OK, after a trip to the Pepperdine lectures, I’m back and ready to bounce some more ideas off of you. Before I so rudely interrupted myself by posting some things I had written previously, I was discussing the idea that governments will say and do what they need to in order to prolong their own existence. We would like to think that our government will always be open and honest with us, but experience says that just isn’t so. For example, we remember the righteous indignation with which the Carter administration responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. However, it wasn’t until 1998 that former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted (in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur) that the U.S. had baited the Soviets into invading Afghanistan by funding Islamic rebels in that country. [Ironically, Brzezinski was asked at that time about the wisdom of such action. “What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?,” he replied. When the interviewer questioned Brzezinski about Islamic fundamentalism representing a world menace, he said, “Nonsense!” That was, of course, three years before 9/11] Was that an isolated episode? Hardly. Nations around the world have done and will do this very thing time and again. And people forgive them. There was a fake commercial on a comedy show back in the 80s which had the tagline “The CIA: You don’t know what we do. You don’t want to know.” That pretty much sums it up for many.

Here’s what concerns me: Christians throw in their lot with these earthly governments based on the information they are given. “God is on our side” is the battle cry of armies everywhere, with Christians taking up arms based on what politicians say and do. Some Christians come to support these governments no matter what. Pragmatism takes precedence over spirituality; what matters is what works, what will keep us safe, what will assure the continuing existence of the kingdom that we support, be it the Roman empire, colonial Spain, or the United States of America.

Dare we abdicate our right to make moral decisions? Will we trust in worldly people to decide whether or not we should use torture? Will we let Congress decide who we are to hate, who we are to kill, who we are to fight, whose nation and way of life we are to destroy? The same people who moan and complain about what the President is doing, about the decisions that Congress makes, about how our government is run, these same people will turn around and urge us to go fight the wars that these politicians choose. We don’t want Obama to spend our money nor make moral decisions about marriage or stem cell research, but we want to give him the right to tell our young people to destroy an Afghan village. (Fighting the very group that we armed and trained in the 1970s… but let’s not go there…)

Somebody help me make sense of this. A high percentage of Christians that write on the Internet have been highly critical of our government’s policies over the last few months. That’s not only acceptable, it’s encouraged by many. But questioning our country’s military policy (made by the same people) is considered unChristian. Huh?

{photo by duchessa, sxc.hu}