Hanukkah and American Patriotism

Thousands of years ago, a particular people lived in exile in their own land. The king, who despised them and everything they stood for, enacted a totalitarian cultural campaign to completely re-engineer their society. He declared their religion illegal, desecrated their temple and erected a statue of himself. Government forces prohibited time-honored customs that the people held dear, drove public expressions of faith from the public square, and even told the people what they could and could not eat. Needless to say, taxation was draconian. Under intense political, economic and social pressure, many of the people conformed. 

But others turned to God and stood fast. In the face of colossal odds, they united and were led to victory by Judah Maccabee, who has come to be known as a universal hero in the struggle for religious liberty. However, it is neither his military or political victory that Jewish people celebrate each year during Hanukkah. Rather, they celebrate how the people rededicated their temple and the renewal of their purpose as a special nation under God, to be a light to the world. 

The founders of America drew inspiration from Israel’s special sense of purpose because they knew that we would be a special nation, a city on a hill, if we held fast to our values of liberty, justice, faith in God, and e pluribus unum (from many, one). They knew that such a great aspiration and destiny could not be regulated into existence by a theocratic government. Instead, they had every confidence that God would lead the nation if the people themselves followed God with all their hearts, minds and strength. Thus, they were determined to protect the rights of the people to freely worship. Surely, it is no coincidence that the freedom of religion is one mentioned in the Bill of Rights. 

With this in mind, I wish a very blessed Hanukkah -- not only to our Jewish friends and family, but also to all Americans -- with hope for our nation's rededication to the true purpose and source of liberty and freedom.

And the Political Darwin Award Goes to...

Christians who refused to vote for Romney all need to do a collective forehead slap for seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. Romney wasn't the ideal candidate, but he was immensely qualified, and people had pretty much figured out that after 4 years of blaming Bush, Obama was still not getting the job done and his policies were to blame. How then was Obama re-elected?

What the 2012 election boiled down to is that a slight majority of Americans want a big, all-powerful "something" to be their mother and father, to make sure everything is alright and everyone gets the same amount of cookies and juice. And instead of putting their faith and hope in a God they cannot see, they put it in a government and princes who cannot save.

It's not that there weren't enough Christians in America to avert this. No, millions of Christians triumphantly voted for Obama's social gospel, thinking that the government's job is to be the people's hired mercenary to do the practical acts of compassion they themselves are unwilling to perform or pay for. It's a self-gratifying sort of compassion that demands nothing of themselves, and all from someone else. I pray for the mercy of God on our nation, and strength for God's people to be the hands and feet of Jesus before the government fails.

But the Christian progressives really can't be blamed. Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. 

My beef is actually with the millions of Christians who know the progressive social gospel is bunk, yet refused to do anything about it.  In their obstinate political pharasaism they wanted a perfect candidate who couldn't win because he didn't exist. So they voted for Gary Johnson or Ron Paul, or simply sat on the sidelines and refused to vote, saying "it's all God's will" and "Jesus wouldn't like it if I voted for a Mormon," and a litany of other sanctimonious copouts. 

There's an organization that gives postumous awards to people whose greatest gift to the gene pool has been to remove themselves from it -- as evidenced by dying as a direct result of one's own embarrassingly foolish action. It's called the Darwin Awards.

How fitting, that the most rabid right-wing Christians (the type whose blood boils at the very mention of Charles Darwin), effectively removed themselves from the voter pool this election, by casting throwaway votes that worked against their own political aims by clearing the way for Obama's re-election, even though his animus toward conservative Christians is well-documented, and whose policies have demonstrably infringed on the rights and consciences of conservative Christians. They effectively picked the greater of two evils, all because Romney wasn't a magic bullet for recreating a Jefferonian conservative paradise?

It will be interesting to see how many votes were actually cast for Johnson and Paul, but we'll never know how many Christians simply stayed home this election. But for at least the next 4 years, each time our children come home from school regurgitating socialist propaganda, each time the decisions of a solid leftist majority on the Supreme Court hands down a ruling that undermines religious freedom, erodes parental rights, makes gay marriage the law of the land, each time we pay $5 for a gallon of gas, we can look to the fundamentalist holdouts and gently say, "thanks for nothing."

Die for a flag?

I've had just about enough of people scorning the American flag, saying that it's "just a piece of cloth that too many people have died for." Don't think for a minute that people die for a sheet of fabric; that completely misses the point. First of all, no soldier aspires to die for his country, the idea is to make the enemy die for his. But more to the point, brave Americans die fighting to uphold what the flag represents, and so by respecting the symbol we respect the lives given for what it represents: 13 Colonies, 50 states, woven together by the essential American values of Liberty, e pluribus unim, and In God We Trust. That's why I salute the flag. Not every child can understand this, nor the adults who think they're so sophisticated that they can take it for granted. But teaching them to respect and salute the flag lays the foundation for passing these values on from generation to generation so that the question at the end of the forst stanza of the national anthem is a resounding YES! The star spangled banner does still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The Good Samarit-Mormon: a Biblical basis for Christian holdouts to vote for Romney

With the 2012 Presidential race coming down to the wire, the fundamentalist Christian protest vote against Mitt Romney on the basis of his Mormon religion may be just what progressive secularist elitists need to realize their dream of entrenching for generations to come a Marxist social gospel that portends more of the very sort of policies conservative Christians most strongly oppose. Despite Barack Obama’s track record of trampling the consciences of Christian family businesses and nonprofits who conscientiously object to Obamacare, among other egregious overreaches, his well-documented scorn for all who “cling to religion,” and his predisposition toward judicial nominees that are sure to erode constitutional liberties, a small but significant number of devout Christians actually cite conscience as their reason for preferring to see the country go down in flames rather than touch a Mormon candidate with a ten foot pole.

Evidently, the story of the Good Samaritan is not to be found among the well-worn prooftexts these fundamentalists ardently wave in justification of their principled, yet self-congratulatory, stance. For if it was, they might see the very words of Jesus with regard to acts of civic righteousness by religious heretics as warrant for the idea that one need not necessarily be a bona fide Christian to engage in a ministry of common grace -- a category in which government belongs. One need look no further than the story of the Good Samaritan in chapter 10 of the Gospel of Luke for clear biblical validation of a heretic’s ministry of common grace being preferred above the religious purity of those whose doctrinal imprimatur serves as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for doing good in the world.

I raise this issue not to suggest that religious fundamentalists don’t help the poor – much to the contrary, they tend to be immensely charitable, and do so voluntarily with their own money -- just as Romney does -- unlike the progressives who can never spend enough of other people’s money but manage to proliferate the image that they have a corner on the market when it comes to compassion. Rather, I think the story of the Good Samaritan invalidates the fundamentalists’ grounds for disqualifying Mitt Romney for their votes.

The story of the Good Samaritan is not merely a benign story glorifying random acts of kindness toward a stranger. Context reveals Jesus’ clear intention to portray in sharp relief a theological point that was unmistakably political. It is the story of righteous acts done by someone whom your religious community has anathematized as an enemy of God.

In those days, Samaritans were considered by faithful Israelites to be theological deviants as well as political enemies. Jews thoroughly despised Samaritans. Samaritans did not worship the right way. They didn’t participate in the annual pilgrimage feasts that brought faithful Israelites to Jerusalem three times a year for proper worship. They did not subscribe to Israel’s national ambitions to restore a monarchy that would, among other things, direct the nation to right worship. Instead they offered worship to God at shrines up in the mountains, the same kinds of places where the pagans offered despicable, obscene and demonic worship to Molech and Baal. Thus, faithful Israelites reasoned, Samaritans couldn’t possibly have any true knowledge of God. With such irreconcilable theological differences, the Jews viewed the Samaritans as apostates, half-breeds, enemies of the one true God. Any association with the Samaritans would make a Jew feel unclean and disobedient to God.

What an indictment of their religious and political sensibilities for Jesus to depict a Samaritan, and not a faithful Israelite, help a man who has been robbed, beaten and left for dead by the side of the road, and thus an exemplar of righteously walking in the ways of God! Worse, the Samaritan comes along only after both priest and Levite have abdicated moral responsibility and abrogated the second greatest commandment: to love one’s neighbor.

Would the priest and Levite have been made ritually unclean by touching the wounded man, and therefore unfit to properly offer worship to God? Was the Samaritan somehow disobeying the Law of Moses by pouring UNKOSHER wine on the man's wounds? Did this somehow defile the beaten man? In the strictest sense, many Pharisees would have answered “yes,” then perhaps wince at the realization that myopic insistence on ritual cleanliness would have left the man to die, naked, in a ditch. They were more concerned about their own religious purity than doing righteous acts of justice to help a fellow man who bears the image of God.

The priest and Levite could have stifled the cognitive dissonance by using “the sovereignty of God” as a fig leaf. I can just imagine one of them saying something to the effect of ….“it was God’s will for the man to die… I remained faithful and therefore will escape his judgment.” That’s precisely the view of my fundamentalist friends, who think that voting for a Mormon would defile them, thereby exposing themselves –and the nation – to the wrath of God. And if Obama is allowed to take America down in flames with a Marxist anti-gospel, “well, that’s God’s will, at least I remained faithful and will escape his judgment.” They blithely congratulate themselves for being too pious to vote for anyone who shares their values but not their sectarian doctrines.

The fact is, you don’t have to agree with Romney’s Mormon metaphysics or Christology to concur with the sincerity of his regard for limited government, sensible budgets, lower taxes and respect for traditional morality and unassailable record of personal charity. After all, nowhere did Jesus concede the point about the errors of Samaritan doctrine. Nor, for that matter, did he shrink from declaring truth to the Samaritan woman at the well when she tried to use a theological and political point of contention to sidestep the question of her own need for redemption.  The fact that the Samaritan, a veritable heretic, acted as the good neighbor is central to Jesus’ point. This is part and parcel with a major theme of Jesus teaching, as well as that of many rabbis throughout the centuries, that saving a life is a greater imperative than strict adherence to religious strictures of ritual cleanliness that define holiness according to group identity. How much the imperative to avert calamity for an entire nation?

The story shames all religious fundamentalists, by drawing in sharp relief the contrast between religious purists who abdicate responsibility for taking just action in an imperfect world, and religious deviants who are reviled by the fundamentalists, yet walk in the ways of God through practical acts of justice and compassion. Meanwhile, we see that the same “religious deviants” whom fundamentalists doctrinally despise and politically shun, can in fact do the will of God.

Romney ain't perfect, but he'll do

After all, who has been a better neighbor than Mitt Romney, giving away his entire inheritance to charity and as much as 30% of his personal income, managing a sizeable benevolence organization for his community on top of serving the public both as governor and saving the Olympics for zero pay?

Furthermore, why is it that the ancient Israelite King Ahab is excoriated for pagan practices, while Cyrus, King of Persia, also a pagan, is considered praiseworthy? The main difference has to do with the fact that Ahab was using the political infrastructure to coerce the nation to worship pagan gods, while Cyrus acted righteously in supporting the religious freedom of God’s people. Similarly, the concept of free will, or agency, is so central to Romney’s religious sensibilities that he’d be the last person in the world to use political office to impose his religion on anyone else, and his record as governor supports that.

At the crux of this issue is a theological error exhibited by both the conservative fundamentalist Christians who oppose Romney’s candidacy and the liberal, Marxist progressive Christians who are pulling for Obama: they both fail to distinguish between a) the special grace of God that characterizes not only the Christian doctrines of salvation and vocation but also the very concept of spiritual revelation and faith claims in general, and b) the common grace of God that characterizes natural blessings, conscience and civic righteousness, which is available to all people without regard to either doctrinal creed or spiritual election, both as a gift and as a ministry. Although both special grace and common grace are equally manifestations of the Sovereignty of God, the distinction is vital for understanding how God can ordain the human institution of government without human government being the means for redeeming the world. It is also helpful for understanding why someone’s actions may be properly understood to be righteous without needing to make any inference about the person’s eternal destiny.  

The audacity of HYPE

The doctrine of common grace provides a solid theological framework for understanding the inherent limits of government. America's predominantly Christian founders understood this distinction, which is why the Constitution forbids any religious litmus test for office. But today, it's a concept neither the advocates of Marxist utopianism not the proponents of an idealized Christendom seem to be able to accept. The fact that these two totalitarian groups would be so diametrically opposed in the policies they advocate should not in itself be surprising. Left wing progressives’ failure to distinguish between special and common grace enables them to posit government as the means of redeeming the world, as though law will make people good, while right wing fundamentalist’s failure to make the distinction is what permits them to think that America’s wellbeing hinges on voting for only born-again Christians in every office in the land, as though that will make America “Christian”. Both groups’ aspirations are characterized by their eschatological ideals, with religious fervor that propels them to resort to heavy-handed political absolutism where the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Pastor Robert Jeffress: almost sorta kinda starting to get it?

In Obama, progressives have found their ersatz messiah and they’re devoted to him despite his being the second coming of Jimmy Carter. Many fundamentalist Christians, finding themselves unable to resurrect Ronald Reagan, and hopeless to clone The Gipper from recombinant Ron Paul DNA, seem content to effectively sit this one out. Some, like fiery Dallas preacher Robert Jeffress, are sort of starting to come around.

Hopefully before Tuesday enough will figure out it’s OK to vote for a good Samarit-Mormon.

Taking the Context Out of Context

In yet another revealing comment, President Obama proves he has no idea what really drives the American economy. He recently told an audience on the campaign trail: "If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen." 

Yep, a typical liberal two-step: use misleading oversimplification to rationalize unnecessary meddling by a byzantine bureaucracy that operates with all the circuitous inefficiency of a Rube Goldberg machine.

‎"If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen." - Barack Obama, July 13th, 2012

The great irony of Obama's statement here is that this statement is sort of true, but in a way that undermines the very point he was trying to drive home. He was trying to say that successful business people owe their success to the government for making America a great place to do business, even though his policies are very unfriendly to people trying to start or run a business. Unless, of course, you're an uber-wealthy donor to the Obama campaign, then you get preferrential treatment, subsidies and loan guarantees that undermine fair competition for your competitors, and sticking it to the taxpayers and providing you with a nice golden parachute when your ill-conceived business goes belly up.

The usual herd of Obama shills are of course claiming these comments are being "taken out of context." But look at the context of his remarks, and it's no mere platitude about no man beign an island and we're all in this together, kumbaya. The guy wants more central control of the economy as though government is the fount of every blessing.

What progressives don't seem to understand is that "FREE MARKET" means people are free to become successful by providing others the products and services they want at a price they both agree on -- not because everything in the market ought to be free.

A Memorial Day Meditation

Of all the virtues we pray for our children to exemplify, courage is one we hope they will never need. Strong, yes; intelligent, of course; attractive, kind, generous, compassionate, gregarious, creative, successful, the list goes on… but brave?  We hope against hope that life will not require of our children the very virtue that forged for them a nation so prosperous and free. We hope that the price paid in others’ bravery will suffice to preserve for them the blessings of liberty. But history has shown us that this is not so. What then shall we do to prepare the next generation for a host of challenges which we can barely begin to imagine, and which we prefer to pretend will never come?

On Memorial Day, a much-needed day off to relax and recreate with family, it is tempting to push aside the weighty demands of citizenship in order to savor its blessings, and gloss over the fact that the purpose of American holidays is to reinforce in the American conscience the central value that is the focus of each holiday. But our holidays demand attention, for they tell us who we are and shape what we will become.

