We The People Bible: One of the most terrible products I've seen lately

This post is going to honk a lot of people off, probably.  Whether it cuts one way or another.  I know and accept that.

First of all, the older I've gotten the more I have come to understand something.  Mainly, that the republican form of government that the Founders gave us in the Constitution of the United States is ideal only for a people who believe in something higher than man.  Whether you call that something God, or Yahweh, or the Universe, or whatever, the Constitution is best suited for those who hold themselves accountable to that greater entity.  I believe that the past several decades have proven that in the hands of they who believe that man is the be-all/end-all of law and life, that weak attempt at imitating democratically-elected republican government has led to disaster on multiple fronts.

So yes: I do believe that the American government is intended for people who believe in greater authority than their own.  It is where all true law comes from.  It has been ever since Moses came down that mountain with those stone slabs.

I believe in the Constitution.  I also believe that the Declaration of Independence was the work of a magnificent assemblage of some of the greatest minds from throughout the colonies.  I think that the Bill of Rights is not taught about nearly enough in the majority of our schools.  The Pledge of Allegiance... ehhhh, I elaborated on that subject ten years ago, about why I cannot in good conscience say it (but I have absolutely no problem when others choose to recite it).

For saying these things, some are going to declare that I am a "Christian nationalist", a "Christian reconstructionist", that I have a colonial mind, that I'm a "right-wing fanatic" or... good HEAVENS... a "MAGA Republican" (whatever that is supposed to be).

Well, that's one audience that I will have worked up in a frothing frenzy.  Now it's time for the other...

A couple of weeks ago an advertisement began popping up on Facebook.  Usually this sort of thing just breezes past me.  But this particular item severely caught my attention.  Because it's the dire opposite of a lot of things that have shaped and molded my personal theology almost since the beginning of my Christian faith.

It's called the We The People Bible.  You can find it in a Google search easily enough, I'm not posting a link to it here.  As you can see it's got an embossed leather cover.  Said cover, in the words of the website, "was designed with the patriot in mind and features a vertical reversed American flag design that represents a country in distress."  Toward the back of the book there is to be found the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its amendments, and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Oh bruddah.  How many ways can we talk about how wrong this thing is?

The We The People Bible is the very worst elements of what I've seen from most of a lifetime of exposure to Christian Reconstructionism: a body of tenets orbiting the notion that God has ordained Christians to seize power, so as to remake the United States into a theocracy based solely on the Holy Bible.

The problem with that is, that this theocracy is going to be forced upon people, whether they like it or not.  And when that is the driving influence of such a movement, the entire thing becomes antithetical to the concept that God gave us this country to govern ourselves.  America is supposed to be the land of a people who choose to seek God's guidance, as best he or she might understand that.  It's not meant to be a land controlled by those who believe their interpretation is to be imposed under penalty of punishment.  America is not like places in the Mid-East where "blasphemers" are beheaded and homosexuals are throw from the top of tall buildings.  But, I could spend all day writing about what I've seen over the years regarding this.

The heart-meat of the matter is this: I definitely have no problem with people reading the Constitution, the Bill of Right, the Declaration of Independence, or any other document pertaining to the founding and organizing of our government.  In fact, I want people to read those.  But to include even those hallowed parchments within a volume of scripture along with the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian theology, is tantamount to making them equivalent to those sacred writings.  They are not.  And I can't but think that the Founders and many others, including the scholars who compiled the King James Version (the translation that the We The People Bible uses), would be horrified that documents of this temporal realm are now on the same level as inspired writings.  This is the worst grief that I have with this product.

I said that's the worst grief.  Not necessarily the one that sticks out as being either the most tacky or visibly sacrilegious.  The upside-down flag on the cover of this abomination is ridiculous.  Those who study scripture will absolutely know that the Bible teaches us that those who give God their highest priority are not to be a people living in fear and anxiety.  Isaiah 41:10 tells us "Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.  I will strengthen you and help you.  I will uphold you with my righteous right hand."

