Monday, April 23, 2018
597 - A Little Bit Benedict
Spirituality Column #597
April 24, 2018
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
A Little Bit Benedict
By Bob Walters
Wincingly observing the daily, ongoing train wreck that is
the American news media makes me especially glad I have a Bible, a church, and
a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Jesus is my
true north; and the media compass is spinning out of control.
This isn’t to fecklessly complain
or whine about the absence of Christian truth, hope, promise, piety, and
decency in the current mainline, cultural narrative – though it truly is not
there – it is to point out that no voice in the breezy, intellectually lockstep
commercial realm of mainstream public information processing and delivery (i.e.
journalism) can or wants to communicate Christian, biblical, Jesus ideals
effectively.
Why? Because human truth is all
Jesus; and modern journalism is all politics.
These days, it seems, never the
twain shall meet. What a shame.
It is a soul-stealing crisis that a
secular “there is no God” baseline governs our American news and political
media narrative. Freedom “yes,” but God “no.” I don’t know how anyone can encounter the
miracles of freedom embodied in the U.S. Constitution and not grasp God’s very
special providence in ascribing humanity’s natural rights, each person’s divine
liberties and responsibilities, and the ensuing nation it conceived.
Oh wait … there is a discussable “God,”
just not a very powerful one. God
becomes – in these times of human arrogance – a “god” who needs to be confined
to terms that satisfy cultural fashion, political expedience, and moral
fluidity. This certainly isn’t the God
of ultimate love, not Jesus Christ with all authority over creation, wisdom,
truth, and life, and not the Holy Spirit offering divine light and animating
every spirit.
Instead what we witness in the
general media’s public square is a conditional god desperately requiring doctrinal,
politically minimizing labels like “evangelical” because, I can imagine the
media thinking, “I can’t argue with Jesus but I can sure besmirch an
evangelical.” Talk about identity politics
run amok. The media is using every club
in its bag to insert a God it doesn’t understand into a situation it doesn’t
like.
And what it likes less then God, at
the moment, is President Donald J. Trump.
Specifically we see that now even
Christianity – well, American political Christian thought leadership – is
starting to consume its own franchise, like a snake eating its tail, by
focusing not on the truth of the biblical Jesus but on the efficacy of joining
the secular media in expressing abject horror at the moral abjurations of the
U.S. president. They had a serious
conference on this recently at august Wheaton College. Really.
Pompous Christian thinkers – and
there are plenty of them – rush to scourge, as one wrote in a recent mainstream
column, “the naiveté and self-sabotage of the Trump evangelicals.” But the “thinkers”
spurn their own proper focus on the centrality of Christ’s life, death,
resurrection, and promise of sufficiency in Him alone; not politics.
I want to shake them and say, “It’s
not about Trump! Stick to Jesus!”
The “Benedict Option,” referred to
in the title, is to pull away from society and live in monastic-ish seclusion. Nah, I love too many people and want to share
Jesus with too many people to simply shun society. Instead, my “little bit of Benedict” is to be
very, very selective when I read anything about Jesus or evangelicals in the general
media.
I won’t disengage, but generally
speaking, I know the media is not on my side.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) is a Christian, not a Trump evangelical.
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