Roy Exum
It is one of life’s great truths: “Christians are the only army in the world who shoot their wounded.” So it was hardly lost on me that in the very same hour I learned 90,000 believers had been killed for their faith worldwide in 2016, the Christian experts in America got all frothy over the fact President-elect Donald Trump has included twice-divorced televangelist Paula White of New Destiny Christian Center on his inaugural Faith Team.
Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore has denounced White as a “charlatan” and a “heretic” for endorsing the prosperity gospel and Christian blogger Erick Erickson wrote, “I’d rather a Hindu pray on Inauguration Day and not risk the souls of men, than one whose heresy lures in souls with promises of comfort only to damn them in eternity.”
The whole thing makes me laugh. In Mark Twain’s Notebook there appears the line, “If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be--a Christian.”
Others on the Faith team are His Eminence Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York; Rev. Samuel Rodriquez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; Rev. Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse, and Bishop Wayne T. Jackson of Great Faith Ministries International. None of them agree the same on Christianity.
It’s true, we are a strange group. The reason there are Baptists and Methodists and Catholics is because they believe different stuff yet it is all about the same thing. Trust me, there ain’t but one Bible, forget the many translations. There are even four or five divisive tribes in the Presbyterian Church. That’s why I realized long ago a church or a tribe has nothing to do with my love for the Lord.
I believe the holiest woman I have ever known was my grandmother. She lived for the Lord, every minute of every day, and is why, at age 12, I accepted the Lord into my heart because He is my personal Savior. But there is a great story to go with that.
My dad really struggled with alcohol later in life. He was a brilliant guy, and knew something fun about everything, but bad came to worse after I got out of high school and he and my mother were divorced. My mom was the second greatest Christian I have ever known. She taught Sunday school for years, was active in the Women of the Church and all of that. All four of her sons had at least ten years of perfect attendance in Sunday school and memorized Bible verses as well as the Catechism from the time we could walk.
When Mom got divorced, the great church she had so faithfully served for years asked her to quit teaching Sunday school. They didn’t need her to help her best friend Madden bake cakes and help serve food. Don’t you see – Christians shoot their wounded. And some sage said one time, “The world is divided into two groups – Christians and non-Christians. Unfortunately, just one of them does the judging.”
Mother acted like the shunning by some of her closest friends didn’t bother her and, with Mammaw’s help, did a beautiful job of it. For the life of me I couldn’t abide her being so kind and nice to the very women who judged her but that’s also the first real lesson I ever got in how to be Christ-like. Her faith never wavered.
It wasn’t but weeks before some of the pious would ask mother to get their daughter’s wedding picture “up high on the page” and others would ask for a myriad of favors. “You can’t do anything except to keep a cheerful heart. We know who were are and God continues to bless us so He must understand,” mother would laugh.
That was about the time I got deep in the newspaper business. Soon I began to find out some of the folks at church as well as in the community I had held up on pedestals weren’t quite what they seemed. I watched some go to prison. Today the CDC tells us that 33 percent of marriages end up in divorce the first ten years and that the number rises to 43 percent in 15 years.
I noticed Mother had a different calling pretty quickly, too. She would always take women who were going through a divorce to lunch. Are you kidding? Sometimes the preacher would even ask Mother to do it and she was always delighted to teach a different Christian lesson.
Down through the years, I have learned that when I read where vitriolic Christians like Russell Moore and Erick Erickson ruthlessly blast other Christians who might wear four-inch heels in the pulpit (and were invited to the inauguration when they were not), there is a great answer in the Book of Matthew where Jesus says, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
“How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:3-5 NIV)
That a Christian is murdered every six minutes somewhere in the world in 2016 is horrible but it is a heart-breaking tale that has endured centuries. I think our military would be far more useful to go after those killers than some of the thankless things we do for countries who vote opposite us in the UN. I am praying Trump will go after ISIS with all our might. The Islamic countries in the Middle East, the militants in Nigeria and the Hindus in India deserved to be thumped real hard.
Pope Francis explained the perverse world perfectly last month. “Why does the world persecute Christians? The world hates Christians for the same reason it hated Jesus; because He brought the light of God and the world,” he paused, “prefers darkness to hide.”
Not quite. Many in the world want the light. Consider this from Wikipedia: “According to 2011 Pew Research Center survey, there were 2.18 billion Christians around the world in 2010, more than three times as much from the 600 million recorded in 1910. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center study, by 2050, the Christian population is expected to be 2.9 billion.
“Protestantism is one of the most dynamic religious movements in the contemporary world,” the report read. “From 1960 to 2000, the global growth of the number of reported Evangelicals grew three times the world's population rate, and twice that of Islam.”
Imagine what the Christian population might be if we weren’t so intent on shooting our wounded.
royexum@aol.com