Bad Priorities – The Greater Issues for the Christian Right and Time for a Course Correction

By TheShofar

Donald Trump met in New York City on June 21 2016 with a group of evangelical leaders including Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, Tim Wildmon, and James Dobson, among others.  Some of these leaders have continued a campaign to do whatever they can to prevent Trump, against all odds, from becoming the nominee of the Republican party.

That meeting provided the perfect opportunity for us as believing Christians to understand and re-evaluate the Establishment Christian Right agenda and expose its leadership for the log-in-eye hypocrites that they have become.

Sounds tough, doesn’t it? But let’s take a truthful and transparent look at where our politically-focused Establishment Christian Right leadership has taken us.

This group of leaders has a narrow focus on three “sins” that they focus on and discuss ad nauseam:

1. Abortion
2. Same-sex marriage
3. Transgender confusion

Interesting emphases and I’ll get back to why that’s their focus later in this essay. But let’s look at a few other issues that aren’t getting the same level of attention:

Pornography

According to studies, 50% of our Christian pastors admit to having a pornography problem. That is major sin that affects our Christian life, our marriages, our culture, and our future directly from our pulpits. For Christians that are not pastors, it would be logical to assume that they are probably even less successful at coping with that sin than pastors are. Porn kills Love. And if we are going to be a Godly land, we need to change the focus!

So let me get this straight. Our Establishment Christian Right leadership is focusing on the insignificant 0.001% of dudes that are surgically removing their male parts, instead of focusing on the sin that about 80% of the Christian community is likely engaged in?

Divorce

About half of our Christian marriages end in divorce. Our families ache and our children suffer. This sin issue affects the future of our children and our entire culture. The Roman Empire collapsed as the family collapsed, among other things. Within the black community, more than 50% of children are being raised in fatherless homes, with no male leadership. And that is not because of the transgender issue. This is a widespread sin that affects over 50% of our families in this country directly.

And as our families collapse, our Establishment Christian Right leaders are spending their goodwill and leadership focusing on the tiny fraction of quirky people that actually want to marry someone of their same sex? But where is the focus on the plague of Christian marriages that are failing? Don’t you think it’s time for these leaders to take the log out of their Christian eye?

Walking Away From Christian Faith

70% of our Christian children walk away from their faith in God when they go to college. We are failing them in both our example, and our instruction. That is a sin issue. In just a few generations since the 1960’s, so many people have walked away from God, including our Democrat and Republican leadership, that God is almost irrelevant in our direction as a country now.

So while our Christian children are falling away, our Christian marriages are failing, our sons are being raised without fathers, and our preachers are addicted to pornography, should our political Christian leaders really be focusing on the hot button issue of the statistical few who want to change their sex or the few guys that want to marry another dude? Don’t you think it’s time to for the Establishment Christian Right leadership to take the log out of their Christian eye?

Heterosexual Sin

Even among Christians, these days we would be hard-pressed to find a significant percentage of Christians that have walked a lifetime of purity and confined their sexual relations to the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman under Christ. That is a very big sin issue. Many of our Establishment Christian Right Leaders have themselves failed, and have had sexual relations before, or during marriage, with someone that they were not married to.

Jesus Christ said that if you so much as lust in your mind, you have committed adultery in your mind. That is a sin issue that is a massive mainstream sin issue in comparison to the sexual outliers in our culture. Don’t you think it’s time for our political Christian leaders to take the log out of their collective Christian eye?

Mountains of Mainstream Sin

Substance abuse, lack of Christian love, pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth, greed, and a bunch of other sins permeate our culture, our churches, and the leadership of the Establishment Christian Right! Are we sure we want to continue to make outlier sexual sin the focus of all our energies and discussions? I know these are great hot-button issues for getting people to send in money, and our Establishment Christian Right leaders all want to make a living in their organizations, right? But is that really where we need to focus our energies if we want to make America great again?

Certainly, we are for traditional marriage. And we don’t think it’s natural or desirable to assume the identity of the opposite sex. But will we be dogmatic about a statistically minor issue at the expense of pragmatically ignoring issues of concern to the Church that affect us all, and even issues in our own homes?

Sanctity of Life and the Other Pro-Life Issue

Granted, abortion is a terrible sin against living children, and there is hardly a family in the country that hasn’t been touched by that. President Trump will make strides on that issue. But he can only sign the legislation that Congress puts in front of him. So we need to get the do-nothing Congress to finally pass some legislation for him to sign. But what’s the chance of that happening? Congress is where the laws are made. To make a difference in the killing that we are doing, we need to get our law-making body to take an action stand and vote on something meaningful for a change.

