don’t mind at all. politics is so hard, but the founders were good teachers.
yes, of course, i agree that the two are related based on my (perhaps oversimplified) view. you see the evidence before us. the mechanisms (causation outside of the first cause: abandonment of God) are pretty murky.
but it’s clear to me that our system of government was engineered/designed up as a system of checks and balances with all parties having the moral fortitude to play *only* their roles. when more than one branch immorally starts to conspire with another, which many of the founders knew had to happen eventually, the experiment would have to fail. franklin and others predicted it.
thus what do we as Christians do given this apparent inevitablity. what action would God want us to take now that we are here at the end of the line. that’s the question i now struggle with.
I’m struggling with that question too. Personally, I think that the growth of the state was mostly well-intentioned in the beginning. The Progressive Movement had plenty of Christians aboard, and they did mean to do good via government power. Though divorced from God (there are exceptions) modern liberals at least say they intend the same. They didn’t originally mean to drive God from our society, but that’s what happened. It just seems like the power corrupts the effort and the people making it.
The Founders certainly knew to be suspicious of centralized power, and what they wrought worked really well for a long time. Even they said it would only work for a moral people. We don’t have that anymore, and so we have a government that actually subsidizes immorality; it’s not even morally neutral. We pay girls to have babies out of wedlock, for instance, and do everything possible to keep people from having to live with the consequences of their actions. I have a hard time putting much faith in an institution that’s $17 trillion in debt, but can’t cut the cowboy poetry subsidy from its budget, or in a people that would elect a fraud like Obama. It seems like virtually everything has been rendered unto Caesar, so what’s left for God?
I think he wants us to show his love to an unjust society, and to each other… I think it would be very hard to go astray following Jesus's example.
I'm very much a fan of the book of James, and think that it holds the keys to reviving the Church in America (see ch 2 & 5, especially)… of course it's hard to go wrong embracing evangelism (which is doing what Jesus said to do).