Implosion (34 page)

Likewise, the founders understood that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Therefore they also believed that government’s role and power must be limited and must include a system of checks and balances to prevent any one branch or party or person from becoming too powerful and abusing the rights of the very people they were sworn to protect. “I am . . . a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power,” Benjamin Franklin said. “I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly.”
[437]

Time and time again, the men involved in forming our system of government drew from and pointed to the Bible. Professor Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston once did a fascinating study on the influence of the Bible on our founders and the political system they established. Lutz reviewed “916 pamphlets, books, and newspaper essays” written during the period 1760–1805. The sample, he noted, included “virtually all the pamphlets and essays from the 1780s by Federalists and Antifederalists concerning the Constitution.” In those documents, Lutz counted 3,154 references to 224 individuals. He found that far and away the largest number of citations—34 percent—came directly from the Bible or from sermons quoting the Bible.
[438]

What, then, should we expect of the American federal government at this point in our history? It’s not rocket science. We should rediscover and vigorously reassert the basic principles of government that our Founding Fathers established in our principal documents, while obviously correcting for their unfortunate mistakes, such as not protecting the civil and political rights of all Americans, including women and minorities. We should, therefore, expect our leaders to:

• Once again honor the Declaration of Independence, which holds that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
[439]

• Truly preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

• Get back to respecting the Tenth Amendment, which asserts that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
[440]

In other words, Washington needs to get focused once again on what the Constitution directs the federal government to do and stop wasting precious time and money monkeying around with everything else. To be precise, Washington needs to make these basic principles its top priorities:

• Protect the sanctity of innocent life from conception to natural death.

• Protect traditional marriage between one man and one woman, the building block of human civilization.

• Protect the American people from all threats, both foreign and domestic, that would threaten our lives, liberties, and property.

• Strengthen our military and care for our troops.

• Protect our borders and defend American sovereignty.

• Establish justice, protect our civil rights, punish criminals (especially violent ones), and appoint wise and sensible federal judges and Supreme Court justices who will uphold the Constitution, not legislate from the bench.

• Protect Americans’ freedom to save, invest, start small businesses, grow those businesses, create jobs, and provide for their families.

• Create the proper conditions for economic growth and innovation. This can be done in part by making tax rates as low as possible and by radically simplifying the federal tax code; this also means setting fair rules and vigorously enforcing those rules—but not trying to use federal power to solve every problem through legislation and regulation.

• Balance the federal budget by limiting the size and scope of government, cutting waste and duplication, returning key responsibilities back to the states, and reforming federal entitlement programs.

• Get out of debt.

• Maintain a sound and stable currency.

• And don’t make promises you can’t or won’t keep.

Given the mess that we are in, will it be easy to reassert the principles espoused by our Founding Fathers? No, it won’t. It will take men and women of deep conviction, character, and courage to get us back on the right track. But one thing is certain: we have no hope unless we try.

A Spiritual and Political Journey

For as long as I can remember, I have had a fascination with American politics, and I have long wrestled with the question of just what role—if any—a Christian should play in politics. Should believers stick to preaching and teaching the Word of God, sharing the gospel, and making disciples, and steer clear of all things political? Should we avoid altogether the political process of electing our leaders and advocating certain policies because it’s a “dirty game”? Or should we engage in the political arena to protect our God-given rights and advance our biblical values? Should we actively resist the onslaught of secular humanism in our schools, our courts, our legislatures, and in the White House even if it’s a hard, brutal, no-holds-barred battle for the heart and soul of America?

These are challenging questions. And given that the stakes are now so high, never has it been more important for Christians in America to wrestle with them and come to solid, defensible conclusions.

Let me take a few moments here to share some of my own story, in the interest of full disclosure and so you can get a sense of how I’ve drawn my conclusions.

In the fourth grade, I did a book report on
All the President’s Men
by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and found myself disgusted by the corruption inside the administration of President Richard Milhous Nixon. Sometime around then, I remember chastising my only living grandmother when I learned that she had voted for Nixon in 1968 and then again for his reelection in 1972. “How could you do that, Grammie?” I asked. “How could you vote for Nixon when he was such a crook?” She, of course, like many Republicans, hadn’t known in 1972 that Nixon was guilty of crimes against the Constitution. She didn’t imagine that Nixon would face impeachment and leave office in disgrace. She believed at the time that the charges were being trumped up by Nixon’s enemies. What’s more, she deeply disagreed with the liberal policies of George McGovern, the Democrats’ nominee, and feared for where McGovern would take the country. But she didn’t try to defend herself to me that day. She just smiled and gave me a hug and told me to go back outside and play.

With the notable exception of my Republican-voting Grammie, I like to joke that my family were “Democrats going back to the Bolsheviks.” My mother was literally a “bra-burning, tree-hugging, liberal Democrat” in the 1960s and early 1970s. My father was also a liberal Democrat, as were his Jewish parents and his Jewish grandparents (who escaped from Russia) before them.

My parents both came to faith in Jesus Christ in 1973. But they didn’t suddenly decide to bolt out of the Democratic Party. They, like millions of evangelical Christians, voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. They were repulsed by Watergate and were looking for an honest leader in Washington. They were attracted to Carter’s willingness to openly describe himself as a “born-again Christian.”

