Christian America at the Crossroads

by David Kupelian

Despite Donald Trump's stunning re-election victory, America remains engaged in what amounts to an ongoing civilizational war. A war not merely political in nature, but cultural, ideological, psychological and ultimately spiritual -- a long-term struggle between forces of decency, morality and sanity on one side and astonishing deception and evil on the other.

And to jump right down to the bottom line: It is the Christian church in America that will either win or lose this war. After all, while their numbers have somewhat declined in recent years -- casualties of the ongoing war -- fully two out of every three Americans today, 68%, identify themselves as Christians.

But that statistic itself forces troubling questions:

If the overwhelming majority of Americans are Bible-believing followers of Jesus, how then can it be legal in such a de facto Christian nation to amputate the breasts and sexual organs of literally thousands of confused children who are being encouraged, from many directions, to believe they're "trapped in the wrong body"? How can it be legal to butcher thousands of beautiful, sacred, fully formed, pain-feeling human babies only weeks before they would have been born?

How can "After School Satan Clubs," sponsored by an explicitly satanic organization, be permitted within public schools across the land? How can the nation's toddlers be subjected to "drag queen story hour" events at public libraries, during which they're required to sit at the feet of demonically possessed men dressed as women -- and sometimes dressed as demons -- who seduce and corrupt these innocents by regaling them with exciting tales of heroic homosexual and transgender youths?

While Christians are winning a few crucial battles -- most critically, the life-or-death re-election of Donald Trump -- they are losing most others. In truth, many Christians are either entirely absent from the battlefield, or worse, have sided with the enemy.

In her recent book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, journalist Megan Basham documents how many of today's churches -- both leaders and congregations -- have been seduced and bought off by leftist forces in the ongoing battle over America's future.

Chapter by chapter, Basham reveals how leftwing nonprofits pretending to carry the Christian torch have persuaded many evangelicals to embrace a radical climate change agenda under the seductive banner of "Creation Care," to support suicidal illegal immigration policies by repackaging and gift-wrapping them with Bible verses as "Welcoming the Stranger," to champion Marxist critical race theory by vowing to "decolonize discipleship from whiteness."

Even to adopt the radical and blatantly unbiblical LGBTQ agenda under the pretext of "challenging the promotion of narrow or hateful interpretations of religious doctrine." And so on -- essentially conning Christians into embracing every major leftwing ideological and moral attack on Western civilization and Christianity itself.

This seduction of the church, however, is not an entirely new phenomenon. Far from it.

Four decades ago, shortly before he died, theologian and author Francis Schaeffer, widely regarded as one of the most influential evangelical thinkers of the 20th century, published a book with the spine-straightening title, The Great Evangelical Disaster. In it, he reflected on the culture wars raging across America -- and why Christians were so absent from the struggle.

"Most of the evangelical world has not been active in the battle," Schaeffer lamented, "or even been able to see that we are in a battle. And when it comes to the issues of the day, the evangelical world most often has said nothing; or worse, has said nothing different from what the world would say."

Concluded Schaeffer:

"Here is the great evangelical disaster -- the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this -- namely accommodation: the evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age."

And remember, Schaeffer was writing about evangelicals, who generally are more conservative, as opposed to so-called "mainline" Protestants who tend to be more liberal-left.

Regarding the latter, some of the flat-out Marxist influences on mainline denominations are explored in The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian:

"Many churchgoing Christians scratch their heads and wonder why America's mainline denominations so frequently seem to support leftist organizations. It's because many of these mainline churches, at least at the leadership level, have virtually become leftist organizations! Front and center is the notoriously radical umbrella group, the National Council of Churches, which represents three dozen denominations, including the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America."

How can an organization supposedly championing the interests of tens of millions of Bible-believing Christians be so passionately, obviously -- indeed, almost comically -- supportive of hardcore leftist causes? Writer Jacob Laksin explains in The Church of the Latter-Day Leftists:

"Founded in 1950, the New York City-based NCC has, for more than half a century, remained faithful to the legacy of its forerunner, the Communist front-group known as the Federal Council of Churches. At one time an unabashed apostle of the Communist cause, the NCC has today recast itself as a leading representative of the so-called religious Left."

Adhering to what it has described as "liberation theology" -- that is, Marxist ideology disguised as Christianity -- the NCC lays claim to a membership of 36 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox Christian denominations, and some 50 million members in over 140,000 congregations.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the NCC has soft-pedaled its radical message, dressing up its demands for global collectivization and its rejection of democratic capitalism in the garb of religious teachings. Yet the organization's history suggests that it was -- and remains -- a devout backer of a gallery of socialist governments.

