The Subliminal Yet Blatant Elimination of God
Is it just me, or have you noticed that God is being removed from our culture? School prayer has all but been eliminated. Creation is no longer taught, even as a myth, in our public schools. The words “In God We Trust” were nearly eliminated from the new nickel, but were instead moved to the edge of the coin. Some are adamant about removing the words “under God” from our nation’s Pledge of Allegiance. Many are trying to prevent students from even bringing their Bibles to school. What’s happened? How could a “Christian nation” suddenly find itself where we are? God has been relegated to church buildings that fewer people are frequenting, or privately-funded television and radio programs that only a handful watch or listen to.
But lest we think it’s just the secular progressive culture trying to rid us of God, let’s take a harder look at the Christian community. We’re all excited about God in our church assemblies (well, you’d never know it if you visited some churches), but few ever mention his name, let alone what he’s doing in our lives, once we step outside the sanctuary. We sing about God and pray to God often, and with fervor. But we don’t talk about him in the workplace or in our schools. In a nation where the vast majority of its citizens maintain a belief in God, we have no excuse for this growing dismissal of God. The Christian community has allowed it to happen, and unless we wake up, it will continue to escalate until God is a thing of our nation’s past.
As I was in the movie theater last week, I paid close attention to the trailer for the upcoming Simpsons Movie. I’ve never watched an episode of The Simpsons, mainly because I find the humor irreverent and distasteful. I’m amazed, though, at how many Christians watch it religiously and find very little shocking about it. As I watched the trailer, I was appalled at a quick scene that was almost subliminal. One gets the idea from the trailer that the Simpson’s hometown of Springfield is in danger, and it’s up to Homer and his family to save it. Homer and several of his family members are sitting on a bench (I think in a church building). He flips the pages of a Bible and exclaims, “This book doesn’t have any answers!” And that’s exactly what the secular progressive culture wants you and me to think. They want us to walk away thinking that the Word of God is nothing but an antiquated book with no relevance for our lives in the 21st century. To them God is just an old “has-been” who doesn’t intervene in our world, much less our lives. They would contend that he’s certainly not responsible for my success in life (of course we do, however, blame our failures on him).
I wonder how many Christians will just allow that scene to just sneak right by them without thinking anything about it. It offends me. It outrages me! And not so much that Hollywood injects their movies with such irreverence, but that the Christian community, by and large, sits back and accepts it! We allow it to happen…to us! I wonder how many of us will continue to laugh at the irreverence Hollywood continues to shovel out? How many of us will continue to expose our children to such? My prayer is that we’ll return to our knees in humility before God and seek his ways. And we’d better start doing whatever we can to take back this nation in the name of Jesus Christ…before it’s too late.
“Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).
Oh, God. Where have we gone wrong? How could we allow Satan to pull the wool over our eyes again? God, please forgive us for accepting whatever Satan throws at us, and doing little or nothing about it. Revive the fire in the hearts of the Christian community in this great nation. Restore us to a nation “under God.” Forgive me, God, for passively allowing sin and irreverence to creep into my life and my world. Amen.
[...] and the New Simpsons Trailer Hawk gets my blessings…as he is of course absolutely correct in seeing obvious-yet-subliminal and evil work of my [...]
Blasphemy and the New Simpsons Trailer « The Fake God Blog said this on July 21, 2007 at 10:00 pm |
You’re proving the point you and I have discussed several times, that this is not a Christian nation. A nation with a lot of Christians IN IT, yes, I will even go so far as to say a nation with many Christian principles incorporated into its foundations. But as I have maintained from the beginning, it has been founded as a secular nation, and it must remain that way in order to protect the freedoms of all its citizens, including Christians. Especially Christians. Is the Simpsons offensive to some Christians? Probably. They also seem to offend a lot of other people for different reasons. I don’t find all of their humor funny, but I do laugh at some of it. Maybe you should watch an episode or two so you will know what you are really talking about, so you can have an informed opinion. (And while you’re at it, try listening to a little NPR as well. It’s not all liberal propaganda.)
But I digress.
The freedom that you enjoy to worship unmolested (and don’t argue the point, no one is stopping you from going to church or waiting outside of the church building with torches and pitchforks) is the same freedom that allows The Simpsons to have been on the air for over a decade.
Freedom of speech, Mark, is a very sharp two edged sword. Use it to slice away at someone else’s rights to express their views, no matter how unpalatable you may find them, and trust me, someone will eventually turn that sword back on you.
But here’s the key and the secret to it all. If you don’t like what someone is saying, you can choose not to listen. Change the channel. Read a different newspaper or magazine. Don’t buy the book. Don’t visit the website. Listen to another radio station. And of course you are always free to express opposing views, right?
