About
Disturbed by the diminishing standards to which his fellow Evangelicals hold their leaders, conservative columnist Ben Howe argues Christians should start focusing on the means, and let God handle the ends.
America's politics and culture have never been more shameless and obscene, and America's Christians have never been more beset by enemies. However, their greatest enemy may be themselves. Writer and filmmaker Ben Howe has experienced firsthand how the desire for political victories can cloud personal judgment and diminish moral conviction. In The Immoral Majority, he lays out the history of how the modern American Evangelical movement shifted from moral arbiters to moral relativists and uses scripture to remind Christians that the moral high ground never belonged to them in the first place, nor anyone except God Himself.
The year 2016 was a watershed for Howe as he discovered the extent to which he'd underestimated Donald Trump, but more importantly, how much he'd overestimated his fellow American evangelicals. How had the movement once spearheaded by the infamous Moral Majority moved their expectations of leadership so fully as to embrace a person of Donald Trump's demonstrable low character after having spent nearly two decades citing similar characteristics from former President Bill Clinton as proof that Republicans retained the moral high ground?
But the enthusiasm with which Christians forwent expectations of their leaders was only a symptom of a larger disease. One that finds a movement more dedicated to partisan victory than to Biblical tenets. A movement that seems more intent on fulfilling their worldly self-interests than growing the Kingdom of God.
America's politics and culture have never been more shameless and obscene, and America's Christians have never been more beset by enemies. However, their greatest enemy may be themselves. Writer and filmmaker Ben Howe has experienced firsthand how the desire for political victories can cloud personal judgment and diminish moral conviction. In The Immoral Majority, he lays out the history of how the modern American Evangelical movement shifted from moral arbiters to moral relativists and uses scripture to remind Christians that the moral high ground never belonged to them in the first place, nor anyone except God Himself.
The year 2016 was a watershed for Howe as he discovered the extent to which he'd underestimated Donald Trump, but more importantly, how much he'd overestimated his fellow American evangelicals. How had the movement once spearheaded by the infamous Moral Majority moved their expectations of leadership so fully as to embrace a person of Donald Trump's demonstrable low character after having spent nearly two decades citing similar characteristics from former President Bill Clinton as proof that Republicans retained the moral high ground?
But the enthusiasm with which Christians forwent expectations of their leaders was only a symptom of a larger disease. One that finds a movement more dedicated to partisan victory than to Biblical tenets. A movement that seems more intent on fulfilling their worldly self-interests than growing the Kingdom of God.