Social Gospel

For all those really interested in establishing a “Godly” government, I urge you to consider the fate of Israel, and contrast that with the early church.

The nation Israel was given land and several governments, each with the expressed purpose of creating a more Godly nation. By law, edict, custom, and culture the state religion was Judaism. By any measure it failed to deliver. In the re-constituted Israel today, that failure continues.

The Church was created in the midst of an oppressive government. Routinely on the short stick of things in a nation that flaunted it’s paganism; constantly in violation of laws that institutionalized the pagan culture. It succeeded.

What was the difference between the two? Israel was promised and given an earthly kingdom. The church was promised and given a spiritual one. The problem is that as oft happens, we Christians get our kingdoms confused. We try to institutionalize Christianity, as did Israel with Judaism. The end is the same; a faith in name only, where the words remain but the people believe not; and the symbol remains (on our courts, our governments, and on our money), but the object is gone. In the words of Murray Rothbard, We have created a social gospel:

The real evil – this crusading spirit itself – first swept over America in the late 1820s in the form of what is technically called "post-millennial pietism" (PMP). In the dominant "evangelical" form that PMP assumed in the "Yankee" communities of the North (New Englanders and their transplanted kin in upstate New York, northern Ohio, northern Indiana, etc.), this meant that every man had the bounden and overriding duty to maximize the salvation of his fellowmen, by stamping out sin and the temptations thereto. In short, he was bound to work his darndest to establish a Christian Commonwealth, a Kingdom of God on Earth. It very quickly became clear that sin was not going to be stamped out very quickly by purely voluntary means, and so the PMPers rapidly turned to government to do the stamping out and the creating and the uplifting. In short, as one historian perceptively put it, for the PMPers, "government became God's major instrument of salvation."

This turn to government was facilitated by the "pietist" part of the PMP doctrine, for this meant that the old Puritan emphasis on creed and God's Law, much less the Catholic or Lutheran emphasis on liturgy or the sacramental Church, was swept aside. Christianity became totally focused in a vaguely pietist, "born again," mood on the part of each basically creedless and Church-less individual soul. Shorn of Church or creed, the individual PMPer was necessarily forced to lean upon government as his staff and shield.

Slowly but surely over the decades since 1830, this mainstream Yankee Protestantism became secularized into an only vaguely Christian but passionately held Social Gospel. After all, with this sort of mindset, it was easy for God to gradually drop from sight, and for government to assume a quasi-divine role. [emphasis added] It was left to the monster Woodrow Wilson, a PMPer to his very bones and a Ph.D. as well, to take this domestic creed and extend it to foreign policy. It was essentially a "today the U.S., tomorrow the world" credo. Once the PMPers took over the U.S. government and imposed a Kingdom of God at home, their religious duty got raised to the planetary level. As the historian James Timberlake put it, once the Kingdom of God was being established in the United States, it became "America's mission to spread these ideals and institutions abroad so that the Kingdom could be established throughout the world. American Protestants were accordingly not content merely to work for the kingdom of God in America, but felt compelled to assist in the reformation of the rest of the world."

I have no idea where Rothbard will spend eternity. But it seems that he accurately places his finger on the misplaced priorities of segments of the Church; who by their actions drive away the very people they are commanded to bear a true witness to. Christ deals with us as individuals. Regardless of which (more or less) orthodox denominations you follow. Whether Orthodox, Reformed, or Evangelical, etcetera: each is held to personal account with our Lord, according to HIS mercies. Institutionalized Christianity is an oxymoron. You cannot force someone to be a Christian, for Christianity demands a personal relationship. When Christians act to mandate the tenants of their faith into law, they witness falsely, and drive fear into the hearts of non-believers who become shut out of the process. How much better to pray for them, and to bear witness that they may look at us, and see Christ revealed in us?

Even so, how little faith we must have if we believe that God is not so powerful that he needs an earthly power to force people to piety. God has a perfect delivery unit to spread his Gospel and salvation. It is called the Church. It is a mission that the church cannot delegate or assign to someone else, and pure laziness, irresponsibility, and sacrilege to think that this could be so. Brothers and Sisters, do not put upon the spirit of fear. Take courage, for God does not need the US Government, or any government for that matter, to accomplish His will upon the earth. Do your own job, and let the peace of God, which supasses all earthly understanding, reign in your heart.