So egregious has been the faint-heartedness and "accommodation" documented by these and other authors that Eric Metaxas' recent bestseller Letter to the American Church likens the Christian church in today's America with that of 1930s Germany when Hitler's Third Reich was rising. With the exception of a relatively few courageous souls like Lutheran theologian Deitrich Bonhoeffer, most German church leaders did and said little or nothing about the rise of Nazism, until eventually the overwhelming evil -- from the death camps and crematoria to Hitler's military invasions of surrounding nations -- became far too massive for them to effectively oppose.

Yet Metaxas says the American church of today is eerily reminiscent of most churches and pastors in Germany during Hitler's steady rise to total power and the unspeakable evil that resulted from their failure to stand for truth.

What's really going on?

Those on the "far left" -- a euphemism for straight-up Marxists -- have long been obsessed with subverting and radically transforming Christianity, not merely because they are at war with pretty much everything the God of the Bible actually demands, from biblical sexual morality to the rest of His commandments. But also because, politically, they simply must undermine and redefine Christians' biblical value system as a means of redirecting their huge voting influence, or else the left will lose every election.

If claiming the left is "at war" with the commandments of God sounds wrong or over-stated, consider that the Democratic Party's top priorities today are: unrestricted abortion ("Thou shalt not kill"), total sexual freedom ("Thou shalt not commit adultery"), redistributing wealth ("Thou shalt not steal"), lying nonstop about their opponents ("Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor") and forever plotting new ways to appropriate other people's wealth, freedom and success ("Thou shalt not covet"). Winston Churchill encapsulated all this by describing socialism as "the gospel of envy."

It should be clear, then, that Donald Trump was absolutely right when he claimed to supporters throughout the campaign season, "In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you -- and I'm just standing in their way."

Truly, the real enemy of the far left is Christian America.

And that's tragic, because the Christian religion has been hands-down the most powerful, consequential and benevolent force in human history -- not only for the salvation of souls, but for the well-being of entire societies. America was founded almost entirely by serious Christians -- indeed, the original settlers came to these shores for the very purpose of being able to practice their Christian faith without being persecuted for it.

The United States of America's eventual system of government and founding documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, were based implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) on biblical principles. Indeed, the entire Western concept of freedom, dignity, equality and "God-given individual rights" is rooted entirely in the conviction that man, as affirmed in the Book of Genesis, is created "in the image of God."

Yet today, America's huge Christian population finds itself at a historic crossroads. Consider this evangelist's assessment, made a few decades ago:

"As in the last days of Rome, Christianity to many people today has faded into mere form, lost its relevance to life and holds no central allegiance in our lives. When a nation loses its faith, it loses its character. When it loses its character, it loses its purpose for living. And when it loses its purpose for living, it loses its will to survive.

"I am convinced that America stands at the crossroads of her national destiny. One road leads to destruction, and the other leads to prosperity and security. Most are going down the broad road that leads to destruction. We are going the way of Rome rather than the way of the cross.

"Many will blame the Republicans or the Democrats. But it is the American people as individuals that should take the blame. We backslide as individuals before we begin to decay as a nation."

So, what about the 224 million Christians currently populating America (millions of whom do not even bother to vote)? It's a staggering number of people that claim to be followers of Jesus Christ.

Some so-called believers are obviously fake -- "mere form" as has been said -- with the label "Christian" just serving as the necessary social garb they must wear to get what they want. For example, most American politicians, even the most corrupt or deranged, claim to be serious Christians, from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. President Joe Biden, who defends abortion up to the very moment of birth, claims to be a "devout Catholic."

But for the millions of sincere Christian believers who make up most of the American population, it turns out -- at least during today's ongoing culture war playing out on a thousand different battlefields across the nation -- that attending church and listening to sermons and praying and singing hymns and fellowshipping and living a moral personal life (and perhaps even evangelizing) is not enough. That's likely what all the good church folk did in 1930s Germany.

The problem is that, with few exceptions, their church leaders insisted that they and their flock "stay in their lane" (to use today's vernacular) and preach the Gospel, and not "pollute" themselves with politics and other "worldly" affairs. After all, they affirmed to each other, they're citizens of Heaven, not of this transient, broken world. We're only here for a short time. Don't get involved in the evils that play out in this life; instead focus on the eternal world to come.

And that's how they got Hitler.

As Eric Metaxas writes at the outset of his Letter to the American Church: "…I am convinced the American Church is at an impossibly -- and almost unbearably -- important inflection point. The parallels to where the German Church was in the 1930s are unavoidable and grim. So the only question…is whether we might understand those parallels, and thereby avoid the fatal mistakes the German Church made during that time, and their superlatively catastrophic results.…

"The German Church of the 1930s was silent in the face of evil; but can there be any question whether the American Church of our own time is guilty of the same silence? Because of this, I am compelled to speak out…to make plain where we find ourselves at this moment, at our own unavoidably crucial crossroads in history."