Election, Enlightenment and the World to Come

By

Ron Corson

Within a day of the election this November the culture warriors began their assault upon the people of America. The foreign press such as the London Daily Mirror presented the cover page with the question "How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?" Obviously those 56,054,087 would disagree with the Mirror and its pseudo-intellectualism presented as fact. But the Mirror reveals a symptom of the disease that has infected the media and many people throughout the world.

Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Wills expresses his disgust more directly. To him it is not Americans who are dumb. It is their Christianity that is dumb. On November 4, 2004, The New York Times published Wills’ column “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.” He asks: “Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?”

Later he explains how the world is confused by the American electorate: “The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.” America has not become any more religious since the 1940s, but modern Europe has become far less Christian. So now, to the secular in Europe, Christianity is the anti-intellectual boogeyman. The death of reason and enlightenment is now found in the Christian right.

But the anti-Christian bigots like Wills are not the only ones upset that the Christian right came out and voted for their preferred candidate. A number of Seventh-day Adventists find the vote of their fellow Christians disturbing. Because if the Christian Right can have an influence on an American election, surely the Sunday laws cannot be far away. According to national exit polling, White Evangelical Christians supported Bush 78 percent, Kerry 22 percent. Fifty-two percent of Catholics voted for Bush, 48 percent for Kerry. Black Protestants voted 83 percent for Kerry and 16 percent for Bush. In each of these categories the more regular the church attendance the stronger the support for Bush.

Of course, the above groups have been important in every election in the last 40 years. Yet when credit is given to the Evangelical Christians by the media for helping to decide a close election, there is a segment of the Adventist church that sees only storm clouds. These folks also see danger in a President who believes in God, who is comforted spiritually by the thought of people praying for him. Even when he espouses values that are similar to their own Adventist values, their first thought is how this will lead to their “time of trouble.”

But our battle is not with the Christian Right; in fact, we are very much a part of the Christian Right. In our effort to prove our traditional endtime predictions right we should not denigrate our Christian brothers and sisters for wrongs that they have not done nor intend to do.

The Christian battle is with the secular world which that defames God and his followers. As Gaylon Parker wrote in the Mississippi Press on November 5, 2004: “In fact, the tripe I've had to choke down over the weeks and months preceding the election is going to be tough to wash out of my mouth. Bill Clinton's former labor secretary, Robert Reich, said Christians pose a greater threat to America than terrorists; Richard Dreyfuss spews anti-religious hate speech on Larry King's show; Bill Maher says prayer is moronic. You get the picture.” Indeed, it is Christian morals and values that are under attack in America. The attack is not from our fellow Christians but from those who think that Christianity is the end of Enlightenment. These enemies of Christianity smugly declare Christians are foolish to believe in the Virgin Birth and the idea that God could become incarnate. Christians are foolish if they don’t believe that some random amino acids formed into an amoeba that over time changed into a human being, as well as every other form of life.

The battle is on, and it is really all about God. At this time and in this country it is about the Christian God. Society and the major media increasingly disparage God and Christian believers. More and more the forces which claim diversity and tolerance as their credos openly ridicule and impugn Christianity, especially conservative, Protestant Christianity. Tolerance, it seems, is only for those who think like the secular Europeans or practice some version of Native American or Asian religion. If you are a Christian believer, you are just dumb, and your opinions are irrelevant.

The critics of Christianity seem to be willfully blind to the fact that the very freedoms that allow them to attack Christianity are the fruit of Christianity. Whatever the personal faith of the American founders, they developed their ideas in a world that was bathed in Christian ideology. The concepts of the dignity of humanity and inalienable rights were rooted in Christian notions of God and his work as creator. Christianity is not the problem; it is the solution. Christians owe it to society to defend their faith and the values that arise from it.

We understand that those without the Spirit of Christ will think us foolish (1 Corinthians 2:14). But we cannot ignore the fact that we are ambassadors to these very people who regard us with condescension and hostility. We owe to Christ as his ambassadors and to our community as citizens to defend vigorously the rationality and logic of Christianity. People who fail to defend the dignity of their Christian faith pose the greatest threat to American freedom, religious and political.