The Enemy Within

Spotifty is a great thing. I would never have signed up on my own, but one day Wendy told me that we now had a family Spotify account. Great. So I've been tooling around through all the old records that I remember. Hey, they even have stuff like I heard when I was a toddler. Anyone remember The Medical Mission Sisters with "Joy is Like the Rain?" Anyhow among all the other memory lane strollings, I used to really like Kerry Livgren's post Kansas group AD so I downloaded Time Line (the album) for a listen. Not bad at all but quite dated. One track stands out. New Age Blues. Brings back such memories. Memories of a church that thought it was under siege from values and experiences it had not known before. Afraid of demonic influences. Afraid of it knew not what. And lashing out against this perceived threat to its existence...

Fast forward to today. The influence of the New Age on the church might actually have been quite positive. The involvement of imagination and feeling in our prayer life has been an avenue for the Holy Spirit to communicate that just wasn't there before. We are now more open to God being present in the thought life of those with other worldviews-- i.e. western rationalism is no longer baptized as the only way to understand the Gospel. We are maybe not quite as dyed-in-the-wool about things as we used to be. And yet we elected Trump. How can this be? (I am painfully lumping myself in with Christians I disagree with in America here. I do relate to their motivation, even though convinced against it. I write this way because there are corresponding forces in my home and native land among Christians that would have elected a junior Trump in Andrew Scheer.)

My answer is that I think we were great at identifying enemies from without but we were blind to the enemy we carried within. This enemy, not a simple entity by any stretch, might be labelled fear or pride or narrow-mindedness or legalism or any one of dozens of labels which only partially describe it. It can only really be identified by its narrative and its results. The narrative is one of once more being under siege, this time from the scientific community, the news media, the unions, the educators, the medical community and so on. But now we have political power of our own, “friends” in the media who will echo and intensify our distrust, and don’t forget the population to force the situation to swing in our favour. Population is an important one. While those of our neighbours who had other views were carefully guarding the world from overcrowding, we were breeding an army of sometimes narrow-minded, but almost always conservative home-schoolers to legally stuff the ballot boxes. So it was that we really gained the upper hand, but we never admitted it. After all what good would it be to live without the fear of being over run by socialists? We might actually have space to breathe the free air and think other thoughts. And anyway we had a few trophies that we were dead set on taking. These trophies had eluded us for decades but were now in our grasp-- if only we could get a president elected who could tip the SCOTUS balance in our favour. And here he came, as the scriptures put it, “to deceive even the elect” and no matter how else morally, mentally, stupidly unfit for office, we labelled him “God’s Man” and ushered him in.

So we won. Brett Kavanagh may yet down Roe vs. Wade. Other trophies regarding the definition of “Family” may yet come. But what has that got us? Let’s start with the word “Evangelical.” Nowadays, when people hear that precious word they don’t think, as they ought, “Those people are really all about the Gospel (The Evangel!) of the Kingdom.” They think of us as those bitter sods who can’t see the need of protecting the mother’s wellbeing through strong and well-funded social welfare after bearing this child we sooo cared about through pregnancy. They think of us as those who lash out in fear and judgment against those who are honestly convinced of their alternative gender identity. They think of us as those who would sell out our country to the rich and powerful and cheer as they vote themselves yet more money and power at everyone else’s expense. They think of us as those who confuse God with Country and support what can only be described as imperialist wars all around the world. They think of us as those who lap up the oil-driven conservative views on global warming and think blithely that the whole thing really isn’t in crisis. Yes, the Evangel (The Good News!) has suffered at our hands.

So the enemy within has put us in a pretty bad place. And it really remains to be seen where to go from here. How do you change a controlling narrative? How do you change decades of telling our kids not to trust what the hippies would have called the Establishment even while we became the Establishment? How do you unconvince people conditioned to hear the evil word communist every time there is a just call for government funding, intervention, and regulation? How do you break the my-little-kingdom-ism which motivates us to vote for the party which promises tax cuts-- tax cuts that will make it impossible for the government to support those less fortunate? (And how do we do that in time for the world not to end?)