Horses and Water
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
How many of you know someone or knew someone who should not be with the person they are with? When I was in college, I had more than one friend in that situation. Almost always a girl. Why? It’s not because women are more gullible or more dependent. It’s because there are so few guys worth it at that age. And I don’t know how much better it gets as you get older. But if you try to tell them how stupid they are for being with that person or if you try to set them up with someone else or if you try to somehow force them to not be with that person, all you’ll do is ruin your friendship. I can tell you from personal experience it just doesn’t work. Even as a parent, you can only say so much. You can point out the facts. You can share from your own experience. But ultimately, your friend or your child or your family member must choose for themselves a better life.
This is true in other facets of life, too.
Addiction comes to mind as the most clear-cut example. Sometimes an intervention works, but if it does it’s only because the person realizes through the intervention how much love and support they have, and it gives them the courage to leave a life of addiction. But you can’t force an addict to stop being addicted. They have to want it for themselves, or it will never last. Torture is another field where forcing someone to do something just doesn’t work. Some people think torture is justified in some situations; sort of a Machiavellian “end justifies the means.” But if you’re trying to get intelligence you can use, you might be surprised to find out torture doesn’t work, regardless of the end OR the means. In the short-term you might get a confession, but the reliability of that confession is suspect – even when the person being tortured WANTS to cooperate! According to Professor O’Mara, an expert in the field, the stress, pain, and fear that comes from torture impairs recall and cognition and can create false memories that the person believes to be true. Torture also encourages lying instead of telling the truth.[1] You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
But that doesn’t seem to stop us from trying.
I’ve been really disturbed at how some people who identify as Christian have been trying to impose their own agenda thorough politics and using God as an excuse for it. There is a very good reason why the Founding Fathers created the 1st Amendment. It was to explicitly forbid a national religion from forming, while ensuring people had the freedom to worship whoever and however they chose. And they did that because they themselves were often victims of religious persecution. They didn’t want anyone else to have to go through that. It’s one of the primary reasons this country was formed. But more and more we are edging closer to eradicating that line between church and state. In fact, Rep. Lauren Boebert incorrectly said in public that “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church.” She went on to say “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.”[2] I must admit I was pretty stunned how completely wrong she is about all of this. It actually IS part of the Constitution, and it means EXACTLY what it says.[3] But it illustrates how so many Americans completely misunderstood the intentions of the early founders. They specifically did not want a state religion because so many people who came to America were fleeing religious persecution. They didn’t want to be under the thumb of the church, and they saw how bad it could become when a political leader was also de facto the head of the church, and they didn’t want that to happen here. But more and more self-proclaimed Christians are pushing that boundary and are trying to make America an explicitly Christian nation.
Now, is that a bad thing?
No. Our directive from God almighty is to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” It’s right there in Matthew 28. We call it The Great Commission. Ideally, the work we do as a church would turn the entire world into a Christian planet, worshipping God together. But not so we can win. Not so we can rub other people’s faces in our Christianity. But to provide an opportunity for everyone to know the love of God. Making laws that force people to accept our faith is not what God intended.
Yet that’s exactly what has been happening, now more than ever. The Oklahoma State Superintendent mandated the Bible be taught to all students in 5th – 12th grade as part of their curriculum regardless of their religious beliefs. He also said he plans to make the Ten Commandments required learning.[4] You might not think that’s such a big deal, but would you feel the same if you lived somewhere that forced you to learn the central tenets of Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism? Suddenly it might seem like a big deal. Louisiana just mandated that all state schools must display the Ten Commandments. According to Gov. Landry who signed it into law, he said, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start with the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”[5] First, that statement is false. The original lawgiver was God and Moses’ documents were not the first laws written for a society. Hammurabi preceded Moses by at least 750 years and King Ur created the Code of Ur-Nammu more than a thousand years before that.[6] And second, there’s no proof displaying the Ten Commandments leads to more moral behavior. We hear stories all the time about corruption within the church – child abuse, embezzlement, and adultery to name just a few. The Ten Commandments haven’t stopped humans from being fallible. And that’s just two examples of many that are being introduced in many areas of our country, both big and small. Believe it or not, the Apostle Paul came across this same problem nearly 2000 years ago. At the time of his writing, non-Jewish people (Gentiles) who wanted to become Christ followers thought they needed to become Jewish to truly be disciples. This wasn’t helped by most of the Apostles who also believed people needed to convert to be followers. The biggest obstacle? Male circumcision. A painful process as a baby, it was even more painful for adults who didn’t have anesthesia to help them. But Paul receives a revelation from God and realizes this attitude isn’t God speaking to his people but human beings imposing their own ideas onto God.
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
2 Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. 3 Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. 4 You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. 5 For through the Spirit we eagerly await by faith the righteousness for which we hope. 6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. – Galatians 5:1-6
You didn’t have to follow Jewish law to be a Christian.
But that was the popular thinking of the time. And it’s completely understandable why so many made that mistake. Even Peter who Jesus said would be the foundation of the church believed that to be true. But Paul points out to us and the church what he also told Peter. It is not adherence to the law that made one a Christian. It was, and I quote, “faith expressing itself through love.” To me that is such a beautiful statement. Paul reminds both the Jewish people and the Gentiles, non-Jewish people who wanted to follow Christ, that you didn’t need to follow Jewish law and customs to give your heart to Christ. You simply had to live out your faith by showing the love of Christ to the world around you. In fact, by trying to follow the law as it was given to the Jewish people long ago, you were instead putting form and function above faith and that isn’t what God wanted.
Legislating faith is the easy way out.
You can force people to pray. You can force them to read from your holy book. You can force people to memorize the Ten Commandments. But you can’t make them believe. In fact, likely you’ll do the opposite and statistics prove that to be happening today. The more politicized our faith has become, the more people are leaving in droves. According to a Pew Research study, in 1972, 90% of Americans identified as Christian and that stayed pretty steady until the late 80’s / early 90’s when it started to drop. It went from 90% to 80% in that small window and has been declining ever since. In 2021, only 63% identified as Christian. Meanwhile the number of people who are religiously unaffiliated has gone up during that same timeframe. It was pretty steady from 1972 until the early 90’s at around 5% but today, it’s up to 29% who don’t identify with a religion. We call this group “the Nones.”[7] And it’s not like they’re going to other religions. They’re just not engaging in faith at all. That’s because we haven’t done a very good job of giving them a reason to hang around.
We have to do the hard work again.
Like the early Christians who led by example and out of love, who brought people to Christ in droves, we need to do that again. Christianity was not and should not be a political movement. But it is increasingly become so. We need to reclaim our Christianity. Instead of trying to get the government to force people to adopt our beliefs, we need to do a better job of being better Christians. We need to stop attacking others. We need to find common ground. We need to accept that other people have other beliefs and instead of treating them like “the other” to embrace them and learn from them and trust in God to use us as his instruments to show the world a better way. We need to stop using God as an excuse for our own poor behavior. By leaning on Christ and on Christ’s example for our lives we can change the world again.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325643/#b4
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/28/lauren-boebert-church-state-colorado/
[3] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights/what-does-it-say
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/27/oklahoma-public-schools-bible-teachings and https://www.akronlegalnews.com/editorial/35317
[5] https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-ten-commandments-displayed-classrooms-571a2447906f7bbd5a166d53db005a62
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_legal_codes
[7] To be fair, there isn’t one reason for this drop in Christians and equal rise in the Nones, but this change correlates with the increasing politicization of Christianity. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/
Craig's Corner 