I admit that in my darker moments I worry we have crossed the Rubicon and there is no way back. But I refuse to succumb to the pessimism in my DNA. As I write this, America is not finished—not yet. America has not imploded—not yet. So I refuse to give up. I choose to believe there is hope. I choose to pray that God will save this country. So long as there is still time, I choose to press on and do everything I can possibly do—or more precisely, everything the Lord directs me to do and gives me permission to do—to preserve this great nation and to mobilize people to work together and pray together to turn this ship around before it really is too late. I’m not blind to the enormity and gravity of the challenges we face. But neither am I blind to the power and might of our God. The Bible says “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). I believe that, and that is what gives me hope.
In the previous chapter, we examined what we should expect from the church and from ourselves in a prayerful, principled, passionate pursuit of a Third Great Awakening. Now let us consider what we should expect from government and what role—if any—we should play in pushing our government to help the nation get back on the right track. After all, while our local, state, and national political leaders cannot save us or solve all our problems, they can be either a great help or a terrible hindrance.
What Should We Expect from Government?
First and foremost, we should consider the role of government through the third lens of Scripture. The Bible is clear that God created government as a legitimate earthly institution with certain limited functions. These functions are to protect innocent human life and liberty, establish and enforce justice, and defend a nation from foreign and domestic threats. Scripture also makes clear that government leaders are subordinate to God. They are not authorized to give people rights or to arbitrarily take them away. Rather, they are supposed to protect people’s God-given rights from all those who would seek to threaten those rights. Clearly, not every government on earth has played this role throughout history, but this is the role government is supposed to play.
While the Old Testament laid out a theocratic system of government for the nation of Israel during a certain period of her history, never in the New Testament do we see God telling Christians to seek to build a theocracy or impose one on any other country. What’s more, nowhere does Scripture indicate that government can save us or solve all our problems or take care of all our needs, and we shouldn’t expect it to. Other divinely ordained institutions—including marriage, the family, the church, and even business—have specific roles to play in society. The government isn’t supposed to do their jobs; nor should it make their jobs more difficult. Instead, government is supposed to protect these other essential institutions and create a climate of safety and liberty where these institutions can flourish and thrive.
The apostle Paul summarized God’s perspective on the healthy, responsible role of government this way:
Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience’s sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.
ROMANS 13:1-7
Many of the American Founding Fathers were devout Christians who sought to apply biblical principles in the formation of our federal government. “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible,” said George Washington, our first president and a strong follower of Christ.[432] John Adams, our second president and also a Christian, put it this way: “The general principles, on which the fathers achieved independence, were the only principles in which that beautiful assembly of young gentlemen could unite. . . . And what were these general principles? I answer, the general principles of Christianity.”[433]
Even those founders who weren’t Christians were nevertheless steeped in—and deeply influenced by—the teachings of Scripture and highly respectful of Christianity and its critical role in fashioning American life. As Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and a deist, once wrote to a friend, “The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [some corrupt clergy members] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.”[434] Jefferson also famously wrote, “God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?”[435]
The founders purposefully designed our system of government with such biblical principles in mind. They weren’t trying to impose a theocracy; they were notably trying to prevent one. They understood that mankind is sinful by nature and that therefore government must set and enforce rules to limit people’s abuses of others’ rights and property. As James Madison, the father of our Constitution, explained, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”[436]
Likewise, the founders understood that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Therefore they also believed that government’s role and power must be limited and must include a system of checks and balances to prevent any one branch or party or person from becoming too powerful and abusing the rights of the very people they were sworn to protect. “I am . . . a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power,” Benjamin Franklin said. “I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly.”[437]
Time and time again, the men involved in forming our system of government drew from and pointed to the Bible. Professor Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston once did a fascinating study on the influence of the Bible on our founders and the political system they established. Lutz reviewed “916 pamphlets, books, and newspaper essays” written during the period 1760–1805. The sample, he noted, included “virtually all the pamphlets and essays from the 1780s by Federalists and Antifederalists concerning the Constitution.” In those documents, Lutz counted 3,154 references to 224 individuals. He found that far and away the largest number of citations—34 percent—came directly from the Bible or from sermons quoting the Bible.[438]
What, then, should we expect of the American federal government at this point in our history? It’s not rocket science. We should rediscover and vigorously reassert the basic principles of government that our Founding Fathers established in our principal documents, while obviously correcting for their unfortunate mistakes, such as not protecting the civil and political rights of all Americans, including women and minorities. We should, therefore, expect our leaders to:
• Once again honor the Declaration of Independence, which holds that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[439]
• Truly preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
• Get back to respecting the Tenth Amendment, which asserts that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to th
e States respectively, or to the people.”[440]
In other words, Washington needs to get focused once again on what the Constitution directs the federal government to do and stop wasting precious time and money monkeying around with everything else. To be precise, Washington needs to make these basic principles its top priorities:
• Protect the sanctity of innocent life from conception to natural death.
