God Has No Place In….
September 28th, 2010 by Christopher WhiteSo I was on a Facebook page the other day, and people were commenting on this quote by Ronald Regan:
“If we ever forget that we’re a nation under God, we’ll be a nation gone under.”
And someone commented that God has no place in politics. That got me thinking (of course I gave back an intelligent and somewhat caustic reply). So God has no place in politics. And our government has decided that He has no place in schools. And the entertainment industry has decided that He has no place in movies and TV (unless it’s a put-down).
Well, of course, He has no place in business. We all know that businessmen are greedy, heartless bastards who don’t care for anyone — even their own mothers. They don’t want any of God’s morals interfering with their pursuit of profit. (And if you can’t tell that I’m being sarcastic — I can’t help it.) Then there’s science. Nope, no place for God there. Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins have assured us that we don’t need to worry about God — He didn’t create the universe, so we’re free to ignore Him.
So where is there a place for God? Church, right? Hmmm…. Maybe, maybe not. I’ve been in churches where the congregation had no idea who God is. And I’ve been in churches where He regularly shows up. You have to be careful where you worship. But that’s another story (or blog post). So, other than churches, where is there a place for God?
Yikes! I can’t think of any! We’ve effectively pushed Him out of every area of modern life! Poor God! Nobody wants Him!
Of course, I’m being very sarcastic. He’s really everywhere, and He can’t be pushed out of anything. The point I’m trying to make is that the Church (i.e. the Body of Christ, not a particular denomination) has unplugged itself from real life and retreated into a fantasy world of bake-offs, bingo, and conventions. The Church has been a negligible influence in the world — because it’s bought into the world’s idea that “religion” is a separate field of endeavor from all others. And consequently, “religion” has been marginalized and made into a “field of study” that doesn’t really affect anyone outside of it’s own little arena.
That guy who commented on the Facebook post — you remember, he said God has no place in politics — was just parroting what he was taught in school: belief in God requires a mental leap to the “upper story,” an area divorced from the “rational world.” And so, God is just what you want Him to be — because, like Santa Claus, He doesn’t really exist. Therefore, He must be kept out of “real” intellectual pursuits because invoking Him is just pandering to someone’s delusions. Since He’s fantasy, He can be whatever you want Him to be, right?
Wrong! Yeah, you knew I’d say that, didn’t you?
Why do people have this idea that God is something we invented? Because the Church has pulled out of all “worldly” pursuits and basically left life to run itself. We, as Christians, must not touch the unclean thing, must be in the world but not of it.
What has this wrought?
Politics without God has given us self-serving politicians, not the servant-leaders our Founding Fathers envisioned. Entertainment without God has become a depressing amalgam of indecency, immorality, and bad writing (did I mention depressing?). Science without God has stopped being rational. Now we have mythology and atheistic religion masquerading as “science” (evolution, global warming, environmentalism, eugenics, population control, mind control, panspermia, UFOs, ad nauseum).
We’ve taken God out of schools, and what is the result? A generation of mindless progressive zombies who can’t think critically, can’t write coherent sentences, have no culture, no ethics, and no idea of where they stand in history. This disgraceful situation doesn’t exist only because God has been kicked out of schools — but when He was shown the door, so was the basis of Western civilization (arts and literature), the basis of any ethical system that actually works, and the concept that there is such a thing as good and evil. Now we have relativism, multiculturalism, socialism, social Darwinism, and a general lack of respect for authority or those who built the civilization these students take for granted.
Fortunately, all is not lost. A significant part of the Church (not the mainstream denominations, however — they’re, thank God, on the way out, soon to be extinct) has realized what Francis Shaeffer told us over and over: if we don’t infiltrate all areas of society, we can’t be an influence on it.
“Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto in 1981 – a response to the communist and humanist manifestos – spoke of a decline of commitment to objective truth in society’s institutions that had come about ‘not because of a conspiracy, but because the church has forsaken its duty to be the salt of the culture.’” —from a WorldNetDaily article.
The Church heard. Or rather, the part of the Church where God is still welcome. Thus, Shawn Bolz is helping Christians get into the entertainment industry. Bethel Church and MorningStar Ministries are training and equipping Christian men and women to go out into all fields of endeavor and take them back for Christ. There are plenty of churches and para-church groups doing this. But I’m just not familiar with them.
It’s happening. Christians are taking their faith to the marketplace in greater and greater numbers. And we’re no longer intimidated by those who don’t believe in or understand our faith. We’re becoming bold, sharing our faith and values with a world that is actually hungry for some real Truth. Because we’re throwing out the old strictures of fundamentalist thought (“don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t run with those who do”) and reading the Bible again as a book that means what it says, we’re infiltrating and affecting our society — taking back what the devil stole, the inheritance given to the children of God. We’re taking back the world.
So where is it that God has no place? Maybe Hell. I can’t think of any other place offhand.