So it is that the reversed flag - which is supposed to be reserved only for the most dire emergencies - comes across as a product of the politics of the era of this book's publication.

But consider: the publishers of the We The People Bible have literally wrapped scripture up in the American flag.  In doing so they claim custody of the Bible.  They want it to be known that the Bible is theirs to interpret and to decree from.  Instead of letting holy scripture work in their lives to affect and change their hearts, they seek to change scripture instead, according to the powers and politics of this frail and brittle mortal realm.

I might have just glossed right over the ads I've seen for the We The People Bible, had it not been for an intensive study I participated in college with others about modern religious thinkers.  The most influential person we studied the works of was Stanley Hauerwas.  And one of his books that we read was his 1993 tome Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America.  The cover of which depicts a Bible literally wrapped up in an American flag.  Unleashing the Scripture became one of the most influential books during those early days of my Christian life.  I still feel it resonating whenever I'm tackling the subject of Christianity and its relationship with culture, and especially with politics.  And I got to say, that the We The People Bible comes across as a dark parody of Unleashing the Scripture, or maybe a Bizarro-World incarnation of Hauerwas's work.

It comes down to this: the Bible, I have no doubt about this, was the principle guide for the Founders when they set about liberating America and then crafting her principles into codified law.  I believe that the Bible has influenced history as no other book has.  But the Bible is supposed to define men.  Men are not meant to define the Bible.  If we are to believe that the Bible is perfect and inerrant (regardless of which respectable version one chooses to draw from) then we should be prepared to accept how it will apply to our lives.  To mold us and conform us to its image.  The Bible is not to be shaped and drawn out according to the fashions of the time.

And that is what the We The People Bible is an attempt to do.  Whether its publishers intended or not, it is become a weapon against those who are in disagreement with them.  Yes, the Bible is as a mighty sword, that divides between truth and false.  It can absolutely be trusted.  But when its publication is intended to be a tangible symbol of political power, well... it has gone too far and become something that is anything but in adherence to scripture.

Let us look not to carnal weaponry for our deliverance and salvation.  There is a greater Kingdom for us to build up and preach a citizenship of.  It is those edifices we are meant for, not the pale shadows of this fallen land.  God will be the judge of our efforts: Were they for His glory, or for our own?

I pray that what we do, will be done and has been done for Him alone.

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Nightmarish "Christianity"

I know, you don't have to tell me: "Consider the source". I'm still debating whether Max Blumenthal is aspiring toward that higher vision of what journalism should be, or if he's got some kind of agenda. But I'll say two things in this instance: his research and writing is quite good. That, and I'm compelled to agree enough that he's on to something here that I felt led to post about it.

The Nation's website has publishedan excerpt from Blumenthal's new book Republican Gommorah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. The selection, titled "The Nightmare of Christianity", is about Matthew Murray, who shot and killed four people during attacks at a missionary training facility and then a church in Colorado two years ago. Murray may or may not have had severe problems already that should have been addressed. But to hear Blumenthal describe it, Matthew Murray's struggles were hopelessly complicated by his family's hyper-religious demands and expectations... until finally he snapped and took five lives, including his own.

Here's some of what Blumenthal writes...

But as soon as Murray enrolled at YWAM's training center in nearby Arvada in 2002, he found himself trapped in an authoritarian culture even more restrictive than home. He realized that, as another student of YWAM bluntly put it, the school's training methods resembled "cult mind-controlling techniques." Murray became paranoid, speaking aloud to voices only he could hear, according to a former roommate. He complained that six of his male peers had made a gay sex video and that others routinely abused drugs. Hypocrisy seemed to be all around him, or at least dark mirages of it. A week before Murray was scheduled to embark on his first mission, YWAM dismissed him from the program for unspecified "health reasons." "They admitted that I hadn't done anything wrong, just that they had prayed and felt I wasn't popular/'connected' and talkative enough," he recalled.

