One of the things that has bothered me over the last several years is the tax-exempt status of US churches. It’s true that it’s helpful, but it’s also true that once the government has its hooks in you by conferring a special status, it then has leverage over you. The government can make demands or restrict the activities of the church as the price you pay for their indulgence.
Covid-19 anyone?
I have thought several times that there may come a day when the church will have to give up its tax-exempt status in order to stay true to its calling. That may mean going back to house churches, small gatherings without a formal organizational structure.
That’s the topic of the introduction to the following sermon that pastor Gary Hamrick of Cornerstone Chapel delivered on September 8. He mentions the 1954 Johnson amendment which, on the surface, is unconstitutional.
The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. tax code, since 1954, that prohibits all 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates.
The Johnson amendment is currently being challenged in court and Cornerstone Chapel is a party to the proceedings.
Hamrick takes us back to the early years of the founding era and observes that pastors freely spoke of politics in their sermons. He mentions a two-volume series called “Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805” (which I have on my shelf and recommend if you’re interested in that era). His point is that pastors used to be able to freely speak on what was happening politically in the colonies and then in the newly formed United States of America.
After his introduction he goes on to make three points about our responsibility to vote and why it’s important that we do. I post his sermon here because I think it’s worth listening to as we approach November 5.
I’ve cued it to the second point of his message, which is that we should “vote policies over personalities,” and he then goes on to discuss seven policies that a candidate will influence. I strongly urge you to listen to at least the 15 minutes devoted to those issues.
I know not all readers of this blog are Christians, but I think the majority of us are conservative. Even if you’re not a believer, you can better understand why someone of the faith thinks the way we do about these issues.
If you have the time, I’d encourage you to listen to the whole thing.
I often find myself mourning the death of historical, traditional America. I sit in my middle class home in my middle class neighborhood, enjoying the fruit of my labor, watching my children take their next steps into adulthood, thanking God for His grace and goodness, and it seems so … normal. It’s more or less what I grew up with and it’s what I want to leave to the generations who come after me.
Yet pull out to 50,000 feet and it’s anything but “normal.” Victor Davis Hanson, or VDH as he’s known, put his finger on it in his most recent column: “The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.”
He goes on to catalogue the catastrophe that the Left has wrought on the country, starting with the damning Durham report.
The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges.
The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign—while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.
The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat out lied it was likely “Russian disinformation.” That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.
Note that not one of the offenders have been called to account for their malfeasance.
Not. One.
This is not only the most egregious political crime in the history of the United States — yes, much greater than Watergate — it’s an outrageous betrayal of the social contract binding our country together. It’s a massive corruption of our legal and political system, which effectively demolishes the Constitutional order and makes us, what?
It’s not the United States of America.
VDH goes on to list the Black Grievance Grift that’s splitting us apart while the lead agitators enrich themselves; the political persecution of a young Marine who restrained a man threatening passengers on the subway — a hero in any other age now mortified as a vigilante with the perpetrator lauded as a victim of racism and oppression; and the degradation of athletic competition as biological males routinely beat female competitors in women’s sports. And then:
Under pressure from the LGBTQ activists, the Los Angeles Dodgers reinvited the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” to celebrate Pride night at Dodger Stadium.
Catholics and Christians had objected to the invitation because the group’s notoriety hinges on its sexualized and often pornographic mockery of Catholic ritual, the Holy Trinity, and Christian faith.
The supposedly courageous group would never dare extend its street-theater blasphemy to other religious groups such as Muslims or Hindus.
As goes baseball, so goes the country. America’s pastime may be much diminished from its golden age, but in a culturally fractured moment nostalgia makes it all the more important as a symbol. So it is worth noting, suggesting something of catacombs, when the Los Angeles Dodgers would rather offend Christians and sitting U.S. senators than risk the wrath of the homosexual lobby.
[…]
A decade, then, at least for one professional baseball organization, is how long it takes for pro-gay to become anti-Christian. This is baseball, recall; the team needn’t really have ever taken a public position on the sexual revolution, let alone prostrate, but here it is, and it says much more about American culture as a whole than about the Dodgers in particular. There was a culture war, once, and you lost.
[…]
But think for a moment about what has happened here. A large-market baseball team—an avatar of American culture and big business—was pressured by religious groups and a sitting U.S. senator to maintain a recently expected standard of public decorum. They did not protest a Pride Night and the Dodgers’ celebration of sexual expressivism, only an obviously anti-Catholic and even anti-Christian demonstration. This was a request for toleration from a position of weakness. And now there is no hesitation to trample.
I encourage you to read the whole thing (both VDH and Meadowcroft). They don’t even touch on the open border with hundreds of thousands of foreigners being allowed to violate our sovereignty, the ramifications of which we can’t even imagine; the coordinated lawsuits against parents and schools for not allowing their children to be sexualized; the profound revelation that elections in swing states are in fact rigged (and there’s no strategy adopted for fixing it); the lawlessness allowed to go unchallenged in Democrat-led cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Austin, Portland and any number of hellholes in between; and much more evidence that this is not your father’s America.
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ apology letter re-inviting the anti-Catholic Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Pride Night reads like the unwinding of a grueling struggle session. And it ends in a predictably pitiful way, with the reactionaries promising “to better educate” themselves in the future.
In contemporary parlance, to “educate” oneself means allowing intellectually and morally stunted clowns — literally, in this case — to bully you. Because LGBT activists, like BLM activists, never need to be “educated” about anything. They have achieved enlightenment.
No, it’s the slack-jawed yokels who cling to thousands of years of intellectual and theological tradition who need lessons from the geniuses who spend Easter Sunday dressed in Virgin Mary drag, passing out condoms on a 13-stop bar crawl mocking the Stations of the Cross. The Dodgers are merely celebrating diversity by sponsoring a group that simulates sex scenes on crucifixes. Why are you fanatics starting another culture war?
Daily Verse | 2 Chronicles 3:1 Then Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father David.
Put another week and month into the history books. It’s Friday and the end of April. When no one is looking I play bagpipes in a kilt.
I wrote yesterday about the Big Guy’s speech to an audience about half as large as Donald Trump’s first SOTU speech drew. The Resident’s 81 million “voters” can’t stand to listen to him either I guess. I sat through it because it’s culturally and politically relevant and fits with the purpose of this blog. Otherwise I would’ve just read the reports.
What I didn’t watch, and wish I had stuck around for, was the Republican Party’s rebuttal given by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC). So I watched it today and, just as many others have said, it was an earnest and principled response to the pablum that Joey “You Ain’t Black” McMumbles fed us.
I want to note first that Tim Scott speaks plainly throughout his speech about his Christian faith.
“This past year, I’ve watched COVID attack every rung of the ladder that helped me up. So many families have lost parents and grandparents too early. So many small businesses have gone under. Becoming a Christian transformed my life — but for months, too many churches were shut down. Most of all, I am saddened that millions of kids have lost a year of learning when they could not afford to lose a single day.”
He refers to his “prayin’ momma,” original sin, and ends his speech with lyrics from a worship song. Faith, culture and politics—all rolled into one speech!
In his rebuttal, Scott first took Biden to task for promising unity, that he would be a president for “all Americans,” as if Trump been the divisive one. But as is quickly becoming clear, it’s Resident Biden and his Band of Junior Commies who are waging war on us.
He promised to unite a nation. To lower the temperature. To govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted. That was the pitch. You just heard it again. But our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes. We need policies and progress that bring us closer together.
But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart.
Scott then set the theme of his speech: “I want to have an honest conversation about common sense and common ground. About this feeling that our nation is sliding off its shared foundation and how we move forward together.” I don’t think anyone on this side of the aisle would deny that it’s more than a feeling that our nation “is sliding off it’s shared foundation.”
I encourage you to listen to the whole thing. He’s not a super-polished speaker, but he’s sincere, thoughtful and a voice of reason.
The most poignant part of his speech, in my opinion, was when he addressed the issue of race relations in our country. Yes, he says, racism does exist in the United States.
Nowhere do we need common ground more desperately than in our discussions of race. I have experienced the pain of discrimination. I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason; to be followed around a store while I’m shopping.
I remember, every morning, at the kitchen table, my grandfather would open the newspaper and read it, I thought. Later, I realized he had never learned to read it. He just wanted to set the right example. I’ve also experienced a different kind of intolerance. I get called “Uncle Tom” and the N-word — by “progressives.” By liberals.
This is true. In fact, as if to help him prove his point, “Uncle Tim” was trending on Twitter for 12-hours before being pulled down by Jackboot Dorsey and his Marxist minions. Scott then exposes the nonsense behind the division.
When America comes together, we’ve made tremendous progress. But powerful forces want to pull us apart. A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic — and if they looked a certain way, they were inferior.
Today, kids are being taught that the color of their skin defines them again — and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor. From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we’ve worked so hard to heal.
You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country. It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.
His admonition that you don’t fight discrimination with discrimination reminds me of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s quote, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” But the anti-Americans aren’t interested in logic, reason or reality. They’re only interested in power and forcibly cramming their Marxist ideology down our collective throats.
Scott draws his speech to a close with an uplifting vision of what America is and can be.
Our best future won’t come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams. It will come from you — the American people. Black, Hispanic, white, and Asian. Republican and Democrat. Brave police officers and black neighborhoods.
We are not adversaries. We are family! We are all in this together.
And we get to live in the greatest country on Earth. The country where my grandfather, in his 94 years, saw his family go from cotton to Congress in one lifetime. So I am more than hopeful — I am confident — that our finest hour is yet to come.
Original sin is never the end of the story. Not in our souls, and not for our nation. The real story is always redemption.
It’s a compelling story and one that our country desperately needs to hear. But to read the hostile responses to Scott’s speech suggests that those who need to hear it have rejected it.
Tim Scott is a living example that America’s defining feature isn’t racism, but personal liberty and responsibility. Don’t let the loudmouths have the last word.