But over the next few years, they became deeply disappointed by Carter’s failed economic policies and disastrous foreign policies. By 1980, my parents ended up voting for a Republican presidential candidate—Ronald Reagan—for the first time in their lives. They voted again for Reagan in 1984, two of millions of “Reagan Democrats”—a movement made up largely of disaffected evangelical Protestant Christians and blue-collar Catholics who not only favored Reagan’s pro-growth, pro-freedom economic and military policies but who could no longer abide by the Democratic Party’s increasingly far-left agenda of support for abortion on demand, capitulation to the gay-rights movement, and timidity in the face of the evil Soviet Empire. My parents went on to vote for George H. W. Bush in 1988 and actually reregistered as Republicans in the early 1990s, during what became known as the “Republican Revolution” to take control of Congress from the Democrats.

What I eventually noticed in my parents’ journey was that a person’s political views are often lagging indicators of his or her spiritual views. Yes, my parents had had a radical change of spiritual beliefs in 1973 when they stopped being agnostics and accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. But that didn’t immediately translate into changed political views. It took time for them to reconsider their worldview through the third lens of Scripture, and longer still to wrestle through whether—and how—to apply their newly developing core spiritual convictions to the political issues of the day. However, the deeper they went in their faith, the more determined they became to find candidates who better represented their values. They had numerous and strong disagreements with the old, establishment, country-club elements of the Republican Party and various GOP candidates. But as time went by, they felt increasingly more at home with the millions of evangelical ex-Democrats who were forming the conservative, pro-life, pro-family, pro-freedom, Reaganite base of the new Republican Party. Not all followers of Jesus Christ have drawn the same political conclusions, of course, but clearly millions have. This has had a dramatic, transformative impact on the American political scene in recent decades as more Christian conservatives have been elected to public office and more conservative judges have been appointed to the bench.

My parents, however, were way ahead of me. In 1975, I prayed to receive Christ as my Savior. For the next decade or so, I grew as a new Christian, but I can’t say I was as deeply serious about my faith as I should have been. Then, in my junior year of high school, God began to shake my personal world in an effort to wake me up and draw me closer to him. Our church experienced a severe split over some important theological issues. My family left the church, and as a result I rarely saw any of the closest friends I’d had growing up. During this time I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t have a best friend. I was anxious about college and my future, and I began to slip into a depression in the fall of 1983. As I lost emotional altitude, my grades started slipping, and I began withdrawing from my family. I became angry with God and doubtful that Christianity was either real or relevant.

And then, completely unexpectedly, I had a powerful and very personal experience with Jesus Christ in January 1984. God shook me to my core and made it clear to me that he wasn’t happy with the shallowness of my relationship with him. One bitterly cold winter night, I was essentially yelling at the Lord in the privacy of my room. I was bitter and confused. “You say that you promise love and joy and peace and hope and happiness, and I don’t have any of it,” I told God. “So either all this Christianity stuff is a joke, or I totally don’t get it.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d had such a blow-up session with God, but it was to be the last. Suddenly I heard the Lord speak directly back to me. Whether it was audible or not I cannot say, but it might as well have been, because the message was loud and clear. “Joel, do you ever really study my Word?” God asked me. Stunned, I thought about it for a few moments and finally had to say no. Obviously I had read the Bible from time to time in my life, but the blunt truth was I had never been serious about knowing the Scriptures for myself. Then God said, “Joel, do you ever spend time talking to me in prayer?” Immediately I was deeply ashamed of myself. Again I had to say no. Of course I had said prayers now and then, but I had never been serious about talking to—or listening to—the Lord.

At that point, God lowered the boom. “Then, Joel, why would you expect to experience my blessings when you don’t even really know me?” Then the transmission, as it were, ceased.

But rather than be further depressed by my obvious shallowness and disobedience, I was electrified. Christ had spoken directly to me! In his mercy, he hadn’t punished me for expressing my emotions and directing my blunt questions to him. On the contrary, he kept his word. As Jeremiah 29:11-13 says, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the L
ORD
, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (NIV).

God had just shown me what I was doing wrong. He had revealed to me the reason for my discouragement and depression and had shown me how to change. I had been ignoring the basics of the faith, and as a result, God had allowed me to experience the emptiness and sadness of being distant from him. But these were simple enough changes to make, and from that point forward, I became voracious about studying the Bible (starting with John’s Gospel) and spending long hours with the Lord in prayer. That’s when my own personal revival began, in the winter of my junior year of high school.

Suddenly my faith really started to take off. My parents and I changed churches and began attending a congregation where the young people were passionate about knowing Christ and making him known and where the leaders actively taught us how to live not in our own meager strength and wisdom but in the power of the Holy Spirit. That summer I went on a missions trip to Los Angeles with other high school and college students to share the gospel with people from all over the world who were attending the Olympics. I was terrified but at the same time exhilarated.

That fall, as I began my senior year, I sensed God leading me to start a small prayer and evangelism group at my high school. Again it was terrifying, but that small group (which we called “Christ for Life”) saw God open up all kinds of doors to share Christ, and we saw kids get saved.

The following year, in the fall of 1985, I entered Syracuse University as a freshman and joined a student ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”). I developed many lifelong friendships and was discipled by a CCC staffer and later by my pastor, T. E. Koshy, the evangelical chaplain at SU. I also became active in sharing my faith with dozens of students on campus and on a summer missions trip to the Soviet Union.