Pulpit Freedom Sunday
Our Annual Day of Taxpayer-Funded Racism
Be Honest. Be Consistent.
I believe God despises veneers [Rev 3:15-16]. I believe He would
appreciate truth—even a hateful truth of a confession of
bigotry—than the hypocrisy of using politics as a shield beneath
which to vent racist screeds. Pulpit Freedom Sunday, despite
what its proponents say it is, is, in practice, an opportunity
for bigoted white pastors to yell and scream hateful, racist
epitaphs under cover of free political speech. You’re not going
to ever convince me that this is something Jesus Himself would
ever have done. My conviction is Jesus would consider this a
frivolity, some nutty scheme Peter most likely would have come
up with. “Let’s change the government!” Jesus had no interest in
the corrupt government of Galilee in His day, and John The
Baptist ended up literally losing his head for
involving himself in politics and, therefore, operating
outside of his calling.
God didn't tell John to go off-script and rant about Herod
marrying his sister-in-law, that was John's idea. God
has not inspired your pastor to go off-script, abandon his
sermon text to veer off and say hateful things about Obama, or,
say, gays, to plant a mock-graveyard of miniature plastic
crosses as a political protest against abortion as one church
here routinely does. The intolerant ring of hate speech is an obvious
signal those words were not inspired by God. Having fulfilled
his purpose as Jesus' pre-game show, John should have moved
offstage. Instead, he kept baptizing in parallel to Jesus, which
I doubt was God's plan, moved into town instead of continuing
his boondocks ministry, and began railing against
Obama—sorry—Herod, which had nothing to do with what God had
asked John to do. God never asked John to call Herod Antipas to
account; He told John to tell people about Jesus. Pastor: God
told you to tell people about Jesus, not to organize committees
and protests and ballot amendments, not to raise money for
political action groups or lobby Congress. He told you to
tell people about Jesus.
You Get What You Pay For: An endorsement of hate: pastors, without a church vote, sending
tithes
dollars to GOP political campaigns. Question: between Barack Obama and Phil Robertson, which person's
demeanor and actions display more of the
qualities of Christ?
In the end, John did not know Jesus very well.
Locked in a tower, John sent two of his disciples to inquire of
Jesus, "Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect
someone else?" [Matt 11:3] Likewise, many of our pastors,
Obama-obsessed, have wandered so far afield of their calling,
they've clearly lost sight of Jesus as well. John's imprisonment
and beheading should be a lesson to all of us: stay in our lane,
do what God has asked us to do. A pastor’s mission is
to care for Jesus’ flock. There is absolutely no biblical model
for bringing politics into God House, where even the most benign
expression of political thought can and will become divisive and
oppressive to God’s people. Pastor: tell people about Jesus.
Stop farting around with politics.
While Christian
churches have traditionally taught core values of love and respect
for our country, including the Office of The President (black
churches, to my observation, bit their tongue through eight
years of the worst presidency in modern history), white
conservatives have abandoned those and other of their core
values by making a singular exception of this sitting president.
Why? Is Barack Obama the worst president in history?
415 leading
historians say no, that honor belongs to George W. Bush, a
president white conservative Christians supported in human waves. What, then, is it about this specific, particular
president that causes these rich, over-fed hypocrite pastors to
put their entire church’s future at risk by violating
well-established rules for non-profit organizations so they can
climb into their pulpits and insult the president?
Shocking, Mean, Hurtful: as reported to me by people who were there..
Know Your Purpose
I, like, I suppose, most whites, had assumed Obama’s election signaled
America was moving toward a post-racial society. I, like, I suppose,
most whites, was subsequently shocked and disturbed to discover just how
untrue my thinking had been. Far from signaling an end to racism,
Obama’s election brought racism out of the closet and back into vogue.
This means it was always there, that we’d not actually stomped it out or
bred it out of our national DNA but, rather, we’d covered it up, swept
it under a rug. A black man in the Oval Office, however, proved simply
intolerable to the sleeper bigots among us, and the GOP—their ranks
thinning thanks to a discredited ideology and disastrously failed
presidency—went after the most ignorant among us by deliberately
stirring up racist fear.
A pastor reacting out of fear does not know Christ [I John 4:18]. A pastor preaching hate does not know Christ [John
13:15]. A pastor
knowingly lying does not know Christ [Prov 12:22]. This entire hateful Pulpit
Freedom nonsense has at its core a corruption of Christian values and
the purpose of the church. It is a movement fueled by hate, which
exposes the pastors who thought this foolishness up as antichrist. It
has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom or our First Amendment rights.
It’s about stoking Obama Fear and, in 2012, about Mormon
Apologetics—making a case for Christians to support an antichrist
religion. It was and remains an obvious racist ploy, these white
pastors speaking so hatefully and irrationally using knowing untruths about
the nation’s first African American president in cruel indifference to
their black seat-fillers who have to just eat it, just take that punch
in the face. I can't imagine Jesus doing that, deliberately uttering
things hurtful and demeaning to people who faithfully followed Him. Here
I am not referring to issues of sin and grace but to antecedent
political rhetoric. There is no rational path forward for Christians to endorse
a Mormon, an agent of an antichrist religion, yet there they were, by
the thousands, these deluded men, lost in their abject hatred of a black
man in a White House, well beyond desperate to motivate their
congregations by manipulating them with fear and lies.
