restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

Please Don’t Call Me an Evangelical!

Matthew R. Gamel   

As the election came to a close, there were many individuals who praised and extolled the election results as a victory for “conservatives” across America. However, as Dr. Chuck Baldwin pointed out, those that voted for Bush out of a concern for social issues have already been stabbed in the back by Mr. Bush’s new attorney general and his continued effort to give free amnesty to a plethora of illegal aliens currently residing here and those that will soon follow.

Personally, I probably would not have voted in the election were Mr. Peroutka not running. On second thought, it is quite conceivable that I would have arrived at the polling location to vote for Skippy the Superhamster (he’s a lesser known Jeffersonian and was, unfortunately, not on the ballot in any state) or some random inanimate object such as a radish or a hair dryer to protest the godless stranglehold on our government.  In general, I don’t particularly believe in legitimizing the fraudulent elections held every four years by the Empire.

However, with this being said, I was extremely disappointed and angered with the election results and the same mindless partisan loyalty that professed evangelicals and conservatives proudly put on display. In fact, I was so upset and angered by this that I did not even want to speak about the election for fear that I would end up saying something that I ought not. Perhaps it was wrong of me to believe that the slumber of modern Christendom would cease and that evangelicals would actually, for once in an incredibly long time, engage in obedience to Christ by failing to associate with a political party that was literally conceived in the hatred of our Constitution. The term “republican” in Republican Party is an excellent example of Orwellian “double speak” as this party was formed with malice towards constitutional governance that continues to this very day.

It is rather frustrating to live around so many doctrinaire evangelicals who seem to be more content with subscribing to erroneous views about the Republican Party and President Bush than they do truth. Evangelicalism in America has unfortunately embraced the same position on truth as the majority of the leftist pathologies that strongly embrace vacuous humanistic philosophies such as relativism and pragmatism. Your average evangelical Christian does not even want to hear anything that is contrary to his or her perceived notion that the Republican Party and its current messiah personify conservatism. Hence, truth is merely a secondary matter to such an individual. Yet we must confront these issues directly.

Unfortunately, reality and perception often fail to coincide. I found it incredibly comical (in an ironic way), for example, that many evangelicals became upset with Arlen Specter’s victory in Pennsylvania yet directly supported one of Mr. Specter’s most vocal supporters during his campaign: George W. Bush. This was one of the queerest forms of irony about the whole election, in my opinion. It demonstrates the ignorance and the foolishness of those that supported Bush merely to prevent Kerry from becoming elected. In fact, the perception that Kerry is one hundred times worse and shoots flaming balls from his eyes is merely just that: a perception. Both Bush and Kerry have similar, if not identical, positions on the issues that are relevant.

The only thing that mattered to the majority of professed Christendom this past election is keeping the evil, bad Democrats out of office so they voted for the opposite side of the same establishment coin. Apparently, to your average professed evangelical, it doesn’t particularly matter if the Republicans have the blood of millions of innocent children on their hands so long as the Democrats are not allowed to get away with it. After all, they have an “R” by their name and everybody knows that “r” is a vastly superior letter of the alphabet compared with “d.” I mean, the word “rabbit” starts with an “r” and rabbits are cute and fluffy so we ought to vote for anybody that has an “r” by their name. Just think of all of the awful words that start with “d”: dirt, dirge, devil, Democrat. This random chain of logic appears to closely resemble the arguments used to justify the actions (the unbiblical and unchristian actions, I might add) of this administration in addition to several others.

As with abortion, it also doesn’t appear to matter that the Republicans have the same global driven foreign policy as the Democrats. At least the Republicans pretend to be anti UN while at the same time staffing their administrations with plenty of folks from the Council on Foreign Relations. I mean, Bush makes Empire fun – just look at that cowboy hat he wears! It’s far better to go around “defying” the UN when deciding which country to invade than it is to get their permission before totally reconstructing every nation we stick our filthy hands in. This takes time and places an obtuse wedge between our military and the fun it has blowing stuff up, torturing prisoners, and other war-type activities.  I suppose to compensate we’ll let the UN handle the reconstruction efforts while we decide whose next! After all, we’ve reconstructed enough nations to the point that the task is now boring and routine.

