For many in the Christian Evangelical world, the last few days at the Republican National Convention have been jarring.
On night one, we saw a speech from Amber Rose, a pro-abortion OnlyFans porn star, and heard a Sikh prayer from lawyer Harmeet Dhillon to the Indian god "Waheguru." On night two, we watched Eric Trump defend the party's choice to remove one-man-one-woman marriage and a national ban on baby murder from the official platform. He likened them to "side issues," the equivalent of "cleaning spots on the wall in the basement while there's a leak in the roof."
To American Evangelicals who are used to being catered to - at least in lip service - by Republicans, these changes are a heartbreaking wake-up call. The party is no longer ours. On foundational issues we believe matter most, the country is no longer with us.
But we're surprised by this?
For my entire adult life, American Evangelicals, the most reliable pro-family and pro-life voting bloc in the nation, have been largely led by the "seeker movement" and the Southern Baptist Convention. For decades, we were shamed by our Christian leaders for being politically active or too openly conservative. We were told that aggressive Christian political action is akin to "idolatry," driven by "fear." We were conditioned to treat politics as "dirty."
Many people think this started with Trump - that Evangelicals sacrificed their morals for cheap political wins - but it began way before that. For years, we were content with being inactive and "above it all" when it came to politics.
We threw our support behind moral, polite men with good hair who paid lip service to our cause while losing on almost every front.
We didn't register voters, we didn't protest, and we didn't run for office. We were content to hide out in our churches and show up every few years to punch the ticket for losers like McCain, Romney, and Bush. The church seemed satisfied as long as the party ticket looked good on paper, even while our country slid further into corruption and disrepair.
Meanwhile, in our little church kingdoms, our leaders built multi-million dollar, multi-site cities where inane self-help sermons got piped onto screens at 38 campuses.
A toothless, politically-neutral gospel was preached.
It was a message that seemed to have nothing to say about the world we were living in (except, of course, when it came to racial justice and COVID masks).
Christian evangelism all but disappeared, too. Even as record numbers of Americans had never read the Bible or even heard of Jesus, we dropped preaching the Gospel to the lost and exchanged it for timidly inviting a neighbor to movie night at church campus #18.
The result? We now live in an unevangelized, apostate culture where even Republican Trump supporters will vote for abortion rights in a local election.
Today, we're facing an onslaught of demonic Leftism determined to destroy everything that is good, true, and beautiful. Our immigration system is lawless. Our leaders are tyrants. Our education system seems designed to hollow out the souls of young people and replace it with satanic sexual fetish, mental illness, and political Marxism.
Where have Evangelicals been this whole time?
They did nothing to stop it, so the job of saving the republic fell to non-Christian fighters like Donald Trump and Harmeet Dhillon.
While the milksops at Village Church and North Point Community Church were conducting white privilege training and shaming politically active Christians, people like Trump and Dhillon were kicking down doors to preserve liberty for our children. So is it any shock that the Republican Party moved on from Evangelicals?
The Republican Party is no longer ours.
But we weren't pushed out.
We gave it up. We stopped fighting for it.
If we want God back in the Republican Party, we have a ton of work to do. It will require us to emerge from our shiny church campuses and take our faith into the ugly, messy, hypocrisy-filled world of politics. It will require us to be salt and light once again.
God's Word is eternally relevant, and the fields are white for harvest. There's still time to save this country, but Christians will have to get in the fray.