• Protect traditional marriage between one man and one woman, the building block of human civilization.
• Protect the American people from all threats, both foreign and domestic, that would threaten our lives, liberties, and property.
• Strengthen our military and care for our troops.
• Protect our borders and defend American sovereignty.
• Establish justice, protect our civil rights, punish criminals (especially violent ones), and appoint wise and sensible federal judges and Supreme Court justices who will uphold the Constitution, not legislate from the bench.
• Protect Americans’ freedom to save, invest, start small businesses, grow those businesses, create jobs, and provide for their families.
• Create the proper conditions for economic growth and innovation. This can be done in part by making tax rates as low as possible and by radically simplifying the federal tax code; this also means setting fair rules and vigorously enforcing those rules—but not trying to use federal power to solve every problem through legislation and regulation.
• Balance the federal budget by limiting the size and scope of government, cutting waste and duplication, returning key responsibilities back to the states, and reforming federal entitlement programs.
• Get out of debt.
• Maintain a sound and stable currency.
• And don’t make promises you can’t or won’t keep.
Given the mess that we are in, will it be easy to reassert the principles espoused by our Founding Fathers? No, it won’t. It will take men and women of deep conviction, character, and courage to get us back on the right track. But one thing is certain: we have no hope unless we try.
A Spiritual and Political Journey
For as long as I can remember, I have had a fascination with American politics, and I have long wrestled with the question of just what role—if any—a Christian should play in politics. Should believers stick to preaching and teaching the Word of God, sharing the gospel, and making disciples, and steer clear of all things political? Should we avoid altogether the political process of electing our leaders and advocating certain policies because it’s a “dirty game”? Or should we engage in the political arena to protect our God-given rights and advance our biblical values? Should we actively resist the onslaught of secular humanism in our schools, our courts, our legislatures, and in the White House even if it’s a hard, brutal, no-holds-barred battle for the heart and soul of America?
These are challenging questions. And given that the stakes are now so high, never has it been more important for Christians in America to wrestle with them and come to solid, defensible conclusions.
Let me take a few moments here to share some of my own story, in the interest of full disclosure and so you can get a sense of how I’ve drawn my conclusions.
In the fourth grade, I did a book report on All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and found myself disgusted by the corruption inside the administration of President Richard Milhous Nixon. Sometime around then, I remember chastising my only living grandmother when I learned that she had voted for Nixon in 1968 and then again for his reelection in 1972. “How could you do that, Grammie?” I asked. “How could you vote for Nixon when he was such a crook?” She, of course, like many Republicans, hadn’t known in 1972 that Nixon was guilty of crimes against the Constitution. She didn’t imagine that Nixon would face impeachment and leave office in disgrace. She believed at the time that the charges were being trumped up by Nixon’s enemies. What’s more, she deeply disagreed with the liberal policies of George McGovern, the Democrats’ nominee, and feared for where McGovern would take the country. But she didn’t try to defend herself to me that day. She just smiled and gave me a hug and told me to go back outside and play.
With the notable exception of my Republican-voting Grammie, I like to joke that my family were “Democrats going back to the Bolsheviks.” My mother was literally a “bra-burning, tree-hugging, liberal Democrat” in the 1960s and early 1970s. My father was also a liberal Democrat, as were his Jewish parents and his Jewish grandparents (who escaped from Russia) before them.
My parents both came to faith in Jesus Christ in 1973. But they didn’t suddenly decide to bolt out of the Democratic Party. They, like millions of evangelical Christians, voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. They were repulsed by Watergate and were looking for an honest leader in Washington. They were attracted to Carter’s willingness to openly describe himself as a “born-again Christian.”
