Where are the Lions?

I recall a youthful Sunday in church when this warning from Jesus totally baffled me: “you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me.” (MT 24:9, LK 21:17).

Huh?! Everybody was a Christian. In fact, it seemed to me to be just the opposite, if you weren’t a Christian, you were more likely to be scorned. I simply could not conceive of being in a threatened position by being a Christian. [However, years later I DID feel so threatened by being a follower of Jesus, which is NOT necessarily the same as being “Christian.” A subsequent essay will detail this experience].

Ever since, I had often wondered just how that kind of persecution would be and what turn of events would have to occur before we “Christians” would experience what Jesus was talking about. Would the butcher, the baker or burger maker suddenly scowl as a believer walked by? Would the cop on the beat or political powers that be clamp down on us a la Nazi Germany and the Jews?

The early Christians in Rome came to mind. Visions of lions devouring our faithful-unto-death bodies, releasing our souls to eternity, consumed me, even though I supposed the Christian-riddin’ death machine would more probably match the technology of the times. In America, and most of the world, cries of persecution are ludicrously false.

Yet hearing the shouts of many Christians today, one would think Christianity is under a severe state of siege. Cackles from the highest tabernacles cry “persecution!!” Behind every “Happy Holidays,” every Constitutionalist separator of church and state, every proponent of equal treatment for all people under the law lurks the lion of Christian persecution.

These pretensions are a total distortion of Jesus’ teachings and they demean the very real persecutions of the early Christians. In fact they are nothing more than a part of the plan to instill Christianity as the official state religion, wrongly entwining it within our government.

Hmmm, you might ask—“What’s wrong with having God direct our affairs, we even print our money with ‘In God We Trust’?” Here is the disconnect: First, God, as perceived by the deists who founded our country, and the Universal Moralists today, is truly universal in nature, as such God is God as God of all—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, Jew, Protestant, Zoroastrian, even agnostic and atheist.

Second, the Christian crusade to revolutionize America is totally against the teachings, principles and life of Jesus himself, the namesake and central figure upon which Christianity supposedly exists!

Jesus would never “Lord” himself over anybody. He never sought to create a political order, a government or nation. Indeed Jesus said: “MY KINGDOM IS NOT OF THIS WORLD. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place." John 18:36.

On the contrary, today’s evangelicals have become a political monolith, the surging wind beneath the Republican Party and part of the GOP’s very strategy for dominance. Their leadership uses lies, deceit, raw power and military might, packaging Manifest Destiny and end-times prophecy to energize and enthuse its Evangelical base.

Why do the “Left Behind” Christians fail to see the vast difference between their actions and Jesus’ teachings? Jesus himself said that “…I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me." John 18:37. And that truth is nowhere more clear than in his Sermon on the Mount (MT 5:3-10), the TRUTH that God blesses those who put their faith in God, not man-made weaponry or ideologies, that God blesses the mournful, the gentle and lowly, those hungering for justice and work for peace, those who are merciful and whose hearts are pure, and finally God blesses those persecuted—TRULY persecuted—for righteousness sake. To all these will come God’s Kingdom.

Instead, the current leadership preaches division, fear and hatred. They constantly stoke the fires of the “Clash of Civilizations” between Islam and Christianity—a lie, a damned lie, if there ever was one. They preach fear and hatred of anything that varies with their own version of the truth, be it evolution, stem-cell research, animal rights, or equal human rights.

It is one thing to preach the Gospel (the TRUTH) to all nations as Jesus directed, but quite another to force upon any nation, including our own, a man-made religious doctrine about how to interpret, teach and live by that truth. Otherwise we end up with lies, damned lies, and falsities that discard truth, that throw science in the trash and exalts “biblical inerrancy.”

Subsequent essays will show that much of the Bible is allegorical as well as contextual, but suffice it to say that the mentality that IS NOW CONTROLLING our nation’s government is the same that denounced Galileo for saying that the universe did not revolve around the earth, but that the earth revolved around the sun.

Today, the lion devours truth, and it often wears a Christian mantle.

Rfd 6/18/06

POSTSCRIPT:

Kevin Phillip’s latest book, American Theocracy, foretells the disaster facing America should we fail to check the ruinous confluence of religious fanaticism, unprecedented national debt and the inevitable decline of oil. Phillips, a former REPUBLICAN strategist and Nixon Administration member, is a stickler for the lessons of history, and he compares the nearly exact scenarios that faced—and brought down—both the Dutch and the English in centuries past.