Our Nation at the Crossroads: Is God on America’s Side?/Program 3

By: Dr. Richard Land, Dr. Erwin Lutzer; ©2008

Protection? Health? Strong stock market? Are these evidence that God is blessing America? Well, then are terrorist attacks, stock market crashes evidence God has withdrawn His blessing?

Introduction

Today on the John Ankerberg show, is God on America’s side? Does God take a position, have a side in the moral and public policies being debated in our country?

Dr. Richard Land: Well, I think that conservatives, their big mistake is that too often they assume that God is on their side, or God is on America’s side. And we can never assume that. If we assume that that’s pretty close to idolatry. What we need to do is what Lincoln encouraged us to do. He said we need to try to make certain we’re on God’s side. I think the problem with the liberals is that too often they assume that God doesn’t have a side.

Dr. Erwin Lutzer: I think that it is very important for Christians to be involved in politics, but I think we’ve been involved in the wrong way. We’ve not done so maintaining independence. John, I really do believe that one of the greatest mistakes we have made is when ministers actually endorse political candidates. You see, this confuses the whole issue as to what the church is about.

My guests today are Dr. Richard Land, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country. He graduated with high honors from Princeton University and received his Ph.D. from Oxford. He has represented Southern Baptists’ and other Evangelicals’ concerns in the halls of Congress, before U.S. Presidents, and in the media. He has just written a new book entitled, The Divided States of America? What Liberals AND Conservatives are missing in the God-and-country shouting match!

My second guest is Dr. Erwin Lutzer, Senior Minister of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, Illinois. His new book is entitled, Is God on America’s Side?

I asked these men, how can Christians be involved in influencing public policies and laws without clouding the message of the Gospel?

Lutzer: If you were to stand at the corner of State and Madison in Chicago and you were to ask people, what do you think Christianity is?, very few would say it’s this message that Jesus came to rescue us as sinners. Almost all of them would begin to talk about our political affiliations.

Land: In a country where 85% of Americans claim to have some affiliation with some form of the Christian faith and where 61% claim that religion is very important in their lives, then the only way that the secularists can win is if they are able to intimidate people of faith.

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Ankerberg: Welcome to our program. What does it mean when people say “God bless America”? After 9/11 we sang that hymn; we had our politicians on the steps of the Rotunda actually just singing it spontaneously. And yet, not too long after that God was kind of put back on the shelf. And so you have to say what does it mean? What does America want when we talk about “God bless America”? And we’ve got two great guests with us today; Dr. Richard Land who is President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Dr. Erwin Lutzer who is Senior Minister of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, Illinois. And Erwin, let me start with you. You’ve written a lot about what happened on 9/11. And you’ve got a new book that is tremendous. It’s entitled, Is God on America’s Side? And, start us off. What were you talking about?

Lutzer: Well, one of the things that we had to analyze is, of course, “God bless America.” And as I pointed out earlier in a previous program that for most people it was simply, “Oh God, protect us, keep us healthy, keep the stock market strong.” That’s what people mean when they say God bless America.

Ankerberg: They still mean that.

Lutzer: They still mean that. The thing is that we have to understand, though, that God not only blesses a nation, He also curses it. You see, what was so terrible is that after 9/11 was over, as the months and the years have rolled by, God is now once again banished. He’s on a reservation and He’d better stay there. Now mind you, if we have another terrorist attack or some great catastrophe, we’ll bring Him out; we’ll ask Him to mop up the spill, so to speak. But then when He has done that we’ll put Him back. And the point that I make is that, yes, God has blessed America, but God can also curse America, God can also judge America. In fact, sometimes God uses exceedingly evil nations to judge nations that are less evil. Best example, Isaiah 10. God says there, “I am raising up Assyria.” He’s talking about Assyria coming against Israel. And he says, “I am raising up Assyria. Assyria, He says, “is the club of my fury and the rod of my anger.” God says, “I am commissioning Assyria to go against Israel.” Assyria was very wicked. Israel was wicked, too, but not that bad.

Ankerberg: I remember that Assyrians were noted for refining torture. They knew how to skin people alive and make them suffer to the utmost. And God says, “These are the people I’m picking out to bring against my people.”

Lutzer: And one of the best examples in scripture in addition to Isaiah is the book of Habakkuk. That was his big problem. He prays to God and says, “God, how can you look upon evil? Do something.” God says, “I am doing something.” He said, “I am raising up the Chaldeans, the Babylonians. And that bitter and hasty nation is going to march against you.” And then Habakkuk has an even greater problem. He said, “God you are of purer eyes than to behold evil. Why are you using such a wicked nation?”

May God use the militant Islamacists to judge us? Absolutely. Was the experience of the Twin Towers and 9/11, was that a judgment? Of course, in one sense all these things are judgments. Now we need to clarify very quickly that these kinds of judgments do not distinguish between the wicked and the righteous. There were Christians who died at the Twin Towers as well. We also have to know that that does not mean that New York is more evil than Las Vegas; we can’t make those kinds of judgments. But that’s what happens when God begins to show us the consequences of our sin and the sin of other nations. There are those kinds of judgments.

Ankerberg: Yeah, there’s a corporate judgment; that which happened on 9/11 affected the whole nation.

Lutzer: Exactly. And when America is judged by God, we’re like a ship and we’re all on it together. And when it begins to sink we all feel the effects. Best example, Israel is taken into captivity as a judgment of God and Daniel goes along, he and his friends. So they become a part of the judgment in that sense. Now, God does preserve His people through the experience. But still, in one sense the consequences of sin are such that we all suffer together. So let’s not think that because we are “better,” or at least we think we are, than some other nation, that God might not use a nation more evil than we are to judge us. If He did that it would be completely biblical.

Ankerberg: Richard, the White House just asked you to go on a trip with the President. And you have such a close connection with people in the White House and in the political world. And you’re hobnobbing with the who’s who of America on television all the time. Here we are in an election cycle. We’re coming up on electing the President of the United States. And here Erwin is talking about the judgment of God could be coming on the nation. At the NRB there was discussion about, if certain candidates are elected there’s going to be laws enacted against religious broadcasters such as ourselves. And the fact is that it will also impact the Church. There are people in political power right now that have tried to outlaw certain things that we are doing from a moral point of view. And I’m saying, is this the time to talk about this?

Land: Well, absolutely. Look, God judges nations. I believe that in many ways America is under the judgment of God right now because of the consequences of our sin. And when we say God bless America, I think what we mean by that, it depends on who’s saying it. When I talk about God bless America, when I talk about God bless America in the book, I’m talking about what Christians should mean by it.

What they should mean by it is, it should be a prayer. It should be a prayer that God would bless America and that we would meet the conditions of those unmerited blessings. And I talk about 2 Chronicles 7:14, that, you know, that’s a conditional promise. Certain promises of God are unconditional, but this is a conditional one: if/then. “If my people…” Now, I would argue that if God is judging America, it’s not because of what the lost people are doing; it’s because of what the people of faith are not doing. That they’re not living lives, you know, when the divorce rate is the same among evangelicals as it is in the general culture, we have nothing to say to the general culture. You can’t be very prophetic when they can’t hear what we’re saying because what we’re doing is drowning it out; because we’re living in the same way that they’re living.

But absolutely, in an election cycle I can think of no better time to be talking about, what are the preconditions for God to bless America? What are the preconditions for God’s judgment of America? And elections do have consequences. And we need to be praying about the person or persons that God would have us vote for. And our ultimate allegiance, as I said earlier, belongs to God Almighty, not to any party, not to any candidate.

And, you know, if we have in this election cycle election results that result in restrictions being placed upon Christian broadcasters and attempts to restrict what pastors can even say in church regarding homosexuality. We do know that in England and in Canada and in Sweden and in other countries, ministers have been arrested. In England a Bishop was arrested for just exegeting what Romans 1 says about homosexuality and lesbianism, that it’s a particularly unnatural sin that is a result of men abandoning God in their minds and God giving them over to vain imaginations and to ungodly things. Now if that happens, the Church still has to be the Church. And we bear witness in fair weather and foul weather; in good conditions and bad conditions; in persecution and in freedom.

Lutzer: Richard, I think it’s very important to realize, and you would agree, that when you look at church history, for 2000 years the Church has had to prove that you don’t need freedom in order to be faithful; because in the midst of great repression and persecution the Church had to be faithful. So I think that if the time comes when we can’t broadcast anymore, we simply take the consequences. We can fight it in various ways, but at the end of the day, Bonhoeffer said that the Church “is called to suffer.” We don’t want to hear that in the United States. And it’s not just the suffering of cancer or heart disease; it’s the suffering for the cause of Christ. And so, in a sense, we should have optimism because as long as God is God, no matter what we read in the newspapers and no matter who gets elected, we know that our allegiance is to God and we know how the game is going to end.