To our Establishment Christian Right leaders:

“Please do continue to push this important agenda where it needs to be pushed – in Congress! But while you are pushing Congress to consider the sanctity of life, maybe you should be a bit more consistent in your application of the sanctity of life. Why aren’t we fighting to stop the wholesale slaughter of Christians around the world? It’s great that we want to stop the slaughter of the innocents, but are our Christian brothers suffering persecution and slaughter any less worthy of protection?”

And how about if we stop just going along with the military industrial complex and central bankers and the neocons in their profit-driven escapades of nation-building, king-making, and crony capitalist use of military force and killing purely for exploitation, economic control, political power, and one world government control? Just considering the concept of ‘Just War’ for valid purposes, there are enough tough and weighty considerations.  But where is the righteousness in killing just to extend power and control?

Let’s Get Our Focus Right!

I suggest to you, the political Christian leaders, that your focus on same-sex marriage and transgender issues is misplaced and misguided. Our country is falling apart. If you want to focus on sin issues, there are great sin issues that affect hundreds of millions of us. Do we really want to spend 50, 60, 70% or more of our energies on sin issues that affect less than 1% of the people, while ignoring the sin issues that affect almost 100% of us?

How do you expect God to work in our land when we conveniently focus on statistically tiny sin while conveniently ignoring the huge log that we carry around in our own eye?

Yes, I suppose it’s easy to target the transgendered, because you’re safe there. Never had that sin issue, did you?

And I suppose it’s safe to target dudes that want to marry dudes, because you’re safe there too. Never had that sin issue either, did you?

But how about targeting pornography, pre-marital sexual relations, extra-marital sexual relations, failing marriages, divorce, fatherless homes, substance abuse, failures from the pulpit, and failures of Christian men to stand up and do what men should do for their families and for our land.

How many Establishment Christian Right leaders make it a point to attend every conference, and hob-knob with every famous pastor, and relish the opportunity to get on the stage at any event they can, while they fail to provide their own sons with real Christian love and involvement in their lives, and instead fill them with a useless list of do’s and don’ts that accomplishes little more than satisfying man-made standards of righteousness, but does little to assure their real salvation?

Let’s Be Careful How We Apply False Christian Standards to Donald Trump

These Establishment Christian Right leaders are all hung up on whether Donald Trump ever fell down on his hands and knees and begged the Lord Jesus Christ for forgiveness? Isn’t that really a man-made concept? In fact, isn’t that exactly what they’d like to see him do? If Trump got down on his hands and knees and begged the Christian leaders in the room for forgiveness, then, if they really believed that he meant it, they would support him? Do we really want to take a man-made standard like that and claim that is what God expects? Really?

I have some news for you. It’s our duty to repent or confess. It’s His mercy to forgive. We don’t have to mouth the words to ASK for forgiveness. We just have to confess our sins and believe that Jesus died as God for those sins. He will freely forgive us of our sins. And when he does, what can you do that is so bad that he would take back his forgiveness?

Trump is not perfect. He’s a man. He has been married three times. In retrospect, he has spoken about how his focus and love of his work took precedence over his wife, and that’s one thing he said he would change if he could go back and do it again. But now he’s 70 years old. His womanizing days are behind him. He’s been married to the same woman for over a decade. He loves her as his wife and the mother of his son. And being married for a decade, he’s now in the top 50^th percentile of marriage longevity in the United States of America.

Sure, Donald Trump has sinned and failed in many ways. Like you and I! But Trump shared with us that he talks to God about his issues. He prays. He confesses. And he makes corrections to avoid mistakes he has made in the past. Trump also transparently shared with us that he feels cleansed when he takes communion and does that as often as he can.

Our Establishment Christian Right leaders made fun of him because he referred to taking communion as the time when he takes his little wine and little cracker, but I don’t think God really cares how we say it.

But before we take communion, and come into communion with God, we have a special time to get right with God. That’s serious. And I don’t know about you, but I do feel cleansed when I do that. When Christ said to do this in remembrance of Him, and given that He died for our sins, then aren’t we supposed to feel cleansed in that remembrance?

What’s the Real Standard We Should Apply?

Trump doesn’t claim to be a biblical expert. And frankly, while many of our Establishment Christian Leaders were becoming political spokespersons for the Christian community, Trump was building skyscrapers and developing business ventures on six continents around the world.

But Trump intuitively understands the Christianity of his youth. We are called to love God and our fellow man. Trump not only tries to live by that, but he tries to incorporate that into the essence of who he is. You hear Donald Trump tell the people at his rallies that he loves them. I tell you, that’s not just campaign talk. In his heart, I believe he actually does feel a foundational love for mankind.