Clearly, Memorial Day tells us who we were. In the midst of an unrelenting pace of life, it builds into our calendar a pause for the sake of recounting, with deep and sober gratitude, the men and women who died in service to the United States in all its wars. And we cannot help but marvel at the strength of character their generation embodied as they braved the brutal horrors of war to fight back the forces of oppression and preserve goodness and decency in the world. The risks were known to and suffered by not only the soldiers, but also the families who sent them and supported them in every way. The shining glory of America is inexorably tied to the heavy glory of bloody sacrifice.

Whether or not we are eternally grateful depends on how well we impart that gratitude to our children and instill in them the virtues necessary to sustain the nation our forebears fought to forge. Thus, Memorial Day provides for us a mirror of who we are and who we will become.  Against the backdrop of Memorial Day the question stands out: how will our observance of this holiday shape the future?

The measure of the gratitude we express for their sacrifice reveals to what extent we are merely self-centered consumers, mooching off the remains of a falling empire.  On one hand, it is an entirely appropriate expression of gratitude toward those who sacrificed all for our freedom, that we relish liberty to the fullest. In this regard, a carefree day at the lake with loved ones will no doubt suffice. But if our day of revelry and repose lacks any reference to the sacrifice that made it possible, we miss an opportunity to impart to our children the sort of values that built and sustain a thriving republic.  

It is well said that values are caught, not taught. To visit a cemetery to honor our fallen heroes, or buy a drink or a meal for someone in uniform goes a long way to demonstrate for our children a very appropriate reverence for those who serve and who have served, an example we hope they will emulate.

But what of the strength that will be demanded of our children? Of course, we savor the thought of our children besting the bullies, but we hope they won’t ever have to risk being pummeled and we certainly don’t want our kids to go about picking fights. And so, a generation of helicopter mommies engenders in a generation of perpetual dependents the debilitating expectation that some ever-faithful force will intervene and obviate the need for courage. This is surely a perversion of the savior narrative, for nothing in Jesus' teaching advocates a lack of courage among his followers. We sanitize courage, conveniently reducing the definition of strength to one of toothless restraint, long on threats and posturing, but short on resolve and not knowing what, if anything, is worth fighting for. We bastardize the term using "courageous" for everything from an avante garde fashion statement to a de rigeur critique on the most benign of social ills. We confuse peevishness for courage as much as we confuse politically correct speech codes for tolerance. How can such a generation be entrusted with a task so ponderous as the preservation of a republic? What will stir in them the resolve to resist charismatic tyrants who promise a life of ease on someone else’s dime, if only they surrender their liberty?

It must be observed that our culture is increasingly squeamish about the violence that underwrites our existence.  Practically speaking for most folks, ground beef comes from the supermarket wrapped in plastic. We don’t have anything to do with raising, slaughtering, or butchering the cow that we enjoy on our barbecue grill.   Some people who awake to this brutal reality are scandalized by it, so they swear off meat on moral grounds.  Perhaps this is because they were unnaturally insulated from it in the first place: living in a luxuriously sanitized subset of the world that is provided to them by others and thus demands from them little or nothing and presents them with easy problems and similarly easy solutions, they live in condescending protest of reality.  (To be fair, many embrace reality with sobriety and gratitude, exercising ethical stewardship of natural resources while maintaining a fondness for cheeseburgers.) 

It's even easier to be overwhelmed by the weight of painful sacrifice that has been required to sustain the American experiment in self-rule. Preferring a sanitary world of easy problems and easy solutions, it is all too easy to indiscriminately mash all violence into the same category, declare that war is never the solution, and place our hopes in appeasing the diplomatic machinations of charismatic tyrants.  This temptation is all the more tantalizing as we lovingly trace the name of a fallen ancestor from a marble wall of remembrance, and the thought occurs: will my child’s name be engraved one day on such a wall? We try to banish the thought. We pray it will never come to that. Many of us deceive ourselves into thinking that evil can be placated, that war is never the answer, vainly trying to bend reality toward our best hopes for a bright future with no cost.