On the other hand, if Kerry were president, Empire wouldn’t be nearly as fun; I mean, he would make sure that the world actually likes our Empire and we’d probably end up getting the French and Germans in on the killing which means we’ll have to let them have some of the loot (i.e. the foreign influence). Its far better to decide who gets to do the reconstruction on our behalf, even if the list of officials comes from the desk of Lakhdar Brahimi.

This may actually sound incredibly satirical, but the more I think about it, this is precisely how several individuals I know have justified the Bush War doctrine! And, what’s even better for the Republicans is the fact that they can get away with more globalist or totalitarian maneuvers without anyone raising a finger (as was the case with the McCain Amendment to the 911 report or the GPOI). So basically, we now have a guy in office whose policy is similar to Kerry’s with the exception that he can pretty much do as he pleases and he pays lip service to his mindless constituents by occasionally mentioning something that is quasi-conservative. This is necessary to ensure future political support by the evangelical church.

I would contend that these individuals have, in an exemplarily fashion, been made associates to murder concerning the millions of unborn children that will continued to be murdered under this administration. Hence, those who voted for George W. Bush are just as guilty as the abortionists themselves. Not only this, but they are associates to our godless federal judiciaries that are staffed primarily by Republican appointees. The argument that we must vote for Bush due to the judicial appointees seems nebulous as best – when I first heard this argument I became incredibly confused. At worse it actually shoots the arguer in the foot as the majority of the Supreme Court has been appointed by Republicans!

Moreover, these evangelicals are now associates to the torture and the murder of innocent civilians in foreign countries that the United States has imperialistic interest in. We talk about abortion in disgust be we apparently don’t have the guts to talk about the actions that our government performs to innocent civilians worldwide or to those who believe their homes are being invaded and actually have the gall to resist the American Imperial Regime. Why does the majority of the evangelical church look at war as if it were a football game, cheering for our side and turning a blind eye when our government wrongs other people in hideous ways?

These people are part of the problem as they continue to nullify their words with their actions thus demonstrating their sheer lack of knowledge and the cowardice they boldly profess by allowing fear to impact their actions. These folks go to extreme lengths to give convoluted (which is to say unbiblical) arguments concerning the just war doctrine of the Bush regime and the excuses that the Republicans continue to deliver as a reason for failing to do that which they promised. Then they wonder why we have a generation of cowards as our leaders continue to cowardly concede one battle right after the next to the enemy.

Perhaps this might explain the sheer lack of influence that modern evangelicalism has had on our nation. Our enemies refuse to compromise and this soft, shallow social gospel that is now being disseminated in our churches has led to one compromise right after the next. The godless humanism that the church has embraced for some time now (most notably the pragmatist ideology) has become wrought in every decision that is supposedly made within the confines of Biblical truth.

These are the same evangelicals that continue to fail to pass resolutions calling on Christians to withdraw their children from the government ‘schools.’ In all honesty, we probably wouldn’t need these kind of resolutions if professed Christians would actually read their Bibles every now and then and spend more time with their spouses and children instead of spending time at the movies or in front of the television. They continue to prostitute their children to these godless social engineers whose Marxist ideology, they naively claim, may be remedied. Then, they gawk in awe when they loose their children to secular philosophies and when their already shallow faith is thoroughly made useless by the godless schools they continue to legitimize. As one would not hand a ten year old an M-16 and tell this child to go fight (although I really wouldn’t put it past Bush to use our children as cannon fodder), why then do we continue to send our children to a battle where they will become engulfed and eventually slaughtered by the enemy? They wonder why we have a generation of lazy men who care more about sports than they do the welfare of their families. They wonder why we are so entrenched in narcissism and materialism. They engage in state worship to the point that ‘Christian’ is no longer an adequate adjective to describe the modern evangelical church. For the modern church has traded Scripture for liberal hermeneutics and has placed wicked politicians on pedestals so high that one often wonders whether or not Christ or the Republican Party is lord over all. With its shallow views of God and practically non-existent views of the sovereignty of God, our churches might as well be shrines to the most pagan of gods because failure to acknowledge God for who He really is can be considered to be a form of idolatry. For we no longer worship the revealed God of the Bible but rather a man made conception of God.

