1902 Some Things Never Change-Long
There are some things that never change, no matter what the context, whether 250 A.D. or 2019 A.D. One of those things is the contemporary negativism by liberal politicians and religionists toward the practice of evangelical (conservative) Christianity outside of its sanctuaries, rescue missions and charities.
In the third century Roman empire, most of the conflict was fueled by distortions and ignorance of the faith, push-back from the polytheistic culture, and the effort to suppress what emperors perceived as a threat to the authority of the State. Because Christians would not, for example, participate in pagan festivals or attend Roman “games”, they were outside the mainstream. Ignorance of their beliefs even allowed rumors of incest, child sacrifice and cannibalism to spread. The conventional wisdom of the culture, generally accepted through Greek philosophies and their mystical religious counterparts, felt threatened because Christians understood religious and ethical truth to be revealed truth. Eventually Christians became perfect targets for the Roman government when it became known that they would not place the folly of the State, including Emperor worship, above the triune God of their faith.
2019 might seem long removed from that time, but it is becoming increasingly clear that those nearly 2000-year-old forces are making their play again, albeit in new costumes. Liberal career Democratic power players Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin have offered consistent not-so-subtle examples over the years. In early September of 2017, during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein, supported by other Democrats on the Committee, told Barrett that her religious “dogma live[d] loudly within [her]” and that that was “of concern”. Fourteen years ago, Feinstein Schumer and Durbin used the same tactics against William Pryor for the 11th Circuit.
Not to be outdone, junior members of Congress Sen. Mazie Hirono and Sen. Kamala Harris have been just as brazen. Just this last December, in the same context as 2017, during hearings with Brian Buescher for the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, Hirono and Harris used the same playbook. Hirono asked about the “extreme positions” of the Knights of Columbus, a conservative Catholic charitable organization of which Buescher is a member. Incredibly she went so far as to ask Buescher if he would quit the organization. Harris asked him if he opposed the “right to choose” (kill the unborn) or was against “marriage equality” (so-called marriage between homosexuals).
It may be true that none of this technically rises to the level of an Unconstitutional religious test for public office (Article VI, Section 3), but the intent was unabashedly the same. Such maneuvering around overt violations just makes it all-the-more insidious.
Many less political attacks have been on the rise. The Left in the media pounced in mid-January when conservative Christian, Second Lady Karen Pence, announced that she would be teaching art at a, gasp, private Christian school. The school requires staff and faculty to affirm beliefs that exclude homosexual applicants or adherents to “same-sex marriage”. Apparently, the idea that Pence working for a traditionalist private Christian school which upholds historic biblical standards is now anathema to the Left. Tony Perkins was accurate when he noted that liberals’ real problem is that Christian schools exist at all.
The instances of law suits, not to mention campaigns of slander and threats of violence against Christian business owners, most notably florists, wedding venues, and bakers, has been unrelenting.
In terms of openness to and tolerance of historic Christianity, the political and cultural landscape is becoming not too far removed from third-century Rome. The labels may be changed to protect the guilty, but the dynamics are the same. Liberal America is straining to push a cocktail of secularism, statism, and polytheism. Just as in 250 A.D., “religion” is acceptable for the Left if it is philosophically nonconvictional and politically obedient. Spiritually, it must be syncretistic – just one benign competitor among equals in the religious marketplace.
The problem is that over 1,900 years after its formal birth at Pentecost, Biblical historic Christianity still cannot be nonconvictional, politically obedient, or syncretism if doing so crosses the line against the revealed truth “once received” (Jude 1:3-4). It still feels threatening to self-styled emperors, eastern religious mystics, and liberals of every stripe whether they are labeled secularist or “Christian”.
Religious/ethical truth and its revelation does not depend on believability or an individual’s experience, knowledge, or ignorance of it. It can be delivered through all the beauty of poetry, analogy, and parable, as well as prose, all without human approval.
There have been at least 23 centuries of Old and New Testament transmission, preservation, translation, and secular historical confirmation. There have been modern confirmations by the applied sciences of archaeology, textual criticism, and exegesis. The final and most powerful witness, however, is what the Apostle Paul termed the “washing of regeneration (new birth) and renewing by the Holy Spirit”.
This complex of truth is the fertile soil of Biblical faith and it is what the Hironos of Congress and liberal religionists seem blinded to and why they attack its exceptionalism.