What They Actually Pledged
For weeks now I have written about the merger — the fusion of the political machine and institutional religion into one apparatus that serves itself and answers to no one. I have written about the Johnson Amendment falling, about politicians of both parties renting out pulpits, about a sanctuary in Atlanta turned into a campaign stop with a donate button stapled to the sermon. I have taken fire from both directions for it, which is generally how you know you are standing in about the right spot.
Here is what the Fourth of July has to say about all of it.
The men we are celebrating tomorrow built a wall specifically to prevent the thing we are now watching happen with our own eyes. They separated the church and the state because they understood — from blood-soaked European experience — that when you merge the two, you do not get a holier government. You get a corrupted church and a tyrannical state, each using the other, and a people who can no longer tell where the worship ends and the politics begins.
We are tearing that wall down from both sides and calling it patriotism on one end and prophetic witness on the other. The founders would recognize exactly what we are doing. They crossed an ocean and signed a death warrant to get away from it.