Chuck Baldwin's research on the uselessness of pastors

Uh, did I just say the uselessness of pastors? Must have been that in my rush to share this item I couldn't think of a more diplomatic, less sweeping term for it. The clergy are so great at helping people through emotional crises, I've experienced it....... but the nagging question remains wouldn't there be a great deal fewer of those problems if pastors and pew-warmers were together grabbing hold of the "political" issues and dealing with them as is so urgently needed? You can't have healthy individuals in a depraved, murderous, satanic society. You can't have a just, orderly society in which life is affordable if there's no vigorous, uncompromised spiritual leadership.


My God, did I put the noble churchgoing faithful down wholesale as "pew-warmers"? What's come over me? Oh, but look how socially improper Pastor Baldwin waxes on the subject:


http://libertycrier.com/new-research-pastors-deliberately-keeping-flock-dark/
New Research: Pastors Deliberately Keeping Flock In The Dark


Some call it politics, I call it political moral issues. If it's wrong for you to run around shooting your neighborhood up because you don't like your neighbors' way of life or simply want their stuff, it's wrong for Washington to run around greater Israel shooting up its neighbors on a pretense of chasing down our own demons or bringing those countries liberation. The mere fact that the politicians have the full blessing of the media and in turn the nation's TV watchers doesn't make it right or less ghastly, merely more prestigious (c.f. the "honor" and "respect" that are central to Mafia culture).


Politics is merely the moral issues concerning us all collectively. That's all it is. If you disagree, please indicate where the dividing line is between it and religion, would you? (After revisiting yesterday's posting here on theocracy, agreed?)


The traditional enemies of truth have bought off or strongarmed every institution in ameriKa. In religion, they've taken over the seminaries and set up tax benefits to make churches corporations and buy off the preachers. On moving to Dixie I eagerly visited churches and scouted for any sign of "political" boldness. Disappointed over and over, I sometimes asked them why no mention -- their answers were blessedly smug but none too clear.


Maybe my first mistake was traveling with my Bible and notebooks in a briefcase. Spoke to one good radio preacher before he was about to do a service and he was clearly sweating bullets all through it.


Another case really took the cake. One of the few moral issues they've ever gotten exercised about was the gambling schemes that have plagued South Carolina. The state is Constitutionