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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

STOP CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL RELIGION

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Too many political conservatives with biblical values as their base have inadvertently turned their zeal into a religion without realizing it.


What happens when political conservatives turn their social activism into a religion?


It subtly wipes out God as God.


I hear conservatives go on and on about this issue and another. They are in reality positing their own human options for fixing America in particular.


This means talking about who conservatives can locate as their ‘real leader’. It focuses on how to turn liberalism around with one political tool or another.


These well-meaning citizens give forth on how to save the Republic by one logical move or another. And so forth.


What occurs when this kind of dialogue persists? And I mean persisting to an ‘over the line’ position.


It means that world-think moves in place of simple-faith-in-God-being-God. Very easily world think can overtake an American biblical believer for we are socially conditioned to assume logic as prime mover.


We are so quick to opt for reasoning out life situations, especially the present national sludge.


However, biblical believers know that world-think is basically carnal. It is the opposite of simple faith.


Now simple faith is difficult for American biblical believers for they privately consider simple faith as the edge of ignorance. For some, it is naïve to the dangerous degree.


Not so. Simple faith is the call of deity throughout Scripture. For instance, God told Moses to take his rod, place it upon the Red Sea and then watch what would happen.


Moses held to simple faith, followed through as a child, and the Sea separated.


God told Noah to build an ark for it was
going to rain for the first time in planetary history.


Noah took many years to build a huge vessel, never once seeing a drop of rain from the skies. But he acted in simple, naïve, child-like faith.


Jesus told His disciples that on the third day He would resurrect. They didn’t get it. Yet they got the significance of simple faith when resurrected Jesus scolded His followers on their lack of understanding concerning the ‘third day’ resurrection.


Today biblical believing conservatives active in political concern must pull back their world-think for simple faith.


That means quite a gulp for some in that they have taken on completely the O’Reilly/Beck catechism as gospel truth. How indeed could any thinking person ever give up on that?


Yet that is exactly what biblically believing conservative politically sensitive thinking persons must do. Yes, O’Reilly and Beck and colleagues are on track. They are valuable.


But they are to be marginalized for the biblical believer. At present, too many such believers make them center pieces. Not good for the spiritual condition of the Republic.


Genuine American Christians must wake up every morning with the hope-filled prayer to God that more and more grassroots believers increase their faith in God’s network for this country. It must be God’s network. His ways and thoughts are far above the conservative politically sensitive.


Buoyed faith from the ‘little people’ of God will turn this nation around because they believe solely in God’s work set forefront.


Such people are asked to hold the rod over the sea. They are asked to build the vessel under divine instruction. They are to believe with all their hearts that Jesus is in fact is risen from the dead.


This same resurrection-powered God then has the might to do what He pleases in His own way for America.


I believe that this God will do what He wants; but it certainly would help the country’s spirit health if His children kept step with Him rather than turn their conservative paradigm into a new religion.