Lessons From Detroit

God has done it again. He has brought seemingly unrelated things to my awareness and given me an epiphany of sorts. I will explain. 1: Because I am a car nut (have been since age 8), and I call Michigan home, I picked up a book called Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff. 2: Although I am a political junky, a couple days ago I reached overload with the umpteen-hundredth Facebook post about the anti-Trump fanaticism that borders on psycho-anarchistic. 3: Today I tripped over another Facebook link to an article that calls evangelical Christians “the American Taliban.” I followed the link to the article by JC Weatherby, read it, and my heart sank.

Here’s my message (up front instead of hidden in the last graph): Church, we are failing! If the election results of last November accurately describe the philosophical make-up of America, roughly fifty percent of our neighbors don’t have a clue who we are. I realize that some sincere Christians did vote for Hillary (See my thoughts on that here). But in large part, the people who voted against what we voted for don’t know what we stand for. And for a certainty, JC Weatherby and the rest of the fanatical haters don’t get us.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Jesus promised that those who hated Him would end up hating us too. (John 15:18-21) The thing that kills me is how self-righteously people like Weatherby condemn us without really knowing us. Weatherby claims to know us because he grew up in Christian circles in Atlanta. But like so many angry gay men, what he hates is a caricature of the true Body of Christ. I know, as Jesus promised, we will be rejected; I just wish we were being rejected more intelligent reasons.

Then there’s the radical left crazies who are protesting Trump (Not My President) who don’t have any reason to protest him yet. All of the interviews I have seen of Trump protesters reveal that they have no concrete evidence that President Trump has done or even proposed policies that would harm them. The left-leaning media painted such a biased picture of Trump that the radical left just assumed that his administration would initiate hell-on-earth. So far, not so much. Certainly the lefties (including Christian lefties) will dislike Trump’s conservatism, but that divide has always been tolerated. It was the Democrats who told us in 2008 that elections have consequences.

So how does LeDuff’s Detroit fit into this? The autopsy LeDuff presents is of a city that died because of corruption. No surprise when you think of corruption in the biological sense: Detroit decayed from the inside out. My “epiphany” was that Detroit was a model for everything the progressive left champions. The city abandoned the principles our country was founded on: integrity, morality, frugality, family. In their place they promoted sex, drugs and rock and roll… and profit for the Big Three auto companies. Detroit is not alone; big cities across America are becoming unsafe, unsound and virtually uninhabitable as a direct result of the kind of policies the Trump-haters love.

You don’t have to believe Genesis to realize that the family is the core structure of any society or that moral integrity makes civil society possible. Nor is it xenophobic, homophobic or misogynistic to say that so-called liberal social policies have weakened the family and morality in general. Indiscriminate welfare distributions discourage a healthy work ethic and encourage the multiplication of children born out of wedlock. Any type of sexual behavior which deviates from the time-tested restraints of monogamous man/wife relationships ultimately breaks down the family. Devaluing life by condoning murder for convenience wrecks not only the family, but society itself. These last three statements are sociological observations, not biblical pronouncements. Of course, we know the Bible will prove time and again to contain sage advice on sociological matters. Little wonder since it was written by the Architect of human society.

When I said earlier that the Church is failing, I meant that we have failed to present God as a loving Father who wishes to order society in the best interests of its members. Instead unbelievers see God as a mean tyrant who wants to take away all their fun. And Weatherby can think evangelical Christians are the American Taliban. It will be the subject of another post to discuss how mistaken the Taliban analogy is, but its invention shows the anarchists for who they are. It was the fool who said in his heart, “There is no God.” The haters on the left are not just rejecting the evangelical message (as they perceive it); they are rejecting rules and order. God help us if they get what they want. Detroit will then be, as LeDuff hints, the harbinger of what’s to come for all America.