Dear Pastor / Father / Reverend:

             The purpose of this letter is to express my concern for the vanishing relevance of the Church in America.  I am a most unworthy vessel to convey this message.  However, if I failed to advance this discussion, it might very well be that no one else would.   This letter will discuss 1) where we are and 2) how we got here.  It will frame the issues. 

Where Are We ? 

We live at a wonderful time.  Some of the people alive today will surely see the dream of the ages – the beating of swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning-hooks.  They will witness hydrogen power formed from the virtually limitless waters of the seas – the same waters mentioned in the second verse of Genesis.  However, we also confront very imposing challenges. What direction we are headed as a nation can be seen from the rising tide of liberal thought opposing fundamental Church belief.  Three examples: 

The Ten Commandments, which are the essence and the foundation of all law, originate from what Jesus identified as the two greatest commandments.  The second greatest commandment, "love thy neighbor", therefore inspires all law that relates to how we live together as a community, nation, and world.  In contrast, Liberal practitioners universally accept the destruction of their neighbors.  They assent to both destruction of the unborn and personal destruction of the born.  Recall the very public thrashing and personal destruction of a fine American, Judge Robert Bork.  And when dedicated public servant, Dan Quayle, was destroyed.  And the trashing and personal destruction of private citizen, Paula Jones.  Thankfully, the personal destruction attempt on Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas failed.  The attempt to destroy Governor Sarah Palin is ongoing.  When Joe the Plumber challenged liberal thought, liberals dug up dirt on him with the intent of personal destruction.  The parallels between today's culture of personal destruction and McCarthyism of the late 1940's is very interesting:

·  Personal destruction, like McCarthyism, is all about bearing "false witness against thy neighbor."

·  Legitimacy of personal destruction and McCarthyism hang on the fallacy that you can hate your neighbor, while loving your country.

· In both personal destruction and McCarthyism, opinions are often given credence despite inconclusive or questionable evidence, and claims of the attacker are often greatly exaggerated.

·  Both phenomena affect all levels of society – making everyone vulnerable to attack – and were / are the source of a great conflict in the United States.

· And both constitute a purposeful erosion of our foundation by striking at our basic rights as guaranteed under our founding documents.

· The objective of personal destruction, like that of McCarthyism, is the silencing of the person through personal assassination.

· Both are not subject to law and are constrained only by the pure conscience and a kindness which hungers and thirsts for the ultimate good.  Therefore, both comprise a framework that over-arches a societal law based upon love of God, neighbor, and country.

Personal destruction is particularly nasty.  Our culture of personal destruction continues the theme of arbitrary selection – abortion arbitrarily decides which children live and which die; financial bailouts arbitrarily decide which companies survive and which are allowed to close; personal destruction arbitrarily selects who among us will no longer remain a viable, contributing member of our society.  In Darwinian natural selection, survival of the fittest is favored, while arbitrary selection often deprives the survival of the brightest and best America offers as illustrated by the above personage.  Arbitrary selection appeals to a depravity below even our most basic instincts.

Arbitrary selection finds its origin in liberal philosophy.  Liberals cannot be accused of having no vision.  Their vision is a pathway to power which tramples over – and vigorously stomps upon – America's foundation as expressed in our founding documents.  It can be said that "not all liberals are personal assassins, but all personal assassins are liberals." 

          Much media commentary has been devoted to decry bullies in the schoolyard, however, America is very accepting of thugs in suits inhabiting the offices of Congress.  When wolves of personal destruction attack, America's citizenry often fail to close ranks around targets to shield them from harm.  In Christ's interpretation of the Mosaic Law, found in his famous Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), He insisted that the gravest thing of all is to destroy a man's reputation and to take away his good name. 

Barack Obama recently attempted to put on the mantle of Abraham Lincoln by quoting "A house divided cannot stand".  But Lincoln would most certainly also have agreed that "A house without a foundation cannot stand."  Where our First Amendment seeks to encourage the marketplace of ideas in the public square, personal destruction is all about silencing the sources of a diverse discourse.  Liberals like Obama want to impose a convoluted censorship by precluding dialog which is adversarial to liberal thinking, and eliminate those who espouse divergent thinking though the tactic of personal destruction.  We are seeing the beginning of the end of our fundamental First Amendment right of free speech.  Our other basic freedoms will follow a like destiny.

The idea of a foundation is stability.  The Lord and his commandments do not change.  "I am the Lord. I change not."  "I am the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow."  Liberal philosophy is aggressive in its support of change.  Liberals seek to overturn the morals, ethics, and character expressed in Church orthodoxy.  Their message of change has been a stairway to political power.  There no longer are bedrock principles that inform a moral compass within the human.  All morality, which guides human behavior, becomes situational.

Finally, scripture teaches, "What you sow, you shall surely reap."  But liberals seek to turn this natural law on its ear.  They want to eliminate the consequences of wrongdoing.  A society can most easily be destroyed by anarchy resulting from depriving that culture of any semblance of justice.  There are numerous examples of the the Illinois form of law which Illinois Senator Obama brings to the national fore.  Liberals' poster boy is Richard Spec.  After butchering eight lovely student nurses in 1968, the State of Illinois rewarded this lowest of reprobates a comfortable cell, three square meals per day, a jailhouse lover, a video camera, and all of the coke he could snort.  Liberals hope to make this is the kind of lawlessness and injustice common, nationwide.

There is perhaps no better case for a godless, ultra-liberal Barack Obama than the short piece written by Kevin McCullough at: http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52998.   One of the best explanations of why Christians should not have voted for Obama is Janet Folger Porter's article that can be linked to at:  http://wnd.com/index.php?pageId=79276.  A nation which predominantly claims Christianity has selected a godless leader to orchestrate their collective future.

How Did We Get Here ?

General elections provide glimpses of what Americans value every four years.  In 2008, economics (60%), the Iraq war (10%), terrorism (9%), and health care (9%) were deciding values.  Character was a non-issue.  It was also not an issue in 1996 when serial woman attacker Bill Clinton was returned to office.  In this era, character has become passe.  Eighteen million Americans voted that the only First Lady to be indicted for crimes should be our nation's leader.  Martin Luther King's dream that people would be judged by the content of their character is a joke.   

We know Your Word says, "Woe to those who call evil good," but that is exactly what we have done.

--  from Billy Graham's Prayer for Our Nation

A confluence of factors and events led to a majority of the population professing Christianity to vote for a Godless candidate.  A look at three dominant Christian groupings is revealing:

American Evangelicals

One in three white evangelical voters who participated in Super Tuesday primaries in Missouri and Tennessee voted Democratic. General election exit polls indicated that 26% of American voters called themselves evangelical or born-again Christians and 25% of these voted for Obama.  Therefore, about 1 out of every 16 ( about 6.5% ) of the 125 million voters was a Bible-believing Obama voter.  Obama won with 53% of the popular vote.  It can be seen from these numbers that Christians helped significantly in electing Obama.  American evangelicals were not able to unify after a divisive primary season, with no consensus candidate emerging as a favorite.  Evangelical leaders were either indifferent or non-participative during the weeks running up to the election.  Dr. James Dobson, at first against the candidacy of John McCain, gave less-than-enthusiastic support after Sarah Palin joined the ticket.  The more and more Christians learned about Obama, the closer and closer was their support for McCain.  Eventual support of McCain came too little; too late.

          According to surveys, the biggest white evangelical movement away from the far right has been those under 30: Fifteen percent have migrated away, but only about 5 percent have moved to the Democratic Party.  This mirrors the overall population where a little over 2 out of every 3 voters in the 18 to 24 age group voted for Obama.  And this generation is America's future !

          In addition to lack of unity behind a single candidate, Evangelicals are also divided on the scope of its moral agenda.  The National Association of Evangelicals ousted their lobbyist who promoted a broad moral agenda that helped define American Evangelicals' public witness.  Meanwhile, some seek to narrow the social agenda – action viewed as an unbiblical path, to make it better serve a conservative political agenda.