Land: And we’ve seen an example of this, a supreme example of this in our lifetime. When the missionaries had to leave China in 1949 when the Communist regime took over, there were between five and eight million Chinese Christians. Today, after a half century of a godless, totalitarian Communist regime that has persecuted Christians, we have between 125-150 million Christians in China; one of the most remarkable stories in Christian history. And while we certainly don’t want to encourage persecution, we need to defend our rights to proclaim the gospel, and to be on the airwaves and to have good conditions to share the faith. We also need to understand that we are to be faithful. And we know how the story ends. When I was a student pastor of a church in New Orleans in the French Quarter, I had six Satan-worshippers walk in and sit on the back row. And I was preaching in the gospel of John. And I made a beeline from the gospel of John over to the book of Revelation where our Boss throws their boss into the Lake of Fire. We know who wins.

Ankerberg: Alright, we’re going to take a break. When we come right back we’re going to talk about the future of religion right here in America. The liberal view could be summarized this way: the separation of Church and State means that God shouldn’t have anything to do with American politics and public life, so we need to take God out of this country and keep it that way. We’re going to talk about how bad it could get and what if we lose the election in terms of the values that we want. I think we need to talk more about what the Church could experience. We’re going to talk about all that when we come right back.

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Ankerberg: We’re back. We’re talking with Richard Land who is President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Dr. Erwin Lutzer, Pastor of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, Illinois. We’re talking about, what is the future of religion in America? And Richard, you’ve written in your book, “The liberal view could be summarized this way; the separation of Church and State means that God shouldn’t have anything to do with American politics and public life, so we need to take God out of the country and keep it that way.” And one of the reasons that they,… there’s a bunch of reasons, let’s go through them. These are the things they’re claiming about conservatives and especially conservative Christians. First of all they say, “Conservative Christians are becoming more influential today, and that’s a bad thing.”

Land: Well, from their perspective that’s probably true, because there are more of us. You know, George Barna’s research shows that in 1983 there were 31% of adult Americans who claimed to be born-again Christians. Today it’s 45%. If you remember back when Jimmy Carter ran for President in 1976 and he said he was born again people thought that was a snake handler. They had no idea what it was. The big religious story in America over the last 40 years has been the implosion of the mainline denominations and the explosion of Evangelicals. We make up about 26-27% of the entire population of the country. In fact, we’re the largest religious group; larger than Catholics, larger than the mainlines who have gone from 45% to 16%. And so one reason that we have more influence is because there are more of us.

And secondly, larger numbers of Evangelicals have sort of jettisoned this pietistic tradition that Christians shouldn’t get involved in anything as worldly as public policy or politics. And we’ve been driven to that. I mean, you understand most of evangelical involvement has been defensive. It was the liberals who made abortion on demand legal, and we came into the process to try to defend unborn human lives from being killed at the rate of one every 20 seconds. We came into the public policy debate and got involved in the political process to try to defend traditional marriage when it was assaulted by the Supreme Court of the State of Massachusetts, who were trying to redefine God’s institution of marriage which is the basic building block of society. So a lot of the Evangelical involvement has not been offensive, it’s been defensive, trying to defend a traditional morality which is under assault by an out-of-control, imperial judiciary.

Ankerberg: Yeah, liberals also claim that evangelical, conservative Christians are rigid instead of nuanced and subtle.

Land: Well, read that, “we believe in absolutes versus abject moral relativity.”

Ankerberg: How about, “They put down those with whom they disagree.”

Land: This is from Sam Harris, I believe, the fellow who says that we’re basically insane and we’re making our children insane, and that we are a cancer on the body politick. So I would say that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Ankerberg: “Religious and political conservatives are eroding the separation of Church and State by working together.”