Two years later, Murray raged at two YWAM administrators during a Pentecostal conference his mother had dragged him to attend. The shocked staffers promptly warned Loretta Murray that her son "wasn't walking with the Lord and could be planning violence." Within days, an ornery local pastor was allowed to burst into the young Murray's room, rifle through his belongings, and leave with a satchel full of secular DVDs and CDs--apparent evidence of his depravity. Murray's mother searched his room for satanic material every day afterward for three months, stripping him of his privacy and whatever was left of his love for her. After the trauma-inducing raids, in which Murray estimated his mother and her friends destroyed $900 worth of his property, he concluded, "Christianity is one big lie."

There's a lot more in Blumenthal's extensive article about Murray and the kind of "Christianity" that he was forced to experience, including this song that students at a south Florida "Christian"-based charter school are made to learn:

Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly.
For when I am busy at my work or play,
And someone calls my name, I'll answer right away!
I'll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say "Yes, sir!" "Yes ma am!"
Hup, two, three

Sounds like something out of the Hitler Youth movement, don't it?

I wouldn't be bringing this article to anyone's attention if I didn't think it merited some thought. Because I know it does. Matthew Murray obviously had issues that should have been given sincere treatment. But if Blumenthal's reporting is anywhere even remotely accurate, I have no doubt at all that the kind of "Christianity" inflicted upon Murray destroyed his spirit, his mind, and ultimately his life.

I have written about it before many times on this blog: that Christianity is not supposed to be about having power in this world at all. To follow Christ means a putting to death of the old nature with each new day... but because we desire to, not because we are made to. But that is precisely how too many alleged "Christian leaders" have gained and maintained power and control over others.

Don't believe me? Look at this pic that I snapped from the website of Bill Gothard, cited in Blumenthal's article as the one most responsible for the insane regimen that Matthew Murray's parents subjected him too...

They "formed an army" and started a "movement of power"?

How is that anything near to demonstrating the love and grace of Christ to others?!

To follow Christ is to be in this world, but not of this world. It means saving the lost from a dying world, not saving a dying world from the lost.

(And if you can suffer an hour or so of your own blood boiling, I would also recommend watching the documentary Jesus Camp: one of the most disturbing looks at American "Christianity" ever produced.)

When I read stories like that of Matthew Murray as Max Blumenthal is conveying it, I can't help but envision Jesus turning down Satan's offer to give Him all the power and authority over this world. Jesus rejected it... but a countless multitude of men and women instead began screaming "PICK ME! PICK ME!"

Neither can I but believe that Satan smiles and says "Of course I'll pick you. And you will be fine. After all, you are only doing what He should have done. I'll even let you do it for Him."

People like this are not trying to win America for Christ. They are trying to win America for their own "Christianity". For their own religion. But to sincerely follow Christ has never been about something so mere as "religion".

And in the end, Christianity of this sort can only hurt and destroy lives, not build them up. Matthew Murray was but an extreme example.

Am I making too much of this? Folks, I don't know if I could make nearly enough of it. So much grief could have been avoided, and still be avoided, had some among us professing Christ only taken the admonition of Proverbs 3:5 to heart...

"Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding."

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My belief on politics and religion in a nutshell

We do not need any more elected officials who believe that God is telling them to change the world.

What we need and cannot get enough of are elected officials who are letting God change them instead.

(And if more common folk would be willing to let God control them instead of trying to control the world for God, this would be a much happier place anyway...)

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A conservative case against Sarah Palin

In case anyone's wondering: currently I'm registered as a Republican. I helped a friend run for statewide office this election season as his treasurer, running on a platform of parental choice in education. Prior to that I ran for office myself, partly regarding issues of fiscal conservatism. In my opinion Ronald Reagan was the last real President that America has had and I'm very thankful that I got to drive to Washington D.C. a few years ago to pay my respects as his casket lay in state at the Capitol.

I never vote for the party though. I've voted for Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and independents and a lot of people in between since I first registered to vote several years ago (the day after my eighteenth birthday).

