Spirituality Column No. 504
July 12, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

“If we are faithless, He will remain faithful …” – St. Paul on Christ, 2 Timothy 2:13

I believe America is basically good and the Bible is entirely true.

I understand many of America’s problems past and present, and most of the Bible’s seeming contradictions.

I observe science as one of God’s greatest gifts and one of Satan’s favorite playgrounds.  Science sheds fascinating light on the workings of God’s Creation while providing human comforts, conveniences and conveyances unavailable in nature.  What science cannot do is save us from sin…if you believe in that sort of thing.

I think politics is a great jumble of cross purposes and passions of the moment.  Some moments are longer than others, and some passions are more productive than others.  Former House Speaker Tip O’Neil famously observed, “All politics is local.”  Indeed.  My faith is as “local” as it gets, and politics is as local as what makes me secure in my home with food on my table and a job to go to tomorrow.  Out in society, politics is a perpetually partisan morass of unsettled arguments.

Then last week happens: Hillary’s email/FBI ruckus, racially charged police shootings, and a black man ambushing police who are protecting blacks protesting the police shootings.  Social media subsequently burned with high dudgeon, partisan vitriol and panicked pleas.  Facebook posts bled with our national angst, calling for prayers and peace and unity.  “Heal our nation” was a popular thread.

Over the weekend: more shootings, riots, arrests and pleas. But no healing.

Ahead still lay the hot weeks of summer including two political conventions with passionately divisive presidential candidates looking to replace a dispassionately divisive current president.  Abroad, the frightfully perilous Zika-Pollution-Anarchy summer Olympics start Aug. 5 in Rio de Janeiro.  Plus, we haven’t heard from ISIS in a week or so.  What’ll happen next?  I can’t answer that one.

My Facebook wall fairly screams, “Where is God when we need Him?”

Now that one I can answer.  God is in exactly the same place all the time.  He’s everywhere, He is righteous and He has already answered every need humanity truly has.  The ongoing problem is that humanity keeps ignoring the ultimate, all-comers healing answer God bequeathed to humanity two thousand years ago: Jesus Christ.

Believers know it, but until everyone understands, believes and acts on what Jesus says in John 15:12, “This is my commandment; that you love one another as I have loved you,” we aren’t going to fix anything.  Neither will science, politics…or God.

God, you see, is perfectly faithful to His own righteousness.

God bless America?  The problem isn’t His faithfulness, it’s ours.

Heal our nation?  Heal our faith.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) understands taking a “Facebook vacation.”

Spirituality Column #444
May 19, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

It remains quite impolite in America to kill someone over their religion.

Other world regions see awful and violent religious persecution.  Here in Indiana, in the good ol’ USA, I feel fairly safe going to church.  For now.

What is a pity, however, is how few Americans these days have a handle on how religions differ, how our American republic so heavily relies on the mysteriously transcendent yet demonstrably objective and unique virtues of Christian love and service, and how historically unique but temporally fragile is our American way of life.

It hasn’t always been impolite to kill over religion in this country.  Prior to the United States’ formal founding, the New World saw great religious persecution by certain Christians against other Christians.  After the Puritan pilgrims (later the Congregational Church) left the oppression of Anglican England, think of the Salem, Massachusetts, Witch Trials in the 1600s and the persecution of Baptists in the 1700s.

As “Freedom of Religion” was written into the Bill of Rights and America expanded west, Biblical evangelicalism boomed.  Offshoot religions sprouted up.  In the 1800s, the Mormons took quite a hit for their practices, doctrines and beliefs which vary greatly from standard-issue Trinitarian Christianity.  In some states it was not a crime to murder a Mormon male.  Roman Catholicism, hardly an “offshoot religion,” was largely unwelcome.  Not until 1960 did John Kennedy take the oath of office – almost scandalously – as the first Roman Catholic U.S. President.

America fought elsewhere combatting religious insurgencies.  Thomas Jefferson sent U.S. Marines to the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea – the shores of Tripoli – in 1803 to quell the Barbary pirates who in the name of Islam were capturing and enslaving U.S. merchant sailors.  General Pershing subdued Muslim unrest in the Philippines in the early 1900s, and that wasn’t pretty.

Today we’ve arrived at a humanitarian place in America not to kill people for their religion.  Only outsiders do that to us.  Yet politically, culturally and academically, it seems that America is working awfully hard as a nation to kill religion itself, especially Christianity.  It may not be the mass murders we see elsewhere, but still potentially lethal to our American way of life.   A republic requires public, objective truth and private, faithful virtue.  Tyranny is history’s unavoidable alternative.

America truly needs these usually-well-meaning folks who worship Jesus, attend church, vote with scripture in mind, and engage in charities great and small following the simplest command of Jesus from the Gospel of John, verse 15:12:

"… Love each other as I have loved you.”

If America successfully kills Christianity, what comes next will be far less polite.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) understands persecution is part of the Christian “deal.” See John 15:18-20.