Today at 12 Noon I joined over one thousand other citizens in Lansing, Michigan at the Capital and exercised my first amendment right of assembly. The crowd consisted of an overwhelmngly white demographic, though the best speaker, by far, was a black minister who gave the invocation and benediction.

While there I was trying to be an observer as well as a participant. As an observer what struck me was that this was a protest movement that was bringing together people who are put off by a confluence of issues. There were signs against taxation. Signs against spending. Signs against the Federal Reserve. Signs against illegal immigration. Signs against Obama. Signs against socialism. Signs against robbing children’s future. Many signs invoking John Galt. Signs against the government’s assault on the second amendment.

Some of my favorite signs were,

1.) A sign with a picture of Obama holding a Vaseline jar with the words coming from Obama, “This is the only stimulus your going to get.”

2.) A sign with a picture of Obama with lipstick on and words that said, “You can put lipstick on a socialist but he’s still a socialist.”

3.) A sign that had pictures of “Mao,” “Lenin,” and “Castro,” with the words, “Other Community Organizers.”

4.) A sign that said, “End The Fed … It owns enough already.”

The one theme that tied all the signs together was a deep seething anger at a government that is seeking to steal the freedoms of Americans, while seeking to be an agency that “spreads the wealth” around. The people in Lansing clearly understood, to a degree, the dangers of command and control government.

I say “to a degree” because there are still some things that these kinds of American’s don’t yet get. This was seen by the insistence of opening the Tea Party with the pledge of Allegiance. These Americans are angry with their government but they do not seem to yet realize that if any solution to what they are angry about is going to present itself, it is very likely going to be the solution of secession. The pledge of allegiance doesn’t allow for secession — “One nation indivisible” — and so it seems a bit contradictory to be reciting the pledge. There was also the invoking of great presidents like “Abraham Lincoln” and “Theodore Roosevelt.” These are two presidents that are largely responsible for bringing us to the point that we are currently at in terms of centralized government.

And then there was the issue of foreign wars. Naturally, middle America loves its military and its foreign wars and that was a theme that was played up today. Unfortunately middle America needs to realize that they will never get their beefs about the Welfare state satisfied as long as they keep supporting the Warfare state. Welfare & Warfare go together in a centralized state like Obama and trillion dollar deficits and until middle America realizes it is not America’s job to do nation building middle America will continue to be raped by confiscatory taxation.

The speakers in Lansing were lame and served up mostly Ra Ra material. The one factoid I did learn that was interesting is that Michigan has recently created legislation that would require yoga training schools to be licensed. Of course there will be a licensing fee involved. Most of the speakers cited the excessive taxation, citing facts that most of the crowd there likely already were familiar with.

The important thing about this tea party was for people to see that there are other people out there that are tired of being used as the government’s ATM machine. The major regret that I had is that the speakers didn’t make it clear that this tendency towards centralized government is not a uniquely democratic problem. I wish the speakers had made it clear how wicked Bush and the Congressional Republicans had acted regarding fiscal responsibility while they were in office. Middle America has to realize that though Obama is spending Trillions to Bush’s 100’s of billions, they were two peas in a fiscally rotting pea pod.

Finally, I hope middle America doesn’t think that anybody in Washington is listening to them and or to these protests. Instead, what Washington is doing is spinning all of this protest as the actions of right wing extremist terrorists. Instead of listening Washington is declaiming that the people are the enemy of the state.

I continue to fear that all of this is not going to end well.

For the past couple years another of the local churches in Charlotte has run adds announcing that they intend to have a $100.00 raffle on Easter.

Word is that if you get saved during the Easter service that increases your odds that you’ll win the bucks.

OK …. so the second sentence is a joke. But the raffle part is true. They incite people to the Easter service by promising them a possibility of winning some cash.

I was thinking about doing a promotion that included promising a night with a local Hooker for the “lucky” winner who attended our Easter services.

Think that would pack them in?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/192583

The article is really quite interesting if you have the ability to strain the writers idiotic assumptions and twisted conclusions.

Here are a few of the quotes I found the most interesting,

(“This post-christian narrative)is precisely what most troubles Mohler. “The post-Christian narrative is radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding authority,” he told me. “It is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step.” The present, in this sense, is less about the death of God and more about the birth of many gods. The rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans are people more apt to call themselves “spiritual” rather than “religious.” (In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 30 percent describe themselves this way, up from 24 percent in 2005.)”

The italicized section is exactly spot on. America is not getting any less religious. What is happening is that America is going from the religious expression of implicit monotheism to the religious expression of explicit polytheism. The folks who prefer to call themselves “religious” in preference for the term “spiritual” are just like the country girl, out of envy of her rich cousin, insisted on calling her Jumper a evening gown.

Also, we shouldn’t miss that if people embrace a faith system that doesn’t have any binding authority inevitably this means that a binding authority will eventually have to forcefully bind those who have no binding authority. Can you say “S-t-a-t-e?”

And as far as tolerance is concerned it might be good to keep in mind Aristotle’s wisdom here,

“Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society”

“While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called “the garden of the church” from “the wilderness of the world.” As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America’s unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.”

1.) Our American culture does compel religious belief. Our culture set up Government churches in the 19th century and compelled children to attend. In point of fact the complexity and “charged nature” of our political call culture was simplified and de-charged by politicians compelling religious belief of Americans through Government churches.

2.) The American political system never came close to embracing the crackpot Roger Williams vision of political culture. The American political system never embraced notions of “separation of Church and State” as Roger Williams envisioned that. It’s these kind of embarrassing statements that reveal that our literary and educated class, as represented by the writer of this article, don’t know jack squat about what they write about.

3.) If it is our commitment to Freedom that unites Americans, as this writer suggests we might ask what standard defines this notion of “Freedom.” Is it “Freedom” according to Isalmic standards? Is it “Freedom” according to Humanists standards? Or was it “Freedom” according to the truth of Biblical notions? You see “Freedom” can only be defined according to some religious system and it can only be defined for whatever it never ceases to be according to the Christian faith.

4.) The decline of the Christian faith and the rise of polytheistic faiths will not bring a calmer America. Instead what will happen is a inflaming of the culture wars as the cultures that are birthed due to these different faiths will come in increasing clashes with one another.

“And they have learned that politics does not hold all the answers—a lesson that, along with a certain relief from the anxieties of the cultural upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s, has tended to curb religiously inspired political zeal. “The worst fault of evangelicals in terms of politics over the last 30 years has been an incredible naiveté about politics and politicians and parties,” says Mohler. “They invested far too much hope in a political solution to what are transpolitical issues and problems. If we were in a situation that were more European, where the parties differed mostly on traditional political issues rather than moral ones, or if there were more parties, then we would probably have a very different picture. But when abortion and a moral understanding of the human good became associated with one party, Christians had few options politically.”

This is exactly correct. Christians have contributed to the decline of Christianity by embracing one political party as a be all end all solution. Once this party betrayed them they were compromised. From this initial compromise they continued on from compromise to compromise. Christians would have been better served to support third party movements in order to communicate how serious they were about their christian faith. Instead Christians thought that what were essentially theological problems could only be solved politically.

All in all, this decline of Christianity in the West will lead to a more coarse and brutal culture. Christians need to contemplate how they will engage this cultural decline while at the same time keeping their identity.