I would never vote for Barack Obama. The man's social spending ideas are a catastrophe waiting to happen. Neither can I ever vote for John McCain: this is a man bankrupt of any principle and I absolutely cannot believe that so many professed "conservatives" are now lining up to support him. This was the Senator who pushed through McCain-Feingold, fercryingoutloud. And as I've said before: any man who dumps his wife just so he can have a younger woman, does not have the moral fiber to be given the responsibility of the most powerful office on Earth.

Now y'all know where I'm coming from. Which brings us to the matter of Sarah Palin. A woman who I have had great admiration for.

Until now.

And trust me: this has nothing to do with what is going on with her family at this moment.

When McCain announced that Palin would be his running mate, I didn't know what to make of it. That Palin, who had previously expressed support for Ron Paul (a candidate as unlike McCain as there's apt to be) would now hitch her wagon to McCain didn't make any sense to me. And after considering it at length, my first assumption was that Palin is a very good governor, who has no idea what she is being drawn into and is perhaps not ready for this at all.

Let me put it another way: I thought that Palin was being used as a tool by the McCain campaign. As one friend put it, Palin as a running mate was analogous to putting lipstick on a pig. She's got a tremendous reputation and is by widespread acclaim "easy on the eyes", but she does nothing to change the fact that John McCain himself has a horrible record on so-called "conservative" issues. Palin, many have told me over the past few days, is only meant to be a distraction from the real John McCain.

Then I started, for the first time, to take a seriously hard look at Sarah Palin's record as mayor of Wasilla, and then governor of Alaska.

And you know what?

There's no way that I could support Sarah Palin now, even if she were to run for President herself (which I earlier had suggested I wouldn't mind happening).

In fact, the notion about Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the world, is now downright scary.

It was her record as mayor of Wasilla that sent the first red flag popping up in my mind. When she was sworn in after being elected in 1996, the town of Wasilla, Alaska had no debt. When she left, the town was twenty-two million dollars in the hole. We're talking a town with a population of about five thousand souls. My own hometown has about three times that amount, and I don't think it's ever been that much in the red.

Where did all that money go on Palin's watch? Much of it went to a new sports and entertainment complex. A bit went to a new park. None of it apparently went to actually improving the infrastructure of Wasilla or toward urban planning. I'm now hearing plenty of horror stories about how the town is a cacaphonic sprawl of bad streets, run-down buildings and big-box retailers like Wal-Mart.

But think about it: Wasilla went from owing no money, to owing $22 million during Palin's tenure. Does that sound like sound economic conservatism to anyone?

Then the tales came out Palin's dictatorial style: how she set down a policy that no city employee could talk with the press without her permission, and how she fired the town's respected librarian and lost a police chief (in addition to several others who she tossed out) because she believed they weren't "loyal" enough to her. So forget financial discipline: now we're dealing with matters of personal discipline and humbleness as a public servant. Palin apparently thought that since she was now mayor, she could be "the decider" of Wasilla. She quickly filled the vacant positions with people that she had previous relationships with. It began a pattern of cronyism that continued into her time as Governor of Alaska and is now come back to haunt her in the form of a state trooper firing scandal.

Maybe some of this could be attributed to being "young" and "fresh" on the job. Some eagerness to over-excel. Kinda like how Barney on The Andy Griffith Show is always getting in trouble because he wants Mayberry to be like a big city rife with organized crime. That's a heap of fun if we're watching a Sixties-era television comedy... but in real life, when the pattern persists from small-town mayor to state governor, it stops being funny or excusable.

It was how Palin became mayor of Wasilla in the first place that finally convicted me to no longer be able to give her any credence as someone I would ever want to be within a hair's breadth of so much power. In what is usually a non-partisan, friendly election in small town America, Palin injected her mayoral race with "wedge issues" like abortion. She received heavy backing from the Alaskan state Republican Party. At one point she was apparently making it out that she was going to be Wasilla's "first Christian mayor".

