Foreign Gods

We were born into a society that has made politics its god. As a deity, politics is not satisfied with nominal devotees, he is relentless and unforgiving, demanding rule over every moment of our lives. He wants to be our source of knowledge, our entertainment, our personal identity and the primary lens through which we see our fellow human beings.

There is scarcely a church in our nation that doesn’t have his worshipers, a denomination not affected by his spirit. Christian media is full of his emissaries, who daily push his rules of orthodoxy as tests of faithfulness, over those of Scripture. Our seminaries are teaching our future shepherds to measure their success by his metric instead of Christ’s.

We cannot say that we were not warned from every corner of the church: Machen, Bonhoeffer, Schaeffer, to name a few. Yet we did not heed their warnings, and we are now prodigal, lost, the blind leading the blind. We look at other parts of the world, where the gospel spreads like wildfire, and ask “Why not here?”, never once questioning whether the reason is within ourselves.

We maneuver our churches to meet the false god’s culture. We shape our message to match the cadence of his media. We celebrate when his religion’s prophets claim to have joined our ranks, and are performatively shocked when they immediately take spiritual authority unto themselves and define our faith by his tenets. Christian celebrities, in their pining for the same level of worldly acclaim, can rarely speak of the true faith without syncretizing the false one.

We have forgotten our first love. We have chosen to bring foreign gods into the temple. We have put ourselves in a position where only a second reformation, a re-dedication to Christ Alone, will be the tourniquet that stops the bleeding.