In George Orwell’s prescient novel “1984,” a totalitarian government led by dictator “Big Brother” has been torturing citizen Winston Smith, insisting he must achieve “doublethink,” a mental state in which people hold two mutually exclusive beliefs at once without questioning either one of them. Finally, Winston capitulates, acknowledging that 2+2=5. “Ah!” his inquisitor exults, “Now we really have you!”
If the government doesn’t yet really have today’s evangelical churches, you can see it from here. While Winston had to be tortured to destroy his will to resist tyranny and preserve his essential humanity, today’s evangelical pastors and churches have been willingly embracing State control over marriage for many decades. They willingly buy into the notion that State actions in the political realm (State-sponsored marriage and divorce decrees) also have agency in the spiritual realm (creating or extinguishing vows to God and one-flesh unions). Government itself doesn’t claim that actions it takes in the political realm impact the spiritual realm – yet the vast majority ot churches have a de facto policy that the government’s legal act of terminating a contract between two people and the State extends into the spiritual realm to extinguish the vows they made to God and the union God joined them in. Even the State is not audacious enough to push that fiction.
Church leadership might find this theological sleight of hand an appealing way to dodge their responsibility to deal with difficult spiritual issues in their churches, but subordinating church policies to government authority is a slippery slope to surrendering ever more religious freedom, because the State does not limit its power grabbing to just the things churches to cede to government. Government’s heavy-handed bullying of churches during the pandemic made that painfully clear.
Is it any wonder that pastors who long ago embraced State control of Christian marriages immediately caved to government orders to close their churches during the pandemic, even as liquor stores, pot shops and strip joints remained open, or that Christians cowered in their homes under lockdown orders from power-drunk politicians? Not when you realize they have been conditioned for generations to believe that anything the State does is God’s will and the churches must adopt it as their own policy as well.
Yet, do you really believe God granted government authority to do things God hates? Can the State join sodomites in God-blessed marriages? Are men in women’s sports, showers and bathrooms, transgender mutilations, drag queen story hours and explicit pornographic kids’ books in school libraries God’s will? If so, you have achieved the fabled “doublethink.” Get ready for marriages between adults and children, marriage with animals, polygamy, bestiality, necrophilia and perversions not yet invented to be legalized as the nation slouches toward Gomorrah. All these things will make sense as equal treatment under the law to an increasingly godless government that has spurned the Natural Law undergirding the U.S. Constitution.
Oh, you don’t agree these are legitimate uses of government’s God-given authority? Are you sure? For generations the church has blithely accepted that government has authority to tell us who is married and who isn’t. How then can you protest if a woman and her donkey spouse walk into your church, proudly holding high their marriage certificate granted to them by that very government? Are you not obligated to affirm that they too are in a one-flesh God-blessed marriage and to shake the woman’s hand and the donkey’s hoof each week in warm fellowship?
If religious freedom is to be preserved, the church must disentangle itself from Caesar and accept its responsibility to adjudicate marriage. its position on divorce and remarriage issues, it must find the courage to deal with it IN the church, led by a new generation of church leaders willing to step out from behind the shield of contrived government authority to establish church policy and own it rather than handing these precious prerogatives to a government that has shown it cannot be trusted with authority over marriage. Whether marriage, divorce or remarriage, churches should issue the certificates, signed by pastors and elders rather than government apparatchiks who know nothing and care less about the welfare of the church.
If churches continue to hand this institution of God over to government to do with as it pleases there will indeed be human-animal couples, throuples and even worse sacrileges desecrating their pews – and less chance than a donkey in an abbatoir of stopping the coming horrors.
The political sphere is Caesar’s province. The church is God’s province, and pastors and elders have responsibility for it. Let’s hope in the future they will accept it.
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
This post originally appeared on WND News Center.