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You wonder where the churches are.
As American society is awash in new morality, as ageless conventions are toppled and condemned, as the teachings of millennia are dismissed and the very definitions of humanity are changed, where are the shepherds of the Savior’s flock, and what guidance do they give?
For the most part, they are passive and silent. Or worse, they have gone over to the side of confusion. But seldom are they heard, and seldom do they lead, and seldom do they seem to be a light of the world.
Nowhere do you find the courage and clarity of Isaiah, who foresaw this technique of the adversary and warned those who might be deceived by it. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil,” he wrote, “that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
“Woe” means great sorrow and discouragement, a fundamental unhappiness. And that is where an increasing percentage of Americans are, lost and confused, just as an Old Testament prophet foresaw they would be. Yet Americans navigate these perilous times with the guideposts of biblical truth obscured and forgotten, their watchmen upon the walls silent and blind.
The churches are often like salt that has lost its savor.
While the world shouts that good is evil and evil is good, that men are women and women are men, that right is wrong and wrong is right. The absolute and eternal truths of humankind’s Creator are seldom heard, including across the pulpit.
Religion, which in most cultures and in most eras shapes social attitudes and practices, has been silenced or co-opted in modern America. We have redefined marriage and gender, issues addressed in scripture, and the preachers of the gospel have looked the other way. We have rejected law, devalued work, preached entitlement, suppressed speech, and burdened portions of our society with ever heavier taxes – contrary to cultural practices rooted in traditional Christianity – and the Christian ministers have been silent.
We have replaced love of neighbor with tribal hatred, and the structures of power in our society seem intent on pitting us against one another to the point of violence and social dissolution. Those institutions of power – the government, the school and university, the entertainment and news media – all preach a strange gospel, focused in large part on children, that confuses the mind and obscures the truth.
And the churches are silent.
Not only about what is the truth, but on the existence of truth.
Religion declares that truth is absolute and eternal, that it is not subject to the opinion of man but is established by God. Situations may change, but truth never does, and the role of the religious has always been to proclaim the truth, to humbly seek to learn it from God and to share it with the world. Christians, Muslims and Jews have done that, and so have most believers of other faiths.
Certainly, there are disagreements, and a free and tolerant society like the United States recognizes and accommodates that. But the overlap of common belief among the faithful is broad, and the divine principles valued in a Muslim home are often the same as those cherished in a Christian home, and the Catholic is not that much different from the Baptist. And the cause of all believers is largely the same – freedom and decency, the right to believe and live as you wish, and the common embrace of right over wrong.
But American society has veered from that. There is no more right and there is no more wrong, and the immorality of yesterday is the morality of today. Good is called evil and evil is called good. There is no God and those who worship him are marginalized and ridiculed in society, the freedom of religion restricted to an hour a week behind closed doors.
And those shepherds and pastors called to guard the flock are silent as it wanders into forbidden and dangerous paths. The ecumenical groups and councils of churches, having long since sold their souls for a mess of progressive pottage, are useless to the task. Some religious bodies seek accommodation with the social masters, ignoring the reality that those who try to appease the lion end up in its stomach. Individual ministers and congregations, perhaps fearful of public ridicule or a loss of non-profit status, are silent, like lambs to the slaughter.
All while our children and society stumble through the fog of demonic deception, straying into the bondage and sorrow of those who do not know the truth and cannot be set free by its tenets.
The war between evil and good rages on, and good is not fighting back. Its institutions have largely abandoned the field. And when the wicked rule, in government or in the pulpit, the people mourn.
The battle for souls and safety is raging all around, and you wonder where the churches are.