Ed Young's Retirement at Second Baptist Houston: A Back Story
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is a member of Houston's Second Baptist Church, a mega church where Dr. Ed Young has been pastor since 1976. If you look at the story about Young's retirement, linked above, you'll see a report about the Lt. Governor preaching in a recent church service at Second, bringing themes into the pulpit from a recent luncheon of the American Renewal Project, a political action group organized to bring Evangelicals into government by training them to campaign for school board seats, state legislative seats, city councils and county commissions.
"We lose this nation if conservatives don't win the Presidential election in November," Patrick said, in his address to the project. That got him invited into the pulpit at Second Baptist.
"Political conservatives are fighting a battle of darkness and light," he told the congregation. "There are people who pray to God, believe in God, raise their families in God's work, and there are people over here who don't believe in God and want to kick God out. They hate God. That's the battle we're in."
And that's the kind of rhetoric that's being used to keep people in the pews nodding and bobbing their heads in agreement, clicking their tongues and planning to vote for a man who rejects everything about their own Christian faith, especially his arrogant claim that he has committed no sin for which he needs God's forgiveness--blasphemy according to the scripture--and whose immoral, worldly lifestyle is the diametric opposite of the Christian gospel of Jesus Christ, which is supposed to be what Second Baptist allows to be proclaimed from its pulpit.
Open Eyes and Open Minds Are in Short Supply in Some Churches
What the Lieutenant Governor has done, from the pulpit of one of the nation's largest churches, is endorse a partisan political position. It has take time away from its preaching, which it considers to be the imparting of the prophetic Word of God, for something that is not only a secular diversion, but is an endorsement of some of the most anti-Christian activity that has ever existed in American politics. And the characterization of their political opponents as God-haters, unbelievers who want to "kick God out" is a lie.
The true perception here, and it is one that is being noticed, even by some of those within the Evangelical bubble, is that the all out political endorsement of Donald J. Trump requires compromising every Christian principle that Jesus Christ laid out in this three year ministry of preaching and teaching, or at least, in what was remembered and recorded by the gospel writers. It's not possible to separate politics from religion in this case, because the religion is being used as a vehicle to drive the politics. Politicians like the Texas Lieutenant Governor are, in fact, doing the blending and mixing with their rhetoric.
As many leading Evangelicals once stated about Bill Clinton, it is not possible to separate his character from his identity and buying his politics means also buying his character. So, using an old cliche, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Trump may not "hate" God, or at least the god he has invented who requires no accountability from him, but he is certainly not the man to vote for to preserve the American constitutional democracy. He's made it abundantly clear that it is he, not Joe Biden and the Democrats, who are the ones planning on taking this country away from its people, and making it an oligarchy of the rich, giving lip service to some heretical apostasy like Christian nationalism.
Trump is the God-Hater
And it's not an "us vs. them" with regard to people who pray to God, believe in God, and raise their families in God's work. The current President and Vice-President are both professing Christians, while Trump himself is not, at least, not in any terms identified by Evangelicals. Trump, already convicted of one rape, is on trial for covering up an affair with a porn star, and is approaching trials for attempting to overthrow the Constitution and for stealing records and risking national security, as well as lying about it. If any candidate running for President behaves like a God-hater, and an anti-Christ, it's Trump.
Trump's campaign organizations and supporters, like Charlie Kirk and Turning Point, have scoffed at Christian theology and doctrine, and have mocked principles that are at the core of the Christian gospel, such as turning the other cheek.
"I understand the principle, sort of," said Trump Jr., at a Turning Point rally in Phoenix, regarding the teaching of Christ about turning the other cheek, "But it's gotten us nowhere in the world."
Evangelicals are known for their vitriolic, caustic criticism of other Christians when it comes to what they define as "changing" or "twisting" the scripture, exactly like this. But it's all OK, apparently, not even worthy of mention if Trump or one of his surrogates does it. That's perfectly fine. And that's perfect hypocrisy, to which many Evangelicals are completely blind. It's killing their churches and their ministries, visibly. But they can't see it.
Lt. Governor Patrick is a politician who is using the trappings of a recognized mega-church, with the permission of its pastor, to endorse an evil, anti-Christian demagogue as President of the United States. In other words, Patrick is lying to us, and Dr. Ed Young is letting him have his pulpit to do so. That undermines the credibility, as well as the spiritual claims, of both men.
Wake Up or Die
There are people who are seeing what the intrusion of evil is doing to their churches. Secular politics and white, Christian nationalism is destructive, and it's turning churches into something they were never intended to be. The best chance America has for surviving and keeping its historical principles intact is for Joe Biden to be re-elected, a Democratic majority winning control of the Congress and pastors in some of these churches waking up to the disaster that is about to break on them if that doesn't happen.
This rhetoric from Patrick, by the way, is similar to the "New Apostolic Reformation group, which teaches that the political enemies of the religious right and its endorsed candidates are possessed by demons. That's an even bigger lie than the election was stolen, but it's there, and they are convinced, in spite of the fact that Trump's behavior is much more characteristic of demon possession than that of his opponents.
These people are heretics, and they are out to kill American democracy and the American church.
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