He likes it the most when that love can be reflected in straightforward kindness and niceness and graciousness. And Donald Trump has graciously helped hundreds of people in his lifetime. But sometimes more often than he desires, it has to take to the form of tough love. And sometimes, he has to fight, even hard and mean, for what needs to happen and what needs to be done.

And maybe you can argue with me about that theologically. But Trump is who he is. And that is the spirit that he brings to the table for you. He brings that spirit to the table to protect Christians in this country and abroad from persecution. He brings that spirit to the table for America, with the hope that we can bring back our values and make America great again.

But Shouldn’t Trump Be Uniting the Republican Party Now?

Some establishment people, the media, and many of our political Christian leaders in fact, have been saying that Donald Trump needs to start unifying the party.

There are two ways to unite the party. The first way is for Trump to capitulate, give in, and meet his detractors where they are. The other way is to take charge and demonstrate to his detractors that if they want to be united, they will have to pick up his flag and march with him.

The fact is that the establishment has been utterly ineffective and has our country on the verge of economic collapse. The last thing Trump should do is embrace losing agendas. If Trump wants to actually accomplish any serious goals as President, he will have to train the establishment over the next 7 months that there is no option for them to continue to push their losing agenda. Their only hope will be to move to real course correction and follow his lead.

If he can’t get them to follow his lead, then unity won’t matter. This election is not about politics as usual. The old formulas don’t apply. There’s too much at stake. In fact, if anyone in Congress wants to get re-elected, they would be well advised to grab on to his coattails and ride them to reelection.

You can say that sounds arrogant. You can say that sounds scary. I’ll tell you what sounds scary, is more of the same. If we don’t fix our broken economy, we are going to suffer a terrible economic collapse worse than anything you have seen.

The Biggest Issue for America, and for the Christians

We are $19 trillion in debt as a country. Congress just did the unthinkable and passed a budget that will increase the debt to $21 trillion by the time President Trump takes office.

Where will this end? Is America going to go Bankrupt? We will soon be in debt to the tune of almost $70,000 for every man, women, child, and illegal alien in the country. We will need to borrow almost $2,000 per year for every person just to service the interest on the debt!

And that doesn’t include the unfunded national debt liabilities of $128,000,000,000,000 (Trillion) and growing, which adds an additional future debt of $400,000 for every man, woman, and child! So the total share of the national debt for a family of four is pushing $2 million! That’s more than some families earn in their entire lifetime!

Folks, there may not be a way out. If we don’t get a hold of the economy NOW, life as we know it is done! Trump certainly doesn’t want to preside over the economic collapse of the USA.

Every group of POLITICIANS in modern history has taken us deeper into the abyss, even Ronald Reagan! We are beyond the tipping point.

We can’t even imagine what life will be like in America if the country goes bankrupt. Worse than the Great Depression. Total destruction of wealth. Worthless, useless retirement funds. Business closures. Race riots. Roving gangs. Infrastructure collapse. Terrorist attacks. Martial Law. Anarchy. It won’t be like it was in the Great Depression, when men in suits and ties lined up politely in soup lines. We don’t have that mentality anymore as a people. Soup lines won’t work now. People won’t have dignity when it all hits the fan. If this happens, Christian issues won’t even matter.

Conclusion

We need to HAVE A COUNTRY to even have Christian values be a focus.

Trump will do what he needs to do to fix the economy and protect Christian liberty.

But the country needs our political Christian leaders to get their priorities right. Sure, we need to continue the legislative and judicial branch fights to stop the slaughter of our children. But we need to be more consistent in our Christian focus. Sure, we can condemn sin, but let’s start by taking the logs out of our Christian eyes.

Let’s focus on heterosexual sin issues that affect so many more of us than homosexual sin issues. Let’s focus on saving our Christian marriages from divorce more than worrying about the occasional dude that wants to marry another dude. Let’s be real men who do what’s right and love our children and don’t provoke them to leaving their faith as soon as they get away from us. And let’s raise our sons to be real men too. And our daughters need dads and moms. Let’s focus on common sense, and common decency. Let’s start with the sin issues that we can fix – the ones in our own lives, and then with our example, we may be able to fix the issues that have slowly rotted society over the past half a century.

Here is the conclusion. I’m not here asking our Establishment Christian Right leaders to support Trump because he’s coming over to where they are. I’m here asking them to take the log out of their eye, and as Christian leaders, to do their part as fathers, husbands, and citizens (or mothers, wives, and citizens) to return America to the values and the reliance on God that made America great to begin with.

Let’s make America great again by starting with ourselves, our families, and our churches. If we do that, the rest will follow. It’s time for our Christian leaders to repent, stand up, and more boldly represent ALL of the core values of this country. Let’s get the log out of our own eyes! Stop being a speck-tator.