How is abortion possibly an issue for a sleepy burg of five thousand people tucked away in a valley in Alaska? That's like trying to teach A.P. history in what's supposed to be a high school woodshop class.

Palin's campaign for mayor of Wasilla had little to do with actual issues, and too much to do with exploiting people's emotions. That's how she came to elected office to begin with: not by appealing to intellect, but by playing off of base psychology.

Which brings me to the final reason that I will share for now about why I cannot ever support Sarah Palin being in the Executive Branch of the United States Government...

...namely, that the Book of Revelation is not a foreign policy manual.

Understand this about me too: I'm a follower of Jesus Christ. I've been a Christian for going on a dozen years now. And even before then I saw how having a faith in God is not something that is supposed to be used as a weapon against other people or other countries. In my opinion, God has not blessed America because America doesn't care about God anyway. Too many self-proclaimed Christians in this land think nothing of exploiting God for their own temporal motives, however. That's something that I not only cannot stand, it scares the hell out of me.

So now witness Sarah Palin, as Governor of Alaska, speaking before a church service and telling the congregants that the war in Iraq is a "task that is from God"...

Anyone else see that movie Jesus Camp? Anyone else think that Sarah Palin seems way too much of that same mindset?

As Christians, we are supposed to represent the Kingdom of God to those that we come in contact with. We are meant to do so by loving them, in spite of their beliefs or what their opinion is of us. We are called to love even our enemies. That doesn't mean that we don't defend ourselves when we must, because I believe that is a moral right for individuals and families and nations. But we were never given an ordained duty to seek out and destroy our enemies in the name of Christ! That's just more of the world's way, and not God's at all. And it is the absolute height of arrogance to assume that God's plan is our own plan enough that we have a license to believe He will grant a blanket blessing on all of our endeavors.

The more that I read of Sarah Palin, the more that I cannot but believe that the woman is an adherent of Dominion Theology. As a theology professor of mine put it ten years ago, that's something that "will beat a path straight to Auschwitz". And as I've studied it since then, the less that I've been able to deny that he was right.

If for no other reason, this alone is why I cannot trust Sarah Palin. God Only can judge her heart, but in my mind the woman is way too infatuated with the power of God and not nearly enough with the love of God.

That won't deter a lot of the so-called "evangelicals" from adoring her, from supporting her without question however. I've even heard a few of them quite seriously declare that Palin is a modern-day "Deborah for America". They're the ones who still believe that America has a special place in God's divine plan for the world. They're also the ones who tend to hold that God allowed George W. Bush to be elected so that it would "help" to eventually trigger Armageddon.

Don't think that I don't know what I'm talking about here. I used to attend a school that was eventually taken over by such apostles of the Apocalypse. And Sarah Palin, now that I've examined her, is precisely the kind of politician that they have been hoping and praying for. Maybe... maybe... even more than George W. Bush turned out to have really been.

These people have forgotten that what makes America special is her virtue. And in the name of God, these people - who should have been the most virtuous - gave up their virtue for sake of a little power in the fleeting span of their lifetime.

And now it is a question of whether there is any virtue left for their children, and their children's children.

And it looks like they're ramping-up to sacrifice even more.

Suddenly, the idea of a John McCain presidency, which I've always felt would be a disastrous continuation of the policies of Bush, threatens to become something much worse than most of us have yet imagined.

There is nothing "conservative" about Sarah Palin, I must sadly conclude. If anything, she seems cut from the neoconservative cloth that espouses bigger government and glorious empire. To her credit, Sarah Palin seems very much to be an all-American wife and "action mom". I certainly respect her strong stance for the Second Amendment. But her track record as an elected official indicates that if given far more power, she would continue the precedent that the current White House administration has set for detaching the American government from the American people.

There is nothing about that which is the least bit conservative.

That's still not enough to prompt me to vote for Obama, however. Nothing could possibly entice me to do that. So this election year I'm either casting a write-in vote for Ron Paul, or writing in what is rapidly becoming the most sensible alternative to the mess that this country is hellbent on becoming...