Land: Well, I would argue that we are seeking to reestablish a correct balance of public policy involvement by people of faith. Some Evangelicals go too far. But we need to understand that what the liberals want to do is to make it impossible for someone like Dr. King, who was a Baptist minister, to use religious and moral insights to say “this is not the way human beings should treat each other; this is morally wrong.” Remember when Dr. King was in the Birmingham jail he wrote a letter in which he said, “I am in this jail because I refuse to obey an unjust law. And it’s an unjust law because it doesn’t coincide with the moral laws of God.” Today that would cause the ACLU to go on Prozac.

Ankerberg: Yeah, they also are just really tired with us talking about abortion and same-sex marriage. But you say we need to.

Land: Absolutely. Look, as long as about every 22 seconds an American citizen is being killed before he or she can be born; one third of all the pregnancies in the United States since 1973 have ended in abortion. God had a plan and a purpose for every one of those human lives. Have we aborted the next Billy Graham? Have we aborted the next Martin Luther King, Jr.? Have we aborted the next Abraham Lincoln? There’s a one in three chance that’s precisely what we’ve done. As long as one third of our unborn citizens are being killed before they have a chance to be born, we have a moral obligation to make that a priority issue. When people are attempting to redefine marriage to be between two people of the same sex or any other conglomeration, we have a responsibility to defend traditional marriage and to defend it being between a man and a woman.

Now, that doesn’t mean that those are the only issues we are involved in. But, you know, criticizing Evangelicals for making a priority out of the sanctity of human life and defending traditional marriage is like attacking Dr. King for making a priority out of racial reconciliation and racial justice. When there is a boulder in front of you of moral injustice you have to address that boulder.

But I’m one of those Evangelicals that believes that we Evangelicals can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can address the issue of the sanctity of human life and the assault on it both at the beginning stages of life and at the end of life. And we can also defend traditional marriage. And we can also deal with issues of sex trafficking. You know slavery hasn’t ended. There are about 300,000–500,000 women and girls who are sex slaves and sexually trafficked in the United States every year. And we as Evangelicals have a responsibility to address it. And we also have a responsibility to address issues like stewardship of God’s creation. God called us to that. I wrote a book about it in 1992 called The Earth is the Lord’s. And we’re going to give an account of our stewardship of his creation.

So we have an obligation to be salt and light as commanded by our Savior on every issue where there is injustice and there is immorality in our society. And we have not only the obligation to do so from the gospel, we have a right to do so, based upon our protections as American citizens under the First Amendment.

Ankerberg: Erwin, you’ve also talked about the fact that if we don’t, as the Church, act on these moral issues, that God will step in; and then we’re part of the crowd that’s going to be judged as well. In fact, sometimes in the Old Testament God did it because He wanted the holiness of His people. He wasn’t even talking about the rest of the society.

Lutzer: You know, I had lunch recently with a man who is a graduate of one of our prestigious universities. And he said that many Christian students come there. And he said they leave Christianity behind, not because of the good arguments against Christianity but rather because of cultural pressure. And I think that we as a Church have become so a part of the culture, John, that it’s very difficult for us now to speak to that culture.

And let me say this. Dark days are coming to us. You know, when you have the possibility of hate-speech legislation intended, actually, to silence those of us who would want to talk about the need for preserving the family and the speaking against homosexual marriage. When you think, for example, of the Fairness Doctrine; can you imagine that? A program like this, John, what you would have to do is give equal time with all those who disagree with you in order to be fair. These are attempts to silence us. And the issue always is going to be, as it was in the book of Acts, namely the name of Christ.

So what do we do? We work through the legislative process. We get involved in whatever way we can. We pray a lot. But if in the end we are marginalized, we bear it and we suffer for Jesus Christ. And we realize, of course, that in the end it is not necessary for us to win on earth in order for us to win in heaven. Ask any martyr and he will tell you that. So we need to be encouraged. What we’ve been talking about today can be very discouraging. But let’s remember that the privilege of being faithful in the midst of this kind of repression is something that is very honoring to the Lord God.

Ankerberg: Alright, next week we’re going to talk more about, what is the solution here in America for ending the division that we have between conservatives and liberals? How can we talk? And how is it possible for Christians to actually be able to express their moral opinions in the public square; whether it be at the universities, whether it be teachers carrying their own Bible to read at school, whether it’s students wanting to express their faith; all of these areas? Richard Land has written a very interesting book answering that question. And Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State, and Joseph Lieberman and people like that have endorsed this conservative’s viewpoint of how it should be accomplished. You need to tune in next week; we’re going to explain what that is.

Read Part 4