But the situation we face as a nation demands otherwise.  Today, our nation continues the drawdown of forces after more than ten years of war, while many continue to question not only the cost but the strategic sensibility of such wars. Plans are underway to reduce the size of our active force, and we hope that unmanned drones will reduce or eliminate the human cost of conflict, despite the myriad indicators that the next conflict our nation will face will require boots on the ground to defeat an increasingly lethal hybrid threat of near-peer regular, irregular and insurgent forces metastasized in urban terrain and equipped with the firepower and operational capabilities previously only possible for nation-states. All this in the face of budgetary cutbacks necessitated by economic turndown and excessive social spending. Make no mistake, courage will be demanded of our sons and daughters in the moral and mortal threats they will inevitably face.

To be sure, there is wisdom in the words of the great military strategist Sun Tsu: "To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Clearly, it is preferable to be so successful in attacking the enemy’s strategy that we don’t have to shoot a single bullet or risk a single soldier. But the enemies of liberty are many, and while they may be evil they are not stupid.  We do not have the luxury of using Sun Tzu’s maxim as a copout from the eternal vigilance required of citizen soldiers in a republic. This would only play into our enemies’ hands.  Far better to recall yet another of Sun Tzu’s sage observations, which our enemies know all too well: "peace and war are difficult to distinguish from each other and are part of the same ongoing conflict."

All this underscores the point that the most immediate and persisting front in the struggle to preserve our republic is to be found in the seedbed of our children’s character.

Whether it be youth sports, a spelling bee, or taking the training wheels of their bicycles and refusing to let them quit until they have gone all the way around the block on their own steam, or any other experience that forces them to rise to the occasion and do the right thing in spite of their fears, teachable moments abound to instill courage in the character of our children. As we honor the fallen on Memorial Day, it is an occasion to introduce into their awareness the virtue of service to our nation, a sense of the reality of sacrifice in that service, deep gratitude for that sacrifice, and above all appreciation for the value of liberty as worth the cost in blood and treasure.

To prepare them for the challenge of sustaining the American republic, it is imperative that we reinforce the central role of the Constitution in deciding when and how to go to war, and a purpose worthy of sustaining our effort amidst the soul-taxing challenges of warfare. By inculcating these values, our children see the heroism of the past as a normal expectation of American character: not to die, but to be so committed to our constitutional republic that they serve our nation up to the ultimate measure of devotion.

Let us pray this Memorial Day not that our children will be spared the challenge, but that as we entrust to them our republic they will persevere on to victory, upholding America as a cause worthy of their courage. And let this be a reminder to us to teach them every day to become the sort of men and women of whom it is rightly sung: “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

- JKB

Who's the hypocrite: Jesus, Evangelicals or Colbert?

Too many evangelicals are being taken in by the empty sanctimony we’ve come to expect from progressives who co-opt Jesus for their political agenda while accusing their opponents of doing the same.

Take, for example, the following statement by political funny man Stephen Colbert in a moment of candor:

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needs without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”

On its face, Colbert’s statement seems like an insightful zinger against politically conservative Christian hypocrites who preach Christ but fail to follow his example. If Colbert merely wanted to promote Christian virtue for the sake of poor people, that would be laudable.  However, his comment actually encapsulates a litany of false, manipulatively deceptive assumptions, not merely to repudiate the idea of America as a “Christian nation” (whatever that is) but to insinuate that the idea of a “Christian nation” is predominantly advanced by those who do not care for the poor. 

Putting aside for now the complex question of what defines a “Christian nation” (which I’ll address in another post) where does Colbert find any basis to assume that the idea of America as a "Christian nation" is promoted primarily by people who do not want to help the poor? Where are all these bogeymen? I’ve been to a lot of churches and met many varieties of Christians throughout America and I can count on one hand the number who exhibit anything but compassion for poor people.

And yet Colbert implies that there is a significant, politically determinative number of people who want America to be a "Christian nation" but do not want to help the poor. This is simply not the case, unless you accept the progressive notion that compassion for the poor is the exclusive domain of the state, along with the false implication that a rejection of government entitlement programs is equal to misanthropy toward the poor.