"A glass of whiskey, a gun and two bullets".

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Johnny Robertson threatens to mention this blog on his TV show tonight!!!

A bit of an update on Dianne Odell, who passed away this past week after living 60 of her 61 years in an iron lung and was reported to have been a devout Christian woman. In considering her situation a question arose in my mind that I felt led to ask aloud to Johnny Robertson, James Oldfield and Norm Fields of the local "Church of Christ" (which has nothing at all to do with the Church of Christ that most people know of): the three cultists who appear on WGSR several times a week and among other things teach that there is no salvation without baptism.

It turns out that Dianne Odell HAD been baptized, in her family's bathtub, when she was 13 years old. She was taken out of her iron lung just long enough to accomplish it, against her doctor's recommendation. It's something that she very much wanted to do and thankfully, she got to do it.

My contention remains unchanged, as well as my question to Robertson, Oldfield and Fields: If someone is incapable of being baptized, does that mean that they are not saved?

How can a physical act possibly be connected to the salvation of one's soul? Is this not adding a "work" to the already finished work that Jesus did when He went to die for us?

Well, now Robertson is threatening to bring up how "wrong" I was on baptism on his show What Does the Bible Say? (which if truth in advertising laws prevailed should be renamed "What Does Johnny Robertson Say?") airing on WGSR Star 39 tonight. Robertson is apparently determined to make hay of this, and will no doubt gleefully point out that the lady in question was baptized. And Robertson spent almost three hours on my blog yesterday (I've got the records to prove it), looking for "dirt" no doubt.

Here are some of the remarks that Johnny Robertson has made in the past 24 hours...

Happy hunting obe one
you will have to try harder than this
are you still going to call in?
If not Corey will get you (he lied Corey)

are you all still searching for some instance where a person cannot be baptized?
it must be really tough on you all to be proved WRONG all the time.
I tell you this is fast becoming my favorite site.
Chris you are the best
our youtube going out to praise Diane (since you brought her up) is a great shout out to how the Devil really is stupid.
Diane was the # one google name yesterday. How well do you think you question being read on my show will do?
It may get you in the New York times again as the most unkind person alive.

God’s word will be upheld.
Did yu think we would take a hit from the likes of Chris Knight when we teach the glorious gospel of the King.
You are hurting the cause

chris are you still calling in and debating on Sunday nite?
or did your little plan back fire

you reject the counsel of God when you refuse to be baptized and if you die
having done this all your days
then dont expect mercy as “rejecter”
I do say this with malice.
but it is the truth

Chris
you may won’t to go back and reread your comments
it was much stronger than this
and when I show it on TV it will be in quotes

Oh what has changed?
You don’t have a an emotional story to try and use to subvert people into taking your position?
Ok I am moving on. There is no truth here today.
Nice try Chris
I am still posting you tomorrow night.
Your comments are good to show how desperate folks are to defeat us.

Chris
not so fast New Yorker (Chris),
I m not going to publish your blog boyee
just your latest blunder

And you don't think people know already where to find this blog, Johnny?

Your attitude points all the way back to my original question from March: How is what you are doing giving glory to Christ?

Here is when I called into his show to ask him that, folks...

This is why what Robertson, Oldfield and Fields are doing is so terribly wrong, folks: they are using Jesus Christ as an excuse for how they like to swagger and bully people.

Johnny Robertson, I said that if you didn't respond with an answer to my question, that I was going to call in and ask. Lo and behold, you did respond. You have made it very clear that you believe that a person who is not baptized, is going to Hell.

So there was going to be no need for me to call in tonight anyway. You responded, and I'm content with that. Are you going to use that on your show tonight as well? Because that is all that I said that I wanted: an answer from you about this. And you provided one, whether you realize it or not.

But if you want a debate, Johnny... then yeah, I'm up for one. It's not going to be stilted in your favor though. We're not going to have your finger hovering over the "mute" button as it is all the time whenever someone calls into your show. You're going to have to face the fire as much as I would be facing it also.

