Evangelicals like to define themselves as Evangelists..those who constantly ‘offer the gospel’ to every drive-by person they meet with a caring smile, healing manner and fun engagement experience…the guys with whom it is fun but serious business to get as religious as religion can be. They actually do it all the time. Really. It is a lifestyle, unconscious zombie like thing they do.
Standard Evangelical boilerplate:
“Do you know that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?”
“God loves you and calls you to accept Him in the person of Jesus Christ!”
“Raise your hands and lets all celebrate Jesus!”
“Those liberals make all the wrong choices with their free will..all the time!”
” warm welcoming K-LOVE.”..with constant songs of profound unworthiness sung by boytoys and girly girls.
At the same time, like any cult, they weave some truths in with that:
“Jesus Christ rose from the dead.”
“We’re saved by the blood sacrifice of and new birth in Jesus Christ.”
“There is no other name given under heaven by which men must be saved but Jesus Christ.”
“You must be born again in Jesus Christ.”
As far as non-Christians go, it is indistinguishable from real Christianity. I mean, if you hear those things, it all makes sense inside human speech.
There is:
- the presumption of human free will based on the powerless nature of human speech.
The powerlessness of the speech itself to create anything gives room for the logical fallacy but seemingly real notion of a another force that must empower what the speech says in order for anything to ‘happen’ and that force goes by the colloquial term “human free will”. All pagans believe they have free will because all pagans are inside human speech. Thus they all have a great tolerance of each others religion because at least a little of the other guys religion has some common sense in it that you could only have if you had the same mind and speech as all the other pagans. You are looking at the same overall environment in which you all live and coming to at least some of the same conclusions about it.
2. the supposition/implication of someone caring enough for you to make themselves vulnerable in some way and that they are putting themselves to pains and personal sacrifice to inform you of some new information about that same environment. ..the seduction of love of each other first portrayed toward you by the “evangelist”.
3. the supposition/implication of the authority of that extra knowledge about your common environment they have, the understanding of and consent to it as truth that is essential to your survival
4. the complete religious package: the presumption/implication of will-neutral “holy information” that includes a list of demands by the god ( usually called “the law” ), a preist class, implication of upward mobility in the whole structure, grace period, learning curve, demand of free willed obedience, a forgiveness paradigm of some sort to both initiate the new guy and restore the more advanced student back to the safety of the idealized disciple of the whole thing.
So, to a non-Christian, a lump of fake Christians and real Christians fighting over doctrine or “who is the real Christian” looks not only like non-sense, but they will automatically side with the side that does the most human emotional nice things..which is always ( at first) ..the fake Christians..because all the fake Christians have human hearts, have not been born again but are conversant with the phrase and have a great mimic vocabulary of Christianity. Think of the constant impish smile of Jerry Falwell..no matter what. Love champions.
The problem for them..not true Christians or the other pagans, is that they make themselves cowards, but in their own mind, cowards who are being cowardly on the behalf of others less fortunate than themselves. They must get the target convert to say YES to Jesus ( think Robert Redford in the movie Jeremiah Johnson forcefully nodding his Indian bride’s head as he teaches her the English word “Yes!” and exactly the uninspired way she repeats the mere sound of the word as a sign of hearing what he is saying )..no matter what. The other persons very soul is at stake you see, so there is no bounds to the self-degradation that might be necessary to manipulate the ideal outcome..and for which one will be supposedly rewarded by God for having done! So right there, you see Evangelicals are going to compromise in what seems to them a very wise and clever way politically so that their outright enemies constantly advance and they constantly retreat for the purpose of having their enemies “saved” later by their supposed display of self-sacrifice and ‘love’.
What you have in the end is a group of people who will shake hands with Satan in order to try to get him to “say yes to the gospel offer” in perpetuity.
When God says “
Matthew 7:16-20 (KJV)
16-20 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
..evangelicals are deceived he actually meant: ” fruits don’t count..only efforts” and to hell with you if you try to keep them from their efforts ..and their political fruit is one of failure, cowardice and fakery. Do you really want a guy who thinks that way having to face down the Russians or the Chinese? You want him as a partner in a gunfight? He’s got a fake Jesus on his sleeve and planned cowardice in his heart–as his best piety. He’s the guy who writes movies about young men being used by their enemies and throwing away the gun as supposed “righteous winning”.
The people who really don’t understand Christ and who admit they don’t understand and who won’t just jump up and “say yes” to the paradigm of the “gospel offer”..those are usually the people God actually saves by Speaking to them and birthing them as an act of His Speech/Word Jesus Christ. They waited past the fakes; their bullshit detector detected the evangelicals 10 miles away.
Ted Cruz is a joke. He doesn’t know what the “body of Christ” is and thinks its human beings, not new creatures in Jesus Christ. He doesn’t understand we are born again by hearing the Word of God, and nothing happens –at all– when you supposedly “say yes” to words that can create nothing. Ted Cruz is a God damned liar whose best honesty is that he is “saved” and he is going to “save the country” by the means of the very thing that has deceived him. But he believes he is honest and that his mere belief in his beliefs is a kind of ultimate defense against reality.
What do you call someone who is deceived they have to be a coward, they have to suffer, their job is to beat the other guy to get in to office and then to lose to the enemy and they have to “rejoice” over the whole thing and that they need authority over you as governance to save you too? An evangelical. Because he isn’t a Calvinist and isn’t a new creature in Jesus Christ. And those like him are as weak as he is.
Evangelicalism has never produced one knarly dude who doesn’t play fair in a gunfight because he is fighting alone on the behalf of people who zero, zilch, nada about warfare, spiritual or physical.
I don’t know who Donald Trump is.. we come from similar religious backgrounds, I have read he is Reformed, etc. Probably believes in free will though. At least he is honest and doesn’t try to “say the right thing” to the religious right. He’ll go so far, but no more. Good for him.
Myself, I am definitely NOT part of the religious right as they are all free willers, constantly losing and constantly “rejoicing”. If you suggest to them that maybe this is not a time to be rejoicing, a self-righteous, er, kindly old church lady will say “Your not evidencing Christ in your life.”
No joke.
Jeremiah 23: 17
They say constantly unto them that despise me, Jehovah hath said, Ye shall have peace. And they say unto every one that walketh in the stubbornness of his heart, No evil shall come upon you.
In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen