VCY-CrossTalk has Forgotten and Replaced God

The VCY radio network posted the essay below back in June - the author is the host of the misnamed 'CrossTalk' programme which is basically a shill for the John Birch Society. The Birchers make regular appearances on the show and it provides a kind of Evangelical (and sometimes Fundamentalist) vehicle for Bircher ideology. Some readers may want to scroll down and read it and then return to these comments. Others may choose to read the essay in light of this commentary.

Essays such as this one by Jim Schneider are maddening to say the least because I'm certain that many will read it uncritically and while not everything he says is false - it's all falsely framed and is replete with a glaring error (in reality a heresy) regarding the identity of the Church and Kingdom. The constant use of 'we' and 'our' confuses and conflates American identity with Christian profession leading to not just epistemological and ethical chaos but the embrace of cultural and political mythology and with it - the justification of evil.

The attempt to place a religious cast on the American founding is clear and ignores larger realities with regarding to the Founders, their influences, and objectives. The rectitude of the American Rebellion is assumed and yet without Biblical basis. In fact, the New Testament 'militates' against this very sort of thing. Taxation without Representation is not a Biblical justification to take up arms in revolt and to kill. And I found it interesting though not surprising that Schneider does not enumerate the grievances laid out by Jefferson - as many do not agree with today's Right-wing notions regarding the Revolution and government in general.

Those who take up the sword will die by it - and so it was for the Founders. In terms of Providence, they won their battle but it does not justify their cause. There are many other narratives that can be laid upon these events but none can be proved or disproved. But when weighed against Scripture the revolt cannot be supported. But as they took power, then as Christians we accept the new regime and yet we should just as easily embrace a different one should it arise. And indeed it could be argued that the United States has gone through several iterations since 1776.

One need not sympathize with the Confederacy to look askance at Lincoln's use and abuse of Scripture and his own dubious record regarding the Christian religion. For the record this author had family fighting on both sides in the American Civil War as well as both rebels and loyalists in the American Revolution. Some of us remember the phoney outpouring of religion after 9/11 as well as the pseudo-Christian platitudes of Reagan who clearly had a poor grasp of the faith to say the least - an episode repeated with the younger Bush and Trump.

But Schneider has chosen to take the line about forgetting God from Lincoln and apply it in manipulative fashion to the hot button social issues of the day. He seems to think that if presidents declare the nation Christian - then it is so. How a nation can be Christian is a question that needs to be asked? Can a nation be baptized? Does the Holy Spirit indwell a nation? Is the nation in union with Christ? Is it justified, sanctified, elected? The only way the statement can make any sense is to redefine the term Christian - which is another gospel. It is this false gospel that Schneider the disciple of the John Birch Society and the American idolater promotes.

Has America forgotten God? It did so when it took up arms against George III. It did so when it stole lands, lied, cheated, and murdered the Indians. America is a land of individualist freedom but it has never been interested in the ethics of the New Testament. It is a land of self-promotion, mammon, and war. It is soaked in blood and lies. In other words, it's not unique, exceptional, or indispensable. It's a nation and empire like so many others. If it's unique in terms of Christianity then it's worse for unlike the nations of old Christendom with their dynasties that ruled by the grace of God - Christianity in America combined the faith with Enlightenment ideology creating a new, subversive, and thus very dangerous hybrid that has now in our day gone to seed. It's internal contradictions have reached the point of crisis and it risks implosion.

America turned its back on God long ago. This is not to say there aren't Christians in America or that their presence has influenced society but not nearly as much as some like Schneider think. Much of what he assumes is Christianity - the wealth, patriotism and the like is alien to the New Testament. The idea that the corporate sector, the Boy Scouts, the military or any of these institutions Schneider lauds and laments are somehow Christian just reveals the nature and scope of his confusion.

America is a godless wicked society but that was no less true in the 1950's when there was a veneer of Christianity - itself a product of fear and manipulation, a reaction to the latest episode of 'Red Scare'. Nineteenth century America was a wicked place and the seeds were planted for the wickedness of the Twentieth century as well.

The Church has forgotten God and this is largely due to corrupt and blind leaders like Schneider that teach the people of God to think about power, politics, and thus wealth. The Church needs to return to the Scripture at which point two things would happen. One, the churches would empty as most American Christians have no interest in the religion of the New Testament or Christ and are hostile to both. And two, those that did engage with Scripture and submit to the teachings of the New Testament would turn their backs on the likes of Schneider, realizing the degree of error and danger he represents.

