As you can see from our Decency Minutes transcribed below (you can click on the titles if you’d like to hear Bill Johnson read them), our writers were all very bothered by both the process and the product of the GOP’s changes to their platform as we head into the 2024 election. Doubtless by now, if you follow any other Christian organizations or news sources you’ve heard varying opinions on how Christians should respond. Within the church, I believe there is room for consciences to be burdened differently on their response, but we ought all to examine our motivations for justifying our positions.
In a 1944 lecture, C.S. Lewis gave a warning to students at the University of London against what he calls, “The Inner Ring.” This is how he describes it: “There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called ‘You and Tony and me.’ When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself ‘we.’ When it has to be expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself ‘all the sensible people at this place.’ From outside, if you have despaired of getting into it, you call it ‘That gang’ or ‘they’ or ‘So-and-so and his set’ or ‘The Caucus’ or ‘The Inner Ring.’ If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself…”
In this instance of responding to the GOP platform, the “inner ring” for Christians to beware of might be called, “political influence.” Here’s what Lewis’ would warn us of:
“…Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things…”
It may be that conservative Christian organizations who’ve had sway with the GOP in the past “think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it…” And the question is, what are we willing to give up to stay on the inside?
The Republican Party has long been a defender of the inherent right to life of the unborn, yet the GOP is now taking steps to betray not only those pro-life convictions and the pro-life voters who put them in office, but more importantly, betray the unborn. This week the Republican Party released its new platform which guts the pro-life principles on which the GOP has stood for decades.
Gone is the language affirming that the inalienable right to life comes God and that the unborn have a fundamental right to life. Also stripped from the platform is the commitment to pass federal pro-life legislation, including support for a human life amendment, which has been in the platform for 40 years.
As Republican politicians seek to appeal to pro-abortion voters by watering down their pro-life principles, they’re in great danger of losing millions of loyal voters.
In 2016, Evangelicals who were on the fence about casting their vote for Donald Trump were wooed into the voting booth with a strict, conservative platform. The New York Times called it the “Most Extreme Republican Platform in Memory” because of its strong stance on traditional marriage and support for a national abortion ban.
Having acclimated Evangelicals to pulling the lever for Trump, the GOP apparently sees no need to be so “extreme” going into the 2024 election.
Now, rather than insisting that the Constitution demands the states’ protection of the lives of infants, it simply says states have the right to protect the unborn. Language in the platform defending natural marriage and parental rights was also removed.
The GOP is betraying their base, saying “Where else will you go?”
Christians who condemned these positions when Democrats held them a decade ago now have a tough choice to make.
Have you ever noticed that most of our national decisions made in the name of “progress” only serve to further our “progress” in sin and degradation?
Such “progressive” decisions are often unreasonable and inconsistent because they run contrary to God’s Word, promoting sin. Yet, nationally, we accept them because we neglect the truth of Proverbs 14:34 – “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”
Take, for example, the 1972 Supreme Court case that decided the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment. In 1976 it was deemed acceptable in some cases, but, just a year later, this same court declared that it was acceptable to murder innocent, unborn babies.
America needs to return to the standards of righteousness as given in the Word of God. Every Christian needs to make God’s standard their own, regardless of what their nation does.
O Lord, revive us, again!
That last Decency Minute nicely illustrates one more warning from Lewis as we examine our motivations: “As long as you are governed by that desire (to be inside the “inner ring” or “relevant” or “progressive”) you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”
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