April 8, 2009.
To Jon Meacham:
My thoughts on reading your excellent article, the End of Christian America, was, even agreeing with your thinking, nonsense.
What the skeptics are ignorant about is what has caused the “problem” in the first place.
They have their complete misunderstanding of Jesus’ teachings, and what they see as the “wrong” direction the nation is taking, and the “failure” of the people to follow their personal ideas on morals (abortion, same sex marriage, prayer in school, etc.), is really the people, and the true “remnant” of Christianity is slowly moving toward the ideals Jesus practiced as well as taught.
Most Americans have not rejected religion, just the stupid ideas, political and otherwise, of a few fanatic nuts who seem to get all the publicity in the lazy mainstream media.
I say this as a person who has followed his religious beliefs from the late ’40s in a old Methodist Church in a then small Southern town (Bossier City, LA). I took what my Sunday School teacher and church and local YM/YWCA taught and understood that the churches had been as wrong as they were about their use of the bible to support slavery and then racial legal racial segregation — never equal of course — no matter how “sincere” they were when they supported and voted for prohibition, antigambling laws, etc. And had the churches not been ignored by the government, we would still have laws against inter-racial marriage as these same ignorant un-Jesus-like churches still oppose same-sex marriage.
Jesus was concerned with people, not nations, just as the article says. And as He did not worry about politics or history, despite what the media and many “gays” think today. The change in issues of homosexuality did not come from politicians until it had been changed in the general population, including, sadly, homosexuals themselves. An even sadder fact is that the change has still not come to Christian churches, nor Jewish nor Muslim or other religious groups. What a terrible indictment this is of the leadership of these religions.
I think this is what Cal Thomas is saying. And it seems that, as in those days when Jesus walked the earth, the people who “get it” and truly follow Him are not the politicians or church leaders but average people. That is why our nation will not follow Europe and abandon religion but just cast out the false prophets, as they had to do in the endless book Line of Splendor (on the history of Methodism in America).
Again, we need to educate the ignorant leaders of religions — which still kill homosexuals and beat and kill women victims of rape — that the reason we don’t want prayer in school is because of the questions of whose prayer will it be? Who will choose the prayer? And why would “conservatives” want government dictating religious events?
No one seeks to promote abortions, but again, it is not the government’s business to control our personal lives. This applies to same-sex marriage as it did to laws against inter-racial marriage, etc.
And the more equal/civil rights we get, the more Jesus-like we can become.
One final warning to anyone rejecting Christianity— be careful of letting radical Islamists replace it.
