A Warning
How every empire falls
8-7-22
Before you keep reading these weekly messages, I suspect you ought to know where I'm coming from.
When I was young and adventurous, I made several trips across the country, usually driving or riding, and since back then I had no I-pod or anything of the sort, in addition to sightseeing, I used the radio to keep myself awake. At least half way from coast-to-coast, when I couldn't tune into Wolfman Jack, I was intrigued by broadcasts from what we called the Bible Belt. Though during the first few trips I was in no way a Christian believer, I most always enjoyed the rants, be they encouraging, inviting us to accept God's love, or terrifying, warning us of where we would spend eternity if we declined the invitation.
Having been exposed through friends to Catholic, Methodist, and Pentecostal varieties of Christian attitude and dogma, I realized that those Bible Belt preachers were not necessarily the last word. So I tucked their appeals away for future consideration.
Shortly after one of those trips, I got lured to a Billy Graham crusade and found myself at the altar. Should you care to, you can experience that evening with me in Reading Brother Lawrence.
Anyway, for years thereafter, I didn't find a church from which I would walk out feeling the need to return, until, at my cousin Patti's urging, I visited Faith Chapel, a rather independent member the Assemblies of God, a charismatic denomination.
The pastor who hooked me into regular churchgoing was Charlie Gregg, as soft spoken as those Bible Belt preachers were bombastic. He hooked me by touching both my heart and mind.
When Charlie left the ministry, I found a somewhat similar preacher at a church loosely connected to the Calvary Chapels, which had grown from one small congregation to a worldwide phenomenon largely empowered in the beginning by what we once called Jesus Freaks. Good people with whom I often identified.
Meanwhile, my wife Pam and I spent several years teaching at a college where I learned that the Bible Belt was alive and well and prospering in Southern California.
I suppose it was both Trump and reactions to Covid that prompted me to realize that even by attending a comparatively open-minded evangelical church I was tacitly participating in what, from my point of view as an educator, I consider a sinister and dangerous movement -- the Dumbing of America.
As an author, sometime publisher, and teacher at Christian writers' conferences, I have learned of the effort that commenced shortly after WW II to combat the rise of secularism by creating church-sanctioned entertainment and by encouraging congregations to turn from secular media to that provided by the newly founded Christian Booksellers Association as well as Christian radio and television. These outlets were obligated to stick to the party line, the predominant party in this context being the Southern Baptist Conference.
During this same era, in the political arena, the Republicans expanded southward in an effort to undercut the Democrats who had prevailed in our South since Lincoln and his Republicans put down the "righteous" attempt to secede. And once modern Republicans gained a strong foothold in the Bible Belt, it didn't take geniuses to recognize the political potential of alliance between the politicos and the churches.
For anyone now tempted to close this file and exclaim "this fellow is anti-American" here are my politics in brief:
I am neither Republican nor Democrat, socialist nor capitalist, yet I am fanatically pro America, trusting that we can "Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed - / Let it be that great strong land of love / Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme / That any man be crushed by one above." (Langston Hughes)
Economically, I'm a pragmatist and favor whatever works best for the most people. I choose to support politicians who appear concerned with the good of both the impoverished and the prosperous. Which means, I suppose, that I could be called a democrat (notice the lower case d), though I prefer to consider myself as someone who takes seriously our Lord's command that we should love our neighbors.
The Republican leaning Heritage Foundation recently published a report that argued, “The contemporary efforts to weaken our republican customs and institutions in the name of greater equality thus run against the efforts by America’s Founders to defend our country from the potential excesses of democratic majorities."
By the "potential excesses of democratic majorities" I imagine the "American Founders" meant efforts to undermine the power and/or prosperity of landowning, business owning, and often slaveholding men. I interpret the statement to indicate the Heritage Foundation agrees with conservative luminaries such as Peter Thiel who argue that "freedom and democracy are no longer possible."
I will contend that democracy and freedom can exist together given a truly educated populace (one in which most people have gained wisdom as well as job skills).
That belief of mine is a reason Pam and I left a college founded by advocates of the Bible Belt motives that include dumbing down for the sake of theological conformity. Our next adventure, in partnership with Charlie Gregg, the preacher who turned me into a devoted churchgoer, was creating Perelandra College with a mission to provide honest wisdom from a Christian perspective.
Please take the above as a warning, along with this song I so appreciate I'll offer a link to the lyrics as covered by John Prine, whose version you can find on Amazon.
And if you are not already subscribed to our peculiar little church, you can do so by clicking here.
Happy forever,