Idolatry and Spiritual Filth: The Christianity of Richard Land

https://www.christianpost.com/voices/is-the-spirit-of-1776-imperiled.html

In this editorial from The Christian Post, the reprobate militarist and Southern Baptist leader Richard Land continues to beat the drums of war. Land has produced many truly terrible and anti-Christian commentaries over the years. This ranks among the worst. I'm not sure what counterfeit Zion he inhabits but in his idolatrous pseudo-kingdom, the great Christian concern of the hour is whether or not enough young people are going to be willing to take up weapons and kill for the state.

Contrary to Land, the situation in Ukraine is not even remotely analogous to the events of 1776 which was in fact an open rebellion. But regardless of his false comparisons, flaunted ignorance, and lame historical arguments, the piece makes it clear that his thinking is fundamentally rooted in anti-kingdom ethics and permeated with idolatry. And as such it produces spiritual filth – the worldliness, mammonism, and violence that has characterised his political activism and his career. And he learns nothing from the past. If anything his views continue to grow more extreme.

In the delusion that characterizes Land's thought, there's nothing more indicative of Judeo-Christian values than the willingness to take up arms and kill for the state. Never mind the fact that he assumes the fiction that is the 'Judeo-Christian' heritage of America, and that he ignores the real Enlightenment and anti-Christian roots of America's founding.  For Land, 'moral virtue' is apparently measured by one's willingness to kill. It shouldn't surprise us as he is the author of the notorious 2002 Land Letter – the Evangelical endorsement of Bush's immoral, deceitful, and brutal invasion of Iraq – a font of atrocity and mass murder. The great Evangelical lobbyist, Land's legacy has nothing to do with Christ, virtue, or anything remotely connected to Christian or New Testament doctrine or morality. Christianity is for him little more than a veneer he can use to provide a moral narrative to his real gods – Texas and the American Empire. In other words mammon, power, and the pride of life.

And while Solzhenitsyn was far from right on many things, his primary concerns regarding the West were with regard to its decadence. The economic and political order championed by Land has played as much of a role in generating that decadence as has the corrupt Left which has over the past several generations succumbed to an equally destructive individualist absolutism and libertarian ethic – even while it has moved increasingly to the Right when it comes to its embrace of Wall Street and imperialism (dressed up as humanitarian concern of course). But Land as a partisan of the Right repeats its talking points and propaganda and like the larger movement he continues to slip in the direction of fascism – another movement that allowed false Christians to combine piety with nationalism and violence.

Land is among those who cannot even engage with Christianity as it is presented in the Bible. For him it is inconceivable apart from its civil construct which emerged with Constantine. He quotes authors but he cannot quote Scripture because it is opposed to him and in reality he hates it – especially the ethics of the New Testament. He defends neither the Church nor the Kingdom of Christ but the empires of Christendom along with the power and wealth they accumulated by killing and stealing on a massive scale – deeds done in the name of Christ and blessed by the false Church and false Christian leaders like Richard Land.

Contrary to popular perception and Right-wing myth, America of the 1950's was not moral. It's true I wouldn't have had some cross-dressing freak brewing my coffee but that doesn't mean that it was a moral society by any means. It's a question of quantity not quality – of tipped scales and a now rotten harvest. It too was built on blood, theft, international murder, individualist consumerism – and lies. Dripping with hypocrisy it was quickly slipping into decadence. Only blind leaders of the blind look back at the period and think of it as a golden age. It wasn't. It may have been better on a superficial level but the cancerous tumors were present and growing rapidly. The Greatest Generation was not that great. In fact it is best characterised by moral compromise and social transformation. Contrary to their self-serving narratives they didn't win the war – at least not in Europe. They survived the Depression but learned little from it as within just a few years they quickly succumbed to Madison Avenue tactics – and more importantly embraced its values. They were conservative when compared to today but overall the society and the values of the new suburban class were not conservative – not at their core. They lived by a new ethic and it didn't take long for it to bear the fruit we see today.

Land's comments to his son regarding the Greatest Generation are telling and yet again belie his Christian claims. Once again his Christianity as a generic civil religion is exposed. It really could be anything as long it produces an ethic that supports America and has a doctrinal system that rationalizes its deeds and justifies its evils. Land is like those who lived during the Roman Empire and lamented the good old days of the Republic and simple values. But Land doesn't understand what happened or why, or how compromised his own thinking is – nor the fact that it has nothing to do with Scripture.

Rather than lament the lies, deceit, and murder that characterised the Vietnam War, Land glories in its filth and revels in a society that produced brain-dead automatons willing to kill and be killed for an empire of lies. Because of evil men like Land, the US committed an endless string of atrocities in Indochina and millions died.

Take a moment and ponder that and consider the judgment God has sent on the Church in the form of leaders like Richard Land.

Hyper-individualism born of Enlightenment values and capitalist society has turned American culture into a herd of psychotics and Land is part of the world-affirming Evangelical movement that embraced the pseudo-science of psychology. He has nothing to say about the breakdown of today's society. He and his allies have more than played their part.

God help him. He has brought great shame and disgrace upon Christian testimony in the United States. It's because of men like Land that when someone asks if I'm Christian I am forced to reply – what do you mean by that? I would never want to just simply say 'yes' and have them think that I am of one mind with the likes of Richard Land and the anti-Christian evil he and his cohort represents. Land is exactly the kind of false teacher and Christian we're warned about in the New Testament. He is a menace to the Church and though he claims to represent the interests of Christ and come in his name, he clearly knows neither Christ nor His Gospel. The Christ of Richard Land is some kind of American Right-wing contrivance that has nothing to do with the Person revealed in Scripture. God help him and God help those who read his asinine commentaries and think they represent wisdom, godliness, or have anything to do with Biblical Christianity.