It was not long
before guest speakers appeared during Sunday services to inform the
congregation that changes in the church were on their way. No
details were given, but it was emphasized that the coming changes were needed
and were to be accepted. As I sat in front of the church with the
choir, facing the congregation, I watched the faces in the audience as they
listened to the sales pitches of these strangers peddling their new
agenda. They all sat like well behaved schoolkids, taking it all in
without a murmur of concern from any of the pews. And I could not
help visualizing sheep being addressed by wolves in sheep's clothing (Matthew
7:15).
I became aware that the "Head Start" program for preschool children is
not simply preparation for elementary school work when this federally funded
program trickled into a church in Maine during Sunday School. I was
music director at the time (the 1980s), and the choir gathered in the church's
assembly hall before the start of each Sunday service, as children gathered for
their Sunday session.
Wittingly or not, the church had allowed a
de facto collusion between secular and sacred teaching. Unsuspecting
families were in fact exposing their children to ideas more in line with
paganism than with Christianity. It was a subtle form of
indoctrination. I was not amused when I saw, among the children's
playthings, dolls of both sexes that were "anatomically
correct." Parents who might justifiably object to
this public display of what was formerly a private matter were out
of luck.
Unmistakable
evidence of tampering with Christian doctrine came during the Sunday School
lessons. Children were being
made to understand that Jesus was not at all different from you or me, that He
was simply an extra-nice and loving man. The Christian tenets that
He is the Son of God, divine, and without sin were details left out of the
narrative. The relation between Jesus and His Father – to whom the
adults on the other side of the church wall would pray ("Our
Father...") – was also omitted. And God loves you, no matter
what you do was the only side of Christian theology emphasized. The
"go and sin no more" side was not even whispered.
Bye-bye,
sin, bye-bye, guilt, bye-bye, all the best and most humane moral brakes on
waywardness and wrongdoing ever manifested in sacred Scripture.
"Sin"
and "guilt" soon became dirty words, in fact, and were deleted from
the official Christian lexicon. This was an important step for the
political left in their ongoing effort to disable individual responsibility for
right behavior and transfer it to the group, a more effective object of
control. Criticism of what was happening was squelched with smears
like being "judgmental," "rigid," even
"fundamentalist." Political leftists tend to agree with
Humpty Dumpty when he declared that
"when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to
mean." Pastors who did not follow the new politically correct
gospel would soon be in hot water. Most were sufficiently
intimidated to guard their speech and keep their religion to themselves
(Brainwash 101).
The
distortion of Christian teaching became obvious on both sides of the church
wall. Whether at the pulpit or at the Sunday School tables,
sacred text was being altered to conform to the new political
commandments. Minds, young and old, were being closed to the truth
about their church and their religion. The new, watered down,
"liberalized" version of Christianity was opening doors to harmful
political obsessions like prenatal infanticide, sodomy, and radical
feminism. And a new political bug was being let in called liberation
theology, which was a Marxist appropriation of Christian
theology for the spread of communism. Was it just me finding it
difficult to picture Karl Marx assisting Christianity?
When asked for my review and opinion of a
new hymnal for children that celebrated this liberalized version of
Christianity, I made it clear that its distortions of Scripture, combined with
trivialized music, made it an inappropriate hymnal for Christian
worship. The new hymnals were ordered anyway.
It was not long before guest speakers
appeared during Sunday services to inform the congregation that changes in the
church were on their way. No details were given, but it was
emphasized that the coming changes were needed and were to be
accepted. As I sat in front of the church with the choir, facing the
congregation, I watched the faces in the audience as they listened to the sales
pitches of these strangers peddling their new agenda. They all sat
like well behaved schoolkids, taking it all in without a murmur of concern from
any of the pews. And I could not help visualizing sheep being
addressed by wolves in sheep's clothing (Matthew 7:15).
The alteration of
church doctrine in many churches across the land, over many decades, cannot
honestly be said to have improved the moral health of America. Daily
headlines confirm the contrary. It would be smarter to get off the
"progress express" and return to the Gospel as delivered by Christ's
apostles. There is solid, good reason to believe that their version
of Christianity is the true one.
