The American Dream says the hardest workers reap the greatest rewards. The Kingdom of God says, "Line your track up with Mine, and let Me set the destination." God's track never moves. If I wander, He waits until I'm ready to come back—like the prodigal son returning home.
My take, then, is that as to the American Evangelical, neither the 80% nor the 20% has it right. We are armchair politicians supporting and voting on what institutions outside our contact or control ought to be doing and falsely using Jesus as our standard. That is to say nothing about nearly unanimous evangelical support for American imperialism over select banana republics.
The Kingdom of God invites God's people now. It demands that we be IN this world but not OF this world; it enables us to stand IN God's presence as ambassadors OF His power and grace. It's breaking through in places the world barely notices. It's calling you and me - not just to believe, but to belong; not just to survive, but to live.
We professing Christians have turned our great nation over to the corporate raiders in our grief over OPS – "Other People's Sin." The grief that sadly lies before us threatens to descend on our lives and families with far less recourse for recovery. May God have mercy!
After 85 years in Evangelical America, including 32 years as a pastor, I write this with a heavy heart. What I see around me is not the radiant gospel of Jesus Christ, but a deconstructed, diluted version that confuses the American Dream with the Kingdom of God. Too often, we have embraced prosperity and comfort over humility and self-sacrifice, even celebrating dying for a nation while ignoring Jesus' far deeper call to lay down our lives truly to live.
At its core, the American Evangelical identity is a strange hybrid — part Old Testament legalist, part New Testament recipient of grace. We Evangelicals straddle obedience to rules and rituals on one side, trusting in God's unmerited favor through Christ on the other. The result? A faith that often feels more like appeasing an angry God than resting in His love.
You've asked me, as superintendent of a public school district, to sign a "certification" declaring that we are not violating federal civil rights law — by, apparently, acknowledging that civil rights issues still exist. You cite Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, then proceed to argue that offering targeted support to historically marginalized students is somehow discriminatory.
How, in God's green earth, did we manage to raise the nation-state of Israel to God's favored nation over all others? I often lament in these blogs the abandonment of Jesus' inauguration of the Kingdom of God as both a present and future reality in the life of the believer. Instead, we find ourselves with a government and Confessing Church that seem to have settled on "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as their complementary mission statements. I refer to that as "flat earth" Christianity.
Stan Moody reflects on the shifting relationship between evangelical Christianity and American politics. He argues that the evangelical church, once a countercultural force grounded in humility and spiritual conviction, has entangled itself with the Republican Party in pursuit of political influence, abandoning its deeper spiritual mission. This fusion has alienated many believers and contributed to the rise of disillusionment among the "Nones" and "Dones"—those leaving institutional religion. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, though respectful of diverse faiths, has failed to protect moral and religious convictions in public life. Moody warns of an impending crisis not just for the church or the nation, but for the soul of both. He ultimately calls Christians back to a kingdom ethic rooted in love, service, and obedience to Christ—not political dominance or nationalism.
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May we hope and pray that, should that time come, we will be ready to say, "Charge to my account!"