So yeah: I'm challenging you to a real debate, live on WGSR Star 39, with a moderator. If you want to use the footage from it however you like afterward, it won't bother me at all if you do.

Let's have a real discussion on your demand for legalism, weighed against the simple sufficiency of the grace of God.

As we are told in Romans 3:22-28...

"This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

"Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law."

You would impose a law on us, Johnny Robertson. A law that is not mandated at all in scripture.

And nothing you are doing, is giving glory to God. Which is what is supposed to be the primary motivation for us as followers of Christ.

I'm as yet undecided as to what I'm going to do this evening, folks. I might watch this show, and I might not. If I just watch it, I'll probably be in a giggle-fit of laughter the entire time. If I'm feeling pokey, I might do some live blogging about it. There are some possibilities that enter my mind. We'll just have to wait and see.

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Why Iowa Christian Alliance and other "evangelical conservatives" won't support Ron Paul

There is going to be a forum for presidential candidates in Des Moines on June 30th sponsored by Iowans for Tax Relief, and a group called Iowa Christian Alliance. And most of the Republican candidates will be present. Except for Ron Paul. Why?

Here's the word from the Ron Paul campaign blog:

Ron Paul Excluded in Iowa

Iowans for Tax Relief and Iowa Christian Alliance will host a presidential candidates forum on Saturday, June 30th in Des Moines. Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Mike Huckabee, Tommy Thompson, and Tom Tancredo will participate.

Ron Paul, however, will not participate. Why? Because he wasn't invited.

We heard about this forum from numerous supporters in Iowa who asked why Dr. Paul was not going to participate. Those supporters assumed that Dr. Paul was invited.

The campaign office had not received an invitation so we called this morning; thinking we might have misplaced the invitation or simply overlooked it. Lew Moore, our campaign manager, called Mr. Edward Failor, an officer of Iowans for Tax Relief, to ask about it. To our shock, Mr. Failor told us Dr. Paul was not invited; he was not going to be invited; and he would not be allowed to participate. And when asked why, Mr. Failor refused to explain. The call ended.

Lew then called Mr. Steve Scheffler, president of the Iowa Christian Alliance, to talk with him. Mr. Scheffler did not answer so Lew left a message. He has yet to respond.

Why are the Iowans for Tax Relief and the Iowa Christian Alliance excluding the one Republican candidate who scored at the top of every online poll taken after the MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN debates? Why are they denying Iowans the opportunity to hear from the Republican presidential candidate whose popularity is growing by the day?

Just out of curiosity, I went to the website for Iowa Christian Alliance. And it's pretty much what I was expecting. They're an off-shoot from (but now unaffiliated with) the Christian Coalition. Actually I learned a lot about Iowa Christian Alliance's priorities just by the visual cues on the front page of their website.

And now I understand why it is that Iowa Christian Alliance will not invite Ron Paul to their presidential forum...

Because Ron Paul doesn't favor military interventionism that figures so well into a lot of evangelical Christian pre-trib Rapture fantasies that have guided American foreign policy more than you really want to know.

(And I say this as a follower of Christ, and one who has lived most of his life being exposed in one form or another to this mentality.)

You have to understand something about the kind of mindset that is working against Ron Paul so far as "right-wing Republicans" go. There are two "brands" of evangelical Christian conservative thought going on in America. One - the really nasty one, is Christian Reconstructionism, sometimes called Dominion Theology. And its adherents believe that they must gain absolute control over the Earth before Christ returns. They hold that their purpose is to "prepare" the world for the Lord's coming, and make it ready for Him to govern. To that end, they often make it quite clear that they want to institute capital punishment for things like homosexuality and abortion and even "disrespect to parents", if they gain power over systems of government. I doubt this movement will ever gain serious traction.

The other one, Dominionism (not to be confused with Dominion Theology, we'll get into why they are different in a minute), has had an enormous influence on American politics for going on forty years now.

