Back in the USA there was a revolution going on. Children were rebelling against all authority, riots on campus and all, and I let myself get swept up in the spirit of it. If I had hoped to find answers in rebellion, I was wrong, but I did get a chance to learn something about my own character. I told myself the drugs I used were tools for vision and knowledge, but they soon became very important...so important that I would not give them up. I lied to myself and to the world that this was my choice of "lifestyle", when indeed I was its slave.
I had grown up a secular Christian, but in my reading I began to turn to the great books of the world's religions. If you had asked me what was my religion I would have said, "Christian," but I really didn't know what that meant, nor had I ever sought to find out what it meant. I was American and , except for Jewish people, Americans are Christian, right?

Then one day my reading turned to the King James Bible and I found something new: it wasn't just interesting stories. This wasn't like those other books. This word was alive!

I don't know if it was the image of Nazism, which seemed to be about lying to yourself ("I was only following orders"), or whether it was that Americans of my parents' and their parents' generations lied about honoring self-reliance but turned to socialism when faced with the Great Depression, or wheteher it was our governments lying to us about the war, or my friends lying about their objections to the war in Viet Nam [self-interest (I don't want to die!") disguised as moral rectitude], or my own careful self-delusion, but I had had enough of lying for one lifetime. The Bible was the first clear truth that I had ever encountered. And I discovered that that truth had power, and a name: Jesus. He changed my life. I stopped using drugs. I became employable. I began to complete things. I began to be the kind of person you could rely on. I actually became a man, where previously I had only looked like one.

Most Americans haven't yet begun to restore themselves in faith and truth. The poet has written of them: the "hollow men." In the arts, in the sciences, in commerce, in education, in politics and religion...two fields which have begun, by the way, to merge...appearance is more important than substance. It is not what you are that matters, but what you appear to be. Having itching ears, they find for themselves teachers who say what they want to hear.


Yet inside their cocoons they are frustrated. There is iniquity and injustice all around, but because it is also within them they can't rebuke it, for they would otherwise have to rebuke themselves. Such a people look for scapegoats.

Is this what happened in Germany?

History offers a parallel to our time, when there was an adulterous king and his spiritual wife. It is found in the book of I Kings in the Bible, in the story of Ahab and Jezebel. Jezebel was given authority to decree the manner in which the people would be permitted to worship. Then she persecuted to death those who would disagree.

Early in the current presidency we got a hint when the horrible tableau unfolded in Waco. Since there was little popular opposition to the tactics used by federal agencies, other fringe Christian groups were soon under scrutiny. It won't happen suddenly, but in the same manner that they have escalated accusations that conservatism is extremist, they will gradually expand the definition of "fringe Christian" until it might include any of us...even you. All the while the denominations will accomodate anything to keep their tax exemption, just as they accomodated Hitler decades ago. Remember the lessons of Germany. Though they were never rounded up and immolated, non-Jewish Germans were ruined by their silence.

Carefully watch events of the days ahead.

The End

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page