God being kicked out of the public schools, along with declining Biblical teaching from the pulpit (expository preaching), returned Americans to a pre-Gutenberg level of grounding in biblical principals.  The ignorance of Christian pastors in the subject of Civics led many to avoid guiding their flocks – they failed to understand that the Constitution provides for freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. It restricts the government from restricting religious practice. The church is not the government and is therefore quite free to express its religious views, teachings and doctrine. If those have overtones that impact the sphere of public discussion and behavior, there is no prohibition of that activity.  World-renowned Scottish, New Testament interpreter, William Barclay, perhaps said it best: 

" . .. . the Church, when it really is the Church, is bound to be the conscience of the nation and the conscience of society.  Where there is good, the Church must praise; where there is evil the Church must condemn – and inevitably, men will try to silence the voice of conscience." 

We are seeing liberal voice and liberal action seeking to silence the voice of conscience in America.

Meanwhile, it is NOT consistent with Christian belief to conclude that religion and faith have no place in politics or in the shaping of public discourse and policy..

          A practical principle of personal testimony is found in Matthew: "By their works ye shall know them."  But lost in Christendom is the idea of corporate testimony – the testimony of groups.  For example, consider the testimony of the Christian Church in America.  This testimony is that money and race trump character and godliness.  The Church in America has become lessened in informing moral conviction and, sadly, the Church has been a participant in much of that marginalization. 

The Roman Catholic Church

One of the few constants in the Church has been the seemingly solid Catholic stand for the unborn.  To a greater degree than any other faith, Catholics demonstrated their embrace of life being one of the inalienable rights of mankind referred to in the United States Declaration of Independence.  Inalienable rights are natural rights which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular society.  Non-Catholics greatly respected the only denomination that refused to compromise on what was universally recognized as a core issue. Viewed as a most important tenet of the faith is the sanctity of human life - hence its stand against abortion.  Then came the 2008 general election when 50% to 65% – depending upon whose statistics you believe – of Catholics voted for Obama.  According to the Barna Group, Catholics voted 56% for Obama (Born-again Christians voted 42% for Obama.) Cars were seen proudly displaying "Catholics for Obama" bumper stickers.  While Obama professed openly to be a Christian, his whole career voting record shows he's comfortable with even the most extreme forms of abortion and would block all attempts to limit them.  And Obama kept the charade that he was a Christian until November 5 to enable a sucker-punch to at least 50% of what we had always perceived as a Christian community.  Obama's cafeteria-style approach to Christianity found kindred spirit with the many so-called Catholics who for some reason want to be part of the Church but do not want to follow its teachings. 

In an ecclesiastical lynching, TV and newspaper liberal media defamed the Catholic church's moral authority. The Church was positioned in the liberal media as "pedophile infested" while these same media under-reported on worse conditions in the public schools.  In the over 50 years between 1950 and 2002, a total of 4,400 priests were accused of misconduct. Compare that to a recent Associated Press article that "found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct."  The AP also reported, "One report mandated by Congress estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50 million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade." See http://blog.oregonlive.com/oregonianextra/2007/10/teacher_ sex_abuse_series_day_o.html.

Obviously, a Catholic Church is a far safer place for kids than a public school. 

http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id= 6041&CFID=13342983&CFTOKEN=72470259

The Pope's position was if you vote for a pro-abortion candidate specifically because of their pro-abortion stance, you may not receive communion.  But if you vote for that candidate for other "proportionate reasons," you may still be eligible to receive communion..  The Holy Father's understanding of Canon Laws 915, 1329, and 1398, lays out the Church's law on abortion and communion.  Therefore, the belief that any vote for any pro-abortion politician when a pro-life alternative is available, is not supported by Canon Law or the Pope's interpretation of it. 

          Father Jay Scott Newman wrote:

"Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exits constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ's Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation."  Simple translation: If you voted for the candidate that supports evil, you need to get right with God.