But over the next few years, they became deeply disappointed by Carter’s failed economic policies and disastrous foreign policies. By 1980, my parents ended up voting for a Republican presidential candidate—Ronald Reagan—for the first time in their lives. They voted again for Reagan in 1984, two of millions of “Reagan Democrats”—a movement made up largely of disaffected evangelical Protestant Christians and blue-collar Catholics who not only favored Reagan’s pro-growth, pro-freedom economic and military policies but who could no longer abide by the Democratic Party’s increasingly far-left agenda of support for abortion on demand, capitulation to the gay-rights movement, and timidity in the face of the evil Soviet Empire. My parents went on to vote for George H. W. Bush in 1988 and actually reregistered as Republicans in the early 1990s, during what became known as the “Republican Revolution” to take control of Congress from the Democrats.
What I eventually noticed in my parents’ journey was that a person’s political views are often lagging indicators of his or her spiritual views. Yes, my parents had had a radical change of spiritual beliefs in 1973 when they stopped being agnostics and accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. But that didn’t immediately translate into changed political views. It took time for them to reconsider their worldview through the third lens of Scripture, and longer still to wrestle through whether—and how—to apply their newly developing core spiritual convictions to the political issues of the day. However, the deeper they went in their faith, the more determined they became to find candidates who better represented their values. They had numerous and strong disagreements with the old, establishment, country-club elements of the Republican Party and various GOP candidates. But as time went by, they felt increasingly more at home with the millions of evangelical ex-Democrats who were forming the conservative, pro-life, pro-family, pro-freedom, Reaganite base of the new Republican Party. Not all followers of Jesus Christ have drawn the same political conclusions, of course, but clearly millions have. This has had a dramatic, transformative impact on the American political scene in recent decades as more Christian conservatives have been elected to public office and more conservative judges have been appointed to the bench.
My parents, however, were way ahead of me. In 1975, I prayed to receive Christ as my Savior. For the next decade or so, I grew as a new Christian, but I can’t say I was as deeply serious about my faith as I should have been. Then, in my junior year of high school, God began to shake my personal world in an effort to wake me up and draw me closer to him. Our church experienced a severe split over some important theological issues. My family left the church, and as a result I rarely saw any of the closest friends I’d had growing up. During this time I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t have a best friend. I was anxious about college and my future, and I began to slip into a depression in the fall of 1983. As I lost emotional altitude, my grades started slipping, and I began withdrawing from my family. I became angry with God and doubtful that Christianity was either real or relevant.
And then, completely unexpectedly, I had a powerful and very personal
experience with Jesus Christ in January 1984. God shook me to my core and made it clear to me that he wasn’t happy with the shallowness of my relationship with him. One bitterly cold winter night, I was essentially yelling at the Lord in the privacy of my room. I was bitter and confused. “You say that you promise love and joy and peace and hope and happiness, and I don’t have any of it,” I told God. “So either all this Christianity stuff is a joke, or I totally don’t get it.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d had such a blow-up session with God, but it was to be the last. Suddenly I heard the Lord speak directly back to me. Whether it was audible or not I cannot say, but it might as well have been, because the message was loud and clear. “Joel, do you ever really study my Word?” God asked me. Stunned, I thought about it for a few moments and finally had to say no. Obviously I had read the Bible from time to time in my life, but the blunt truth was I had never been serious about knowing the Scriptures for myself. Then God said, “Joel, do you ever spend time talking to me in prayer?” Immediately I was deeply ashamed of myself. Again I had to say no. Of course I had said prayers now and then, but I had never been serious about talking to—or listening to—the Lord.
At that point, God lowered the boom. “Then, Joel, why would you expect to experience my blessings when you don’t even really know me?” Then the transmission, as it were, ceased.
But rather than be further depressed by my obvious shallowness and disobedience, I was electrified. Christ had spoken directly to me! In his mercy, he hadn’t punished me for expressing my emotions and directing my blunt questions to him. On the contrary, he kept his word. As Jeremiah 29:11-13 says, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (NIV).
Implosion: Can America Recover From Its Economic and Spiritual Challenges in Time? Page 31