The “Christian community”, whatever that means (I find it amusing to hear of all these communities, groups of people so busy dividing themselves from others with words like “community” that they forget that there are yet many things we can unite on, and perhaps gain some understanding and dialogue with each other in the process) has, for a long time now, been operating with a Victim Mentality, much like the so-called “African American community”. This is not a position of strength. This is a position of weakness. “Woe is me”. “I’m so persecuted.” “The evil ACLU is trying to take God away from me.” Spare me the theatrics. Even a lapsed Christian like myself can figure out that Jesus called people to be Lights. NOT Doormats.
When are Christians going to wake up and realize that just maybe the reason their numbers are dwindling is because people get tired of hearing all the whining and crying, especially when it flies in the face of what Jesus stood for and taught. People want a place to belong and a reason to feel strong and comforted and secure.
Why, after all, do you think I left the church? I got tired of hearing a constant litany of “Thou Shalts” and “Thou Shalt NOTS”. This is Donald Wildmon and Jerry Falwell and many of the rest in a nutshell. And those are the voices that the secular world hears, the voices that shape their image of what evangelicals are. That must really suck.
The Church (especially the Church of Christ) will continue to dwindle until someone can stand up and say with confidence and strength, “There’s a LOT more to being a Christian than THIS”. The world sees the Church define itself by what it is NOT, by what it is AGAINST, by what it CONDEMNS. I’m not saying you have to accept and embrace what you feel is wrong. I’m just saying that if you concentrate on what is good in Christianity, you won’t have time to worry about all that bad stuff outside of Christianity. And people will be drawn to this like moths to a flame. I probably would be too.
I can’t say all these things. I’m outside your “community”.
You’re not.
(hint hint)
Keith, the Hopeful Agnostic
I hate to jump in here to a discussion that seems to have been going on but this country absolutely was FOUNDED on Christian principles. Christian principles were so important to the early founders that the frist continental congress referred to the Bible as “the great political textbook of the patriots.” Do you know that the first continental congress appropriated funds to import 20,000 copies of the New Testament for soldiers and citizens? Patrick Henry the man most rememberd for saying “give me liberty or give me death” said “it cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.”
John Adams a founding father and second President of the Uniteds States of America in a letter written to Thomas Jefferson said “The general principles on which the Fathers achieved independence, were . . . the general principles of Christianity.” I would be remiss if I did not remind anyone and everyone that out of 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence 53 were confirmed Christians. It would be absurd to believe that even for a moment that these men who were forming a new nation by “faith” would then be so brasen to establish this country on “secular” beliefs. And by the way how can something that is secular have any guiding moral principle? What is the guiding moral compass of secularism but self? A nation cannot be LED by saying “follow me” for in our human frailty we will fail. We need a higher standard to follow. Something more than this world so may achieve a height that is greater than the self. The only moral compass is Jesus. Let no one forget true American history. . .our revolution was a war based on oppressive government and taxation without representation. The idea of the “separation” of church and state was NOT to protect the state from the church but to protect the church from the state! I live 20 minutes from the nations capitol. I am there frequently. You cannot enter into the US Capitol building, or visit ANY monument without a reference to God. . .and by the way the Christian God not a god. Lets not forget what made this country great. James Madison the fourth president and the father of the constitution said “The future and success of America is not in this Constitution but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded.”
As Christians we have a heritage in this country. It is a great one and one that I am proud of. It amazes me that other cultures have such deep respect for their origin. The egyptians never denied the importance of religon in building the pyramids. The greeks boasted in their reason for building the parthanon. And Science is constantly pushing down our throat that religon is why stonehenge was erected. Why such opposition to our government when it is so obvious? The answer is simple. . .because Satan fears ANYTHING built upon the foundation of Christ!
All I know is you have a naked man on your blog.
Just happened across this blog, but I’ll burst in with a clarification, if I may:
The distinction to make with the “founding fathers” argument is that they did indeed found the nation incorporating “general Christian principles” into that foundation. What’s important, though, is to ask exactly what they meant by that. If you read the writings of Jefferson, Paine, Franklin, etc., what becomes clear is that they believed in the moral code of Christianity, and saw Jesus as a great moral teacher. As desists very much influenced by enlightenment thought, however, they did not believe in anything supernatural. Jefferson himself produced an “edition” of the Bible which is essentially all the moral teachings with all supernatural references cut out. None of those “founding fathers” believed in things like the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, the presence of the miraculous, the gospel of Grace, or even the idea that God is very much concerned with the lives of individual humans at all. If you can accept the idea that accepting Christ’s moral teachings and rejecting his godhood as a legitimate form of Christianity, then you can say that the country was founded on Christian principles. If not, I think it’s more accurate to say that it was founded on Deistic principles rather than Christian ones. Jefferson and his colleagues really can’t, I think, be called “Christian” in the sense of the term generally employed by present-day American evangelicals.