The Diocese of Charleston would not support its own priest who had the audacity to stand for his beliefs, and withdrew its support of a courageous Father Jay Scott Newman who was faithful to his calling:

Charleston, Nov 15, 2008 / 01:16 am (CNA).- The Diocese of Charleston is distancing itself from the actions of a Catholic priest in Greenville, South Carolina, who made remarks in a letter to parishioners suggesting that those who voted for Barack Obama should not receive Holy Communion until they go to Confession.  Monsignor Martin T. Laughlin, Administrator of the Diocese of Charleston, said on Friday afternoon that the Catholic Church's "clear, moral teaching on the evil of abortion" has been "pulled into the partisan political arena" by the priest's letter which was posted on the web site of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville.

In a fall into the chasm of unintended consequences, the Pope opened the theological door just a crack, and the unlatched door was forced wide open.  In a practical demonstration of Revelation 22:18, addition to the scriptures was made and the plague of godless leadership was visited upon us.

          Then there was a well-coordinated effort to provide cover for liberal Catholics when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talked on nationwide TV to Tom Brokaw and made the stunning announcement that there has been debate in the Church for centuries about abortion.  Unfortunately, priests of courage and conviction, like Father Newman of Greenville, were too few.  Lacking the guidance of pastoral shepherds, many parish flocks fell victim to false bishops Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Patrick Leahy, Tom Harkin, and John Kerry who had long since demonstrated spiritual bankruptcy.

The African-American Church

The heritage of African Americans is decidedly Christian.  Many of the most powerful Christian voices in America have come from the African-American community.  Up until the present, the African American community chose its leaders from its ranks of spiritual leaders.  The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) originated, by its name, as a Christian organization.  It was formed by two ministers of the gospel, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.   Martin Luther King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial.  Taking a page out of MLK's playbook, Obama will take the Oath of office using Lincoln's inauguartion Bible, retrace some of his steps, and generally cast himself as a second Abraham Lincoln.  Meanwhile, Pastor Rick Warren will be cast as a reincarnation of Billy Graham, who has led millions to a saving relationship with Jesus and lives in a backwoods North Carolina log cabin, with rocking chairs on the front porch.  Neither Lincoln nor Graham had ". . . a form of godliness, but denied the power thereof . . ." ( II Timothy)   Whether or not the Obama and Warren extreme makeovers stick remains to be seen.

Martin Luther King's assertion that people should be judged not by the color of their skin – the outward – but by the content of their characters – the inward – is a remarkable application of Samuel's "Man looketh upon the outward countenance, but God looketh upon the heart."

But then Liberal change ushered in a new order..  The same liberals who complained about evangelical pastors ministering moral conduct in living and voting looked the other way when thousands of predominately African-American churches and their pastors used their pulpits to praise Barack Obama, and not the Savior of the World.  T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and other African American leaders were silent in defense of the gospel, choosing instead to sell Biblical values for 30 pieces of silver.  The outward – race – would trump the inward – character and godliness.  In a clear triumph of the new order over the old order, 97% of African-Americans voted for an African-American Barack Obama – within 3% of unanimity.  Thus the beginning of the civil rights movement in America can be traced to Rosa Parks in the bus, and its end can be identified as Martin Luther King's dream of judging people by the content of their characters being thrown under the bus. 

        Jesus said that we cannot be right with God until we are right with men (Matthew 5: 23-24).  It should be obvious that physical and personal destruction of our fellow men does not engender any measure of right relationship.  It is troubling that the Church has lost its ability to make loving our neighbor a high priority.

God's plan for the Church as expressed in Malachi was that His house be a storehouse.  We have departed from that model.  Today, the Church is consumed in building its ediface, while care of the widows and orphans has been defaulted to our government.  As a culture, we failed to get that one right.  But The Almighty is a God of second chances.  Whether or not the Church will re-engage our culture – with demonstrable fruits – will be revealed in the fullness of time.

Doxology

         The ancients had it right.  They were in so much awe of the name of God that they gave him a name with only soft consonants.  Like Yaweh.  They feared to even mention His name.  Today, we have altogether become flippant.  We flip His name around with little regard for the reverence due a precious, wonderful, holy, and awesome God.  But forbid that this should be so !  May His glorious name be praised forever and ever.

Amen.

Stephen Paul Leykauf