It must be an incredible relief to these pastors, on Pulpit Freedom
Sunday, to finally be able to take off the handcuffs and shout to the
world what they really feel: I HATE BLACKS. That is, after all, the
subtext echoing from every over-the-top irrational histrionic personal attack
against Barack Obama. They may as well have tee shirts made up. It’s the only reason these men, allegedly God’s
men, knowingly repeat ridiculous falsehoods parroted from Fox News and
hateful SuperPacs. I HATE BLACKS is the driving force behind Christian
conservatives’ heinous, inexcusable betrayal of the cross in their
rallying support to Mitt Romney in defense of an antichrist religion. As
I discuss here, racists are typically the last people to realize
they are racists. Racism stinks; it seeps out of your pores like Curry
Goat. People can smell it on you. These pastors are stinking up their
sanctuaries as they all but foam at the mouth going through ridiculous charts
and graphs full of distorted and misleading "facts" making a case for how Obama is destroying the nation.
The Pastoral Record
These are the guys we should listen to?
Where were these pastors when George W. Bush was actually destroying the
nation? Most of these pastors worked tirelessly to reelect an inarticulate
anti-intellectual who plunged the nation into two wars costing 138.000
lives, trillions of dollars, and who turned a $237 billion surplus (ABC
News) into
a $2 trillion deficit? By contrast, President Obama—despite historic and unprecedented Republican obstructionism—pulled the nation
back from the precipice of a George W. Bush-created Second Great
Depression, saved millions from foreclosure, ended unfair credit practices, ended one war while trying to end a second, saved the auto
industry, reduced U.S. and Russian ICBM nukes by half, cut the
unemployment rate from nearly 11% to 6.3%, cut the deficit in half, and
trimmed the U.S. Government employee base to its smallest size in modern
history. Obama has created trillions for the private sector, with
the NYSE poised to hit 17,000, a historic first. His Affordable Care Act
is creating untold wealth for insurance companies while making health
care available to millions of Americans for the first time, and he has
steadfastly refused, at great political cost, to embroil America in yet
more unwinnable foreign wars. But, according to these "Christian"
"pastors," Obama is likely the antichrist. He is destroying our nation
and must be stopped at all costs.
The overwhelming majority of arguments against this president are specious; appearing to be valid but actually based
upon distortions, outright lies, and political rhetoric. The vehemence
with which many politicians and preachers hurl irrational, inaccurate
and deeply personal epitaphs at Obama has at its core only one thing.
Legitimate policy differences, even in the face of mounting evidence of
the president's success, can produce reasonable and civil discussions.
That's not what's happening, here, and that's not what this "Pulpit
Freedom" mess was created to produce. It is, instead, largely a platform
for overpaid conservative pastors to simply recite Fox News talking
points and knowingly mislead their congregations as to Obama's obvious
evil. It is a day for these men to further justify their congregants'
own innate racism by providing disinformative non-facts with which to
assuage troubled consciences in people who hate the president and are
struggling to find a reason why. It is a day for these pastors to
manipulate the least of these, the most faithful and often the most
simple-minded people who have almost no independent thought but who
trust their pastor implicitly.
Pulpit Freedom Sunday is simply a day of advocacy of racism and intolerance. It
has absolutely no biblical model or foundation. You don’t have to write
your Congressman. You don’t have to form any committees. You don’t need
to call the Mayor or paint picket signs. Just tell folks about Jesus.
That’s it. Just tell ‘em. That’s the biblical model. That’s all the Lord
asked us to do. The church is always poking its nose into peoples’
lives, into their bedrooms. Abortion. Gay marriage. Do things I don’t
believe in threaten those things I do? Of course not. For, if they did,
my belief would be in vain.
Pulpit Confession Sunday
Here's my alternate proposal: instead of this "Freedom" Sunday, I'd so
much more appreciate a Pulpit Integration Sunday, where white pastors
preach at black churches and vice versa. Let's have something more akin
to Judaism's Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement, where we confess our sins,
this hateful sin of racism. Instead of pastors poking the hornet's nest
of the IRS, let's see some real courage: let's see affluent, prominent
white pastors confess that their visceral opposition to the president
contains elements of hatred. First and foremost, that is obvious,
whether they confess it or not. Then, let's ask the real question: why?
This opens the door to a real dialogue on the inescapable properties of
racism each of us is tainted by to whatever degree. I don't find pastors
participating in Pulpit Freedom Sunday to be particularly brave. A
pastor who comes clean about what's really bothering him, now THAT's
bravery.
Congregations tend to follow their pastors: into denial, this Pulpit
Freedom mess composed of arguments painstakingly crafted and vetted, or
into actually dealing with important emotional issues. Truth requires
far less research. Confession requires no vetting. Having lost the 2012
presidential election, many of these same pastors are now having to
clean up the mess they've made in their defense of Governor Mitt Romney
and Mr. Romney's faith, which denies key tenets of God's Word and
functions much more like a secretive cult. That's what these pastors are
left with, mess all over the floor, along with a Naked Emperor status
that has undermined trust within their congregations.
The saddest part is none of this Pulpit Freedom stuff actually helps
anybody. It divides rather than unites, wounds rather than heals.
Pastors, you want to prove how tough you are, how brave you are? You
wanna Man Up? Try confessing your faults, your sin, before your people,
asking God to purge this vile evil from your heart.
If you will, they will. And THAT's an annual day that would actually
bless and please God.
Christopher J. Priest
19 May 2014
editor@praisenet.org
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