This is the kind of theology taught by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and now continued largely by people like James Dobson and D. James Kennedy. Where Dominionism differs from Dominion Theology is that Dominion Theology/Christian Reconstructionism tends to greatly believe in a post-millennial "end of the world", hence its emphasis on "preparing" the world for Christ's return. The more popular Dominionism that was spread in the modern era by Falwell and Robertson preaches that the Rapture must take place first, then a period of tribulation and then Christ's millennial kingdom.

There are some things that the two movements have quite in common. Achieving temporal power is the most obvious. This lust for political power is so pronounced that it often seems that preaching the Kingdom of Heaven as Christ taught about is a distantly second priority... if it's even a priority at all.

Oh very well, I'll go ahead and say it: too many Christians in America have made "winning elections" a far more important thing than living the life that Christ has called us to live. And that is partly why America is suffering as she is: because a lot of Christians have prostituted their principles for a fleeting measure of glory. But I digress...

But in addition to this desire for political power, Dominionism also has a terrible obsession with the Apocalypse. Probably because they have a fear of death (which they shouldn't really) and want to avoid it via the Rapture. And more than most people really know, even with the popularity of books like Left Behind and other Rapture media, there are a LOT of folks who want nothing more than for Armageddon to come... and they think that God isn’t moving fast enough so they feel obliged to "help" Him out.

This is something that they have been actively working toward for years, now. All those young people from Regent University that are working in the Bush Administration: ever wonder "why Regent?" Because Regent was founded by Pat Robertson with the express purpose of training young evangelical Christians to someday "change the world" but a more accurate statement might be to "control the world". And the reason why "evangelical conservatives" flock to support George W. Bush, will steadfastly refuse to abandon him even in spite of all evidence that his is the worst presidency in American history?

Because they sincerely believe that George W. Bush has been anointed by God to set events into motion that will work to usher in the End Times.

Incidentally, this is exactly why these same "evangelical" types are so hot to support Israel no matter what: part of pre-tribulation teaching is that Israel will be largely destroyed before the Second Coming. These people are eager to help Israel so that it will be wiped out! But lobbying groups like AIPAC don't mind why these people believe what they do, so long as these lobbyists can keep employing these "useful idiots". But that's a whole 'nother post for a later time.

All of this is why these same people, in the next presidential election, will be quick to support the most military-interventionist-minded Republican candidate that they can find (I'm assuming they will probably love Fred Thompson now, especially in light of his remarks about going after Iran). Because supporting him, in their minds, will be part of the great plan that they have been working on for decades now. Have invested their children's lives in helping it come about, even...

...and Ron Paul would absolutely wreck all of it, if he were to be President.

Ron Paul would bring the most realistic foreign policy to the White House that we’ve seen since... well, since Reagan at least (and even there some will argue that many policies of that administration were influenced too much by the pre-trib thought as well). Paul definitely WON'T be guided by delusions that he is being led by God to do something apocalyptic with the Middle-East. That's also why the Bush camp would rather Paul go down: Ron Paul's success would repudiate the entire illusion that George W. Bush has somehow been "favored of God" all this time.

And if it's not bad enough that Ron Paul would postpone the Apocalypse, his belief in a strict interpretation of the Constitution plays major havoc with the "evangelical conservative" belief that it must seize power over people's lives in order to create a "moral" country. Just as Ron Paul would be and is now shunned by "liberals" who want more government control over our lives, so too does their "conservative Christian" counterparts, who have just as much hunger for power... if not moreso.

That is why Ron Paul will not be supported by the so-called "evangelical Christians" for the most part: because he's not going to be a "team player" so far as helping God along with the end of the world goes, and he doesn't believe that some people should be given more power... even if they do ask for it in the name of Christ.

I'll close this post with one of my favorite quotes by Stanley Hauerwas, which I think encapsulates this situation better than anything I could say:

"Let me be as clear as I can be: the God of 'God and country' is not the God of Jesus Christ."

-- Stanley Hauerwas

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