God & government

Cal Thomas makes a lot of the same points I've been making for several years in this column , namely that "Conservative Christians, while seeking to enact legislation that reflects their moral views, increasingly have found it difficult to impose their morality on themselves." I've seen data that indicates "born-again" Christians have a higher (yes, higher) divorce rate than that of the general pop, while atheists and agnostics have the lowest rate. When, about 20 years ago, conservative Christians started abandoning, or losing the war against divorce among their own flocks, they turned progressively outward, to focus on the sins of the "them."

This was accompanied by other phenomena: the explosion of 'mega-churches' -many of which are staffed by pastors ignorant of classic theology training (can't read the scriptures in the original languages for example), and who pass on to their flock bits and pieces of learning derived from tapes from other pastors, as well as popular books. Passive occupants of the pew who don't check to see if what they're learning is biblical, contribute to the rampant biblical illiteracy (also documented by Barna) plaguing America's 'evangelical' movement. In fact few know, that some of those who first advocated using the term "evangelical" now want to come up with a new term to differentiate themselves from the pop-theology, New Age mish-mash out there.

Add to this a trend in many churches to wallow (engage) in amateur therapy on one another as well as the fact you can talk to just about any youth group pastor/leader and he'll tell you the Christian kids' behavior is no longer distinguished in any significant way from secular teens and you begin to get a bigger picture. Then you have the evangelical poll which showed 35% of evangelical women surf online for porn now, and you have to wonder how long such a contradiction can be maintained.

Lobbyists, and politicians hope it will be forever of course.

Cal Thomas sums up the disturbing hypocrisy:

"Wouldn't these conservative Christians have greater moral power if they put their own houses in order before trying to cure the disorder in other houses? Isn't that the principle behind Jesus' story about noticing a speck in the other fellow's eye, while ignoring the beam in one's own eye"

Note: I also heard Thomas on a talk radio show back in Sept. 04, DC area, talking about how the Xtan fund-raising machines churn out letters, complete with red letter phrases in bold, focusing on sex -whether it be gay marriage, promiscuity, etc. Then they ask for $ so they can save the country, as Thomas put it. But you don't get letters from these same orgs addressing things Jesus talked about such as poverty for example.