Obama and FDR: Rallying the Churches

President Obama has appointed a 26-year-old Pentecostal minister as his White House chief of faith-based initiatives. Himself comfortable with religious language, Obama's campaign appealed strongly to liberal-leaning Christians. Inevitably, self-professed "social justice" religionists will have White House access. Evangelical left activist Jim Wallis has already boasted of the administration's appreciation for his viewpoint.

The National Council of Churches (NCC) has also boasted of its presence at recent Obama events. But the NCC, as primarily the organ of diminished Mainline Protestantism, is only a ghost of its former prestigious self. It's been decades since a U.S. President has addressed an NCC event. In 1995, President Clinton did receive in the Oval Office an NCC delegation, which "prayed" with him to be "strong" in resisting the new Republican Congress. But Clinton declined to address the NCC on its 50th anniversary in 2000.

In headier days, presidents paid more attention. In 1933, facing a more drastic economic crisis, Franklin Roosevelt addressed the 25th anniversary of the NCC's predecessor, the old Federal Council of Churches (FCC). Founded in 1908, the FCC was liberal from the start, focusing on labor rights, and largely siding with theological modernists against "fundamentalists." Infamously, Methodist Bishop Francis McConnell, FCC president from 1928 to 1932, had once asked: "Is not this tendency to deify Jesus more heathen than Christian?" Many FCC elites were openly socialist and to FDR's left, espousing pacifism and state ownership of industry.

The FCC's founding social creed originated with Methodist activist Harry F. Ward, a Union Seminary professor. Ward fumed that FDR's New Deal "works top-heavily in favor of big businessmen and bankers" and aims at "recovery for the profit system," which is "the exact opposite of what liberals, including leaders in the social movement in the churches, have envisaged.…"

This is a look back to the era when the church lost it’s way, at least in this country. To a large degree they forgot about the one message that the church is actually supposed to deliver - namely that Christ died to save sinners - but replaced it with the social gospel. It only took a generation for liberals to realize that it was altogether easier to preach the social gospel without the veneer of Christianity; thus was born the secular left.

Many Christians in this country flocked to the GOP simply because the Democrat Party had been hijacked by the New Left, an explicitly communist and atheist movement. For you DU trolls, that does not mean I’m calling all Democrats atheists or communists, I’m merely referring to how the movers and shakers of the party changed it radically after Johnson.

Anyway, all things being equal, I think that in the short-run, many Christians will be attracted to socialism and quasi-socialist policy. We shouldn’t look at the past twenty or thirty years and assume that there’s something about Christianity that makes its adherents economically libertarian (although I for one think that libertarianism *is* the logical political ideology to follow if one is to adhere to what the whole Bible says).

The Russian Orthodox church, after decades of persecution and corruption by the Soviets, became an ally of the Soviets in the last years of the USSR, because both were opposed to decadent Western cultural influences.

It scares me, but I see socialism becoming more and more popular with my generation of Christians (20s), in much the same way it is becoming more and more popular with the general public. The government has a great racket: cause an economic catastrophe, and then be the one to fix it. They did the same thing with slavery and Jim Crow laws.

We need to be careful, regardless of our beliefs, NOT to put anything before God, and that definitely includes politics. Too many Christians mistake a political crusade for a religious one. They are both being busy-bodies in the affairs of others, which the Bible explicitly commands us not to be. Whether the other person’s affairs relate to how they conduct their financial affairs, who they hire and fire, who they work for, what they buy and what they sell and at what price, or whether their private affairs are related to what they do in their bedrooms out of sight, then we shouldn’t interfere. That’s not me, that’s what the Bible says.

For starters, check out 2 Thessalonians, Chapter 3. That should put the instant breaks on any Christian advocating socialism (and there’s more Scripture where that came from!).

“Evangelical left activist Jim Wallis has already boasted of the administration’s appreciation for his viewpoint.”

His viewpoint AND his words:

..Wallace closes his book with the self-congratulatory (and possibility heretical) declaration: “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Read on:

IT TAKES A CERTAIN AMOUNT of chutzpah to write a book called God’s Politics. But you have only to read a few pages of Jim Wallis’s new bestseller by that name to discover that it isn’t actually about the politics of an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful deity at all. Instead, it’s 384 pages of Jim’s politics, and Jim (with a couple of notable exceptions) is a pretty average, down-the-line leftist ...
[.....]
MAINLY, THOUGH, what Wallis is up to these days is building his “movement for spiritual and social change” and arguing for optimism over cynicism. Previous theological agonies dispelled, Wallis fills his book with chatty anecdotes from his speaking tours, his time teaching at Harvard, his appearances on TV and talk radio, his travels at home and abroad. He closes the book with the self-congratulatory (and possibility heretical) declaration: “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Excerpted from 2005 article:

God’s Democrat (The church of Jim Wallis)
The Weekly Standard ^ | April 11, 2005 | Katherine Mangu-Ward
Posted on 04/05/2005 12:20:31 AM EDT by RWR8189
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1377520/posts

God’s Democrat
From the April 11, 2005 issue: The church of Jim Wallis.
by Katherine Mangu-Ward
04/11/2005, Volume 010, Issue 28
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/441oqlsg.asp?pg=1

UGH!! There is that name again - Jim Wallis. I learned about Jim Wallis when my brother’s female friend went to my father’s funeral. She slipped inside the coffin a large black button pin that said “Matt 24”. She saw me take it and she said she placed it there. At first I didn’t think much about it so I slipped it back under my father’s hand.

Later in the evening, I came online and research this Matt24 and found to my dismay their beliefs. It was all pure socialism mixed with Christianity. I was so pissed that that woman had to place something political in my father’s coffin and most of all that is so contradictory to God’s teaching. That moron does not know that my parents yes were Democrats but they began voting Republicans. Starting with George Bush Sr.

Well she sent a Christmas letter to all her friends and me. In that letter she tells of her excitement to have meet Jim Wallis and praise her and her group with Matt 24. I couldn’t no longer read the dam letter so I tore it up and trashed it.

Unfortunately many Christians are replacing God with Government but they don’t realize there will be heavy consequences for this in the future. Now that Obama has been the Usurper for 1 month, we are now seeing what he is doing. Many morons Christians who supported will not escape from this devious destruction of our once great nation.

It seems like all of the nonsense of the sixties radicals is back, only now the radicals are the “establishment!” And the ageing radicals from the sixties have learned nothing - they have not had a new, original thought in 40 years or more, assuming they ever had an original idea. And they teach young people this tired old stuff and have them believing it is new and radical. And there are people roughly Obama’s age who, like Obama, are wannabe radicals - they just blindly follow the old radicals. Obama was too young to throw bombs but he is friends with old terrorists.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.