Colbert is clearly attempting an improper induction by conflating a) the conservative/Republican political affiliation of the sort of people who typically promote the idea of America as a "Christian nation" with b) the conservative/Republican platform with regard to government entitlement programs, and c) a hypocritical refusal to help the poor. He’s essentially implying a one-to-one relationship between loving and helping the poor and progressive entitlement programs, thereby unfairly insinuating that if people embrace the idea of America as a "Christian nation" but don't believe the way to be a "Christian nation" is to outsource compassion to a bloated, inefficient, impersonal and fiscally unsustainable system of entitlements and wealth redistribution, you're somehow a hypocritical Christian.

His logic goes something like this: Those who want America to be a Christian nation believe we ought to follow the example of Jesus (TRUE). Jesus loved and helped the poor and taught us to do the same (TRUE). All who truly love and help the poor support government entitlement programs advanced by liberal progressives, so if you do not support these then you do not love and help the poor (FALSE). Jesus would have supported the government entitlement programs supported by progressives as the primary way to help the poor (FALSE). Therefore, if you support the idea of America as a Christian nation but do not support progressive government entitlement programs, then either Jesus was a hypocrite or we are (FALSE).

To be clear, there is not a one-to-one relationship between the definitions of Christian and Republican. And yet, Colbert is content to savor his snarky, one-dimensional caricature of conservative evangelicals, despite the fact that Red states are statistically more generous than Blue states, or that private charities do more good with each hour and each dollar, doing the job for substantially less than what it costs government bureaucracies. That’s a far cry from the cold-hearted hypocrisy of progressive slacktivists, who find it all too easy to be so generous with other people’s money only to accomplish little and demand more. What progressives like Colbert seem unable to account for, but conservative evangelicals intuitively understand, is how voluntary charity benefits society by generating generosity in the heart of the giver and gratitude in the heart of the recipient, which promotes fellowship and hope among mankind. Entitlement programs strip society of that social capital, and therefore erode the glue that holds communities together. Thus, the progressive hope in the state is sadly misplaced.

Colbert’s rhetoric follows the trend of throwing the voice of Jesus through the mouth of Karl Marx in order to commandeer Jesus’ moral authority for the progressive cause. First, they reduce the significance of Jesus to merely a moral example. They do this ostensibly to limit the frame of reference to morality and ethics so that all can engage in a fair dialogue free from special claims of revelation, but in reality it is to reduce the definition of Christianity to purely political terms and hold Christians accountable to the diminished definition imposed on them. Then, taking Jesus’ moral example out of historical context, they use it as a basis to wag the finger at Christians for failing to live up to a definition of Christianity that Christians don’t embrace. After all, if religion is merely “the opiate of the masses,” the decision whether to abolish it, mock it or subvert it for your own causes is an arbitrary one.

We all know Jesus vocally denounced religious hypocrites. But progressives seem to overlook the fact the primary targets of these rebukes were the Pharisees, who were renowned for their acts of charity but who presumed that their ever-tightening regulations of all human activity could redeem their nation by the force of law. Jesus also rebuffed the aspirations of political zealots, upended the Sadducees’ materialistic cult of religious profiteering, and when the masses clamored for Jesus to seize the reins of national government to set right all wrongs, he explicitly refused. Instead, Jesus preached the good news of the supernatural reign of God in our hearts as the source of the world’s transformation.

Christians put their hope in the Creator and Redeemer, not the State. We rejoice that when people see our good works they praise our Father in heaven, not an omnipotent government. God, not the government, is the fountain of blessing, and his work of redeeming the world is mediated through all departments of human activity.  Therefore, we reject any person or regime that proposes to be the sort of messiah that Jesus refused to be. And we will not be deceived whenever some cynical political opportunists tries to twist the gospel to make us bend the knee for some other kingdom. If Jesus is Lord, the Caesar is not.

Is there a proper role for government in caring for the poor? Sure. But government entitlement programs are neither a replacement nor a fulfillment of Jesus’ command to love them. This is a duty you cannot outsource to a government program.