Fear and Trembling

  A recent article from Pew Research starts off : Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” This accelerating trend is reshaping the U.S. religious landscape, leading many people to wonder what the future of religion in America might look like. This is a crisis. It’s destroying the shared morality that has made freedom possible in the USA. This will fuel tyrannical legislation to try to enforce morality, and we Christians will probably not like the morality that will be enforced. (See A Free People’s Suicide by Os Guinness) How did we get into this mess?  I think especially the lack of apologetics at the level of the intellectual elites we have exhibited in the last two generations. Also, anti-intellectualism among evangelical Christians has lead us to abandon fields such as philosophy and college professorship. (See The Scandal Of t

I am publishing this long overdue post on the subject of Christians in politics.  This is a timely, divisive topic; and I hope to treat it briefly but well.  This post will justify a certain type of Christian political involvement based on the prevalence of moral issues in politics, the necessity to preach and teach concerning all moral issues, and the example of Christians in the Old and New Testaments.  Along the way, it will comment on the applicability of the Bible to modern moral issues, briefly address The Johnson Amendment, and give some questions to ask that might provide guidance for a teacher or preacher. Many political issues are moral issues.  Some seem to say that we cannot find an ethical principle in the Bible that addresses those modern moral issues, pull that principle out of its immediate historical context, and apply it to a modern moral situation.  It would seem to me that if the Scripture leaves a "man of God...thoroughly equipped for every good work," th