for the most past) and the culture war is more polarized than ever.]
We still live in a contested environment. The candidate who flouted political correctness won. But his victory does not necessarily represent a victory for religious conservatives—at least, not in the way we’re used to thinking. There are crucial differences between the influential Religious Right of the 1970s, or even that of the 2000s, and the political influence and prospects of religious conservatives today.
Though Trump was elected by a significant margin in the Electoral College, he received slightly less of the popular vote than his opponent did, and significantly less than an outright majority. These numbers tell an important story. The nation is deeply divided. The election result disturbed as many Americans as it elated. Some are outraged enough to march before Trump even takes the oath of office.
Such demonstrations are unprecedented, and they give dramatic expression to how divided we are. There is no moral majority awaiting religious conservative leadership. We’ve been at this for more than a generation, and the divisions have become more evident, not less. Our “victory” will be deceiving if we do not attend to all that is going on.
There also exists an important division among those who handed Trump the win. The evangelical Protestant vote, which has played such an important role in the Republican Party’s success in recent decades, came in three parts. Close to twenty percent did not vote for Trump —through abstention, a third party, or a vote for Hillary. Almost eighty-one percent did vote for Trump.
Hidden in that large number, however, is a crucial reality: The Trump vote was itself divided, with many ballots cast ambivalently or lukewarmly. The back-and-forth among evangelicals before election day shows this to have been the case—with one magazine laying out seven different options for how to vote.
2016 was not like 2000, when evangelicals warmly embraced George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Trump occasioned among evangelicals much debate as to whether a vote for him was a vote for good or, at best, for the lesser of two evils. Post-election discussion shows the same, with a recent piece in Christianity Today asking whether the term “evangelical” still has value.
I don’t have hard data, but given my experience, I believe
the hold-your-nose Trump support constituted a significant minority, if not a majority, of the evangelical vote. Evangelicals were motivated by specific concerns — the Supreme Court, religious liberty, the pro-life cause, maintaining the rule of law, and constitutional limits on government — as well as by a general feeling that the government had intruded on our lives in excessive ways. Evangelicals, by and large, were
not voting for Trump the man, nor for his agenda. Their support was targeted and strategic.
This targeted support for Trump suggests an important change in evangelical voting patterns. In the old Religious Right, voters largely adopted the conservative political agenda without exception. We signed on to the agenda of tax cuts and de-regulation, as well as post–September 11 wars, because we saw this political agenda as part of a broader conservative agenda that included our moral and religious values.
Today, that wholesale support does not exist. The internal fragmentation of what looks, from the outside, like solid support stems from the fact that secular conservatism itself is in disarray. This naturally affects the political judgments of religious conservatives, as it undoubtedly affects secular voters.
Trump’s ideological profile was, and remains, ambiguous. The same is true of his cultural symbolism, which is authoritarian and yet, in places, quite transgressive. Trump’s initial appointments likewise suggest that the internal debate is not over, even within Republican and conservative ranks. Debate among political conservatives spills over into debates among religious conservatives. Sometimes the line between power politics and faith can get blurry.
There are further reasons for evangelical ambivalence. In 2016, evangelicals are more likely to want to promote racial reconciliation than they were in the 1970s, when the Religious Right burst onto the scene. The attitude then was that racial issues had been mostly solved by the changes of 1960s, a belief that present realities show was premature. Similar changes have come about regarding women’s equality and immigration.
Today, many conservative Christian leaders I know will (1) disapprove of any policy changes that divide families through deportation, (2) desire genuine religious freedom across the board as a way to protect the family, and (3) resist generalizations about race as a way to dictate public policy. Families matter deeply to evangelicals, as do the multi-ethnic features of the church.
Thus, for the first time in a generation, overwhelming evangelical support for a Republican presidential candidate coexists with significant misgivings and uncertainty about some aspects of the conservative movement. The internal fragmentation of support for Trump opens the door for conversation across political divides.
As odd as it sounds, the divisiveness of this election has the potential to change the static dynamic of the last few decades.
The time for imposing solutions on half our country, whether from the left or the right, has passed. [That remains to be seen in how Trump will govern and how successful or unsuccessful he will be.] Perhaps if evangelicals model a better political discourse among ourselves, the larger society will take note.
So what might this new conversation look like? And does such a recalibration have biblical support?
Talking with those who find President Trump a frightening prospect is a good place to begin. The following are real illustrations of concern, communicated to me by African-American and Hispanic evangelicals who are attuned to what is felt in their larger communities. There is a mother who had to explain to her five-year-old a post-election racial slur that he had heard at school. There are blacks who have been taunted about being shipped back to Africa. There are Hispanics, including native Hispanics, who have received hostile remarks about building a wall.
Pro-Trump evangelicals need to confront such incidents—and others, as when a hijab is ripped off of a Muslim woman’s neck and she is told it will be used as a noose for a hanging. We may be opposed to an imposed political correctness, but evangelicals should seek a respectful, multi-ethnic society, not a nativist one. The church is made up of people from many nations, and God’s work was for the whole world.
2016 provides an opportunity to recalibrate how we see and discuss the culture war. For too long we have seen the battle in purely political terms: If we get the right people in power, we can restore America as a “Christian nation.” But that way of seeing the confrontation was never biblical. It is too simplistic, abstract, and impersonal.
Ephesians 6:12 reminds us that our battle in the world is not with flesh and blood, but with rulers, principalities, and powers.
Our battle is for the hearts of people who are persuaded by forces that hold them in bondage, sometimes unawares. The struggle, therefore, is not merely for political power, but instead for words powerful enough to bring others (and ourselves more fully) to see the wounds that an excessive, undisciplined, and selfish freedom can inflict.
The war Paul asks us to fight is not against political opponents seen as an enemy to be crushed. Our mission is rather to inspire our neighbors’ allegiance to a set of ideas that make society better.
The core of the gospel entails seeking engagement with those who are not yet rooted in the gospel. The gospel depicts
Christ’s own sacrificial work on behalf of those who had resisted God and needed to be rescued from brokenness [Well put, although I would make the verbs a historical present - 'those who resist God and need to be rescued from brokenness' - because that is who we are whenever we sin. It is such a relief to find someone say that when our Beloved Pope is always saying Christ came to earth only for 'the poor']. At its core are efforts of grace, reconciliation, and living with and loving one’s neighbor. There are standards, but they are seasoned with grace.
Paul described himself as an ambassador for God with a ministry of reconciliation. Take a look at 2 Corinthians 5:17-21. An ambassador does not seek war, but represents the perspective of his nation and Savior. His concern extends beyond one nation. He serves the city he loves, reaches out to the marginalized with empathy, and shows his love tangibly by caring for others. He contends for and represents the truth that he believes holds society together and promotes human flourishing.
As we seek, like Paul, to serve the city we love, we will need a recalibration of battle imagery, an introduction of gospel values, and a new kind of conversation across social, racial, and gender divides. The pursuit of truth and flourishing compels us to a new kind of relating. Evangelicals are uniquely placed to aid in this debate and dialogue — provided they grasp the opportunity gospel values offer. To forego a reset risks turning opportunity into retrenchment and mutual defeat. Delicate times require us to reach a different and better place than where we have been.
Darrell L. Bock is executive director of the Hendricks Center, senior research professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, and former president of the Evangelical Theological Society.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 29/11/2016 22:57]