May I second the notion that this blind state worship is heresy? Yet, this ought not to be surprising. After all, as I have repetitively mentioned, this is the same evangelical church that embraces every theological fad and humanistic philosophy that gains popularity within the secular realm. Evangelicalism would not know sound doctrine if it continually slammed our ecclesiastical leaders in the face. What the church is in dire need of is heaven-sent revival where Christ and His Word are esteemed more than worldly fad. It is shocking how many individuals profess to be evangelical Christian and hold such a sorry view of God such as the notion that He is this jolly clown that does not care about sin who serves as a vending machine in the sky to meet everyone’s “felt” needs or the more popular notion that God is like a drug, only a “good” one. Now, instead of being Lord over ones life, Jesus is merely a marijuana cigarette for the soul. One simply comes to Jesus whenever life becomes arduous and throws Him out when everything is peachy or when the notion that obedience might somehow be demanded by a claim to the Lordship of Christ.

I ought to write about this at some later time but many individuals find it difficult to be brought to the realization that the church teaches a form of humanism more than it does Biblical truth. For some time, I was unable to pinpoint the practical application of the Calvinist vs. Armenian debate until I realized one important truth: if God is not sovereign then man must be sovereign. This is a fundamental presupposition of humanism and why the doctrine of the sovereignty of God is so essential. Why, for example, is God’s Law binding to everybody? Why is everyone commanded to repent?  It certainly is not because it is man made or because God hath but little authority over His creation. The answer must readily be found in the doctrine of the sovereignty of God.

This also might help explain why church doctrine is so soiled in humanism. Not only is it Biblical truth but when one maligns a fundamental attribute of God to the point that the modern church has deconstructed the sovereignty of God, one essentially ends up with a god entirely different than the God revealed in the Bible. And once this occurs, it then becomes a rather trivial task to legitimize church growth theory (which is essentially a denial of the sovereign grace of God), psychology, and pragmatism (yet another denial of the sovereignty of God). Hence the current state of the church.

Thus, in accordance with my political convictions, not only do I have no desire to be labeled a conservative but I also have decided that I no longer wish to be labeled an evangelical as well. Just as the establishment media has redefined the term ‘conservative’ to refer to a neocon or a Republican, so the modern church has redefined the term “evangelical” to imply a soft, “cool”, worldly “Christian” whose theology has been watered down to the point that even a Muslim would have no trouble accepting the tenets of modern “evangelicalism” (this sounds an awful lot like “diversity” and “multiculturalism” to me – do recall that these are Marxist social theories). Much of the problem in the church stems from the fact that we let unrepentant unbelievers into the church to attempt to convert them with a non-effectual social gospel and in turn, these individuals pervert and completely malign the purity and holiness of the church. This, in addition to the false doctrines harbored then causes the church to behave in the manner that it has been behaving for the past several decades.

At the same time, the church neglects the needs of the true children of God by failing to feed them any real substance from the Word of God. Too many individuals seem to believe that depth in the Christian life is optional and it almost has to be because there are so few teachers that teach any real theology in our churches anymore – real theology and the entire counsel of God is in direct conflict with the majority of church growth theory, psychology, or pragmatism and it almost never focuses on the “felt” needs of an individual. How awkward a phenomenon it is when pastors occasionally quote men like Edwards or Spurgeon when it suits their fancy but I guarantee you that if men like Edwards or Spurgeon were here today, we wouldn’t be able to fill a congregation if we were giving away free seven course steak dinners! Modern evangelicalism is tending more towards Unitarianism faster than one might possibly imagine.

And, in the end, we ought to remember the ultimate fatality when a church embarks on the “down grade”: evangelicalism itself. Spurgeon was absolutely correct: the down grade of the church in England via the Modernist movement literally destroyed the church. What was demonstrated this past election was not merely a political statement. It was a theological statement of profound proportions that any serious Christian ought not applaud nor be proud of. This continued insistence with our current doctrine promises grave, yea, serious consequences if the root of these heresies is not promptly dealt with.

As the post-communist world becomes more like the West and the West more like the communist world, it won’t be too long before the Chinese are sent to evangelize us. It would be wise to hearken to the words of our Lord: “Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent” (Rev. 2:5). May He grant us grace to do just that.

November 22, 2004

Matt Gamel is a graduate student at Texas A&M and eventually desires to go to seminary to study to be a biblical scholar. He may be reached for comment here or at his website.

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