Here is the sad and tragic irony to this - Schneider has not only forgotten God but he has replaced Him with a god of his own making, and an American Patriot and Capitalist religion that thinks godliness is gain, whose servants worship their bellies, who obsess about this world and its cares and glories. They have a form of godliness but deny the power thereof. From such turn away.

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"We Have Forgotten God"

By Jim Schneider, Executive Director

VCY America

It was on July 4, 1776 that the Continental Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence. A draft had been submitted on July 2^nd and it was on the 4^th that the edits and changes were agreed.  Now 248 years later the importance of this date and of this document must not be forgotten.

In 1776 those living in the American colonies were outraged at the control that England bore over them. The Declaration carefully laid out their grievances as to why they were breaking away from Great Britain.

In all, there were 56 signers who were representatives from the 13 colonies. Their ages ranged from 26 (Edward Rutledge) to 70 (Benjamin Franklin), but the majority of the signers were in their 30’s and 40’s. More than half were lawyers, and others were planters, merchants and shippers. Together they mutually pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. They were mostly men of means who had much to lose if the war was lost. Some of the signers were taken captive during the war and nearly all of them were poorer at the end of the war than at the beginning.

A Constitution and Bill of Rights were later drafted providing the framework for the freedoms we cherish today.

America has been a nation that acknowledged, reverenced, and honored God. Many leaders were not ashamed to honor God in our political bodies, in the nation’s schools in textbooks, in print media, in the churches, in the homes and in everyday living. We have gotten way off course in the relatively short time that we’ve been a nation. We have been off course before, and without question we are off course now.

Our nation has been blessed. We are a land of plenty, rich in minerals and natural resources, and with lots of farmland and produce. And we are blessed with freedoms that others in many parts of the world can only dream.

It is likely that Abraham Lincoln came to recognize the significance of Psalm 33:12. “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance.” His Presidency guided the nation during some very tumultuous times as this nation was being ripped apart at the seams through a Civil War.

The Civil War was the deadliest war in our nation’s history with some 620,000 deaths. That’s more deaths than the U.S. suffered in World War I, World War II, Viet Nam and Korea combined. Not only was there a physical battle going on, but there was very much a spiritual battle facing the nation. Our nation was less than 100 years old as the Civil War ensued. On March 30, 1863 Abraham Lincoln included Psalm 33:12 in a Proclamation Appointing a National Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer. Lincoln wrote in part,

And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.

And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Can you image such a proclamation being issued today?

On August 23, 1984, President Ronald Reagan spoke at a Dallas Prayer Breakfast saying,“Without God, there is no virtue, because there is no prompting of the conscience. Without God, we’re mired in the material, that flat world that tells us only what our senses can perceive. Without God, there is a coarsening of society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under!”

After September 11, 2001 churches across the nation were filled to capacity. Congressman gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol singing “God Bless America”. Marquees at businesses across the nation encouraged people to pray for God to bless this nation.

Each year on the anniversary of 9/11 then President Bush called for a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. In the years after, this was changed to a National Day of Service and Remembrance.  The words of Abraham Lincoln appear to be true once again. “We have forgotten God.”

In April, 2009, then President Obama said “…we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”

As a nation we have drifted afoul of God’s Word and the principles it lays forth. We have killed over 65 million babies in the name of “choice”.We have forgotten God.

On June 26, 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned so-called “same sex marriage.”We have forgotten God.

We have changed military policy allowing open homosexuality and transgenderism. The Boy Scouts have dropped “Boy” from their name and have caved to the homosexual and transgender agenda. We have forgotten God.

This year in his National Day of Prayer Proclamation, Governor Tony Evers never mentions or refers to the name of God. We have forgotten God.

Corporate America is falling in line with this moral erosion and bending over backwards to celebrate “pride” and immorality. We have forgotten God.

Classrooms across the nation have become indoctrination centers for the DEI movement, aberrant lifestyles and undermining parental authority.  University campuses are awash with anti-Semitism. We have forgotten God.

As a nation, we must again humble ourselves before God, calling upon Him in repentance and seeking His forgiveness. This is not only required of our nation, but must also be practiced by our churches, our families, and by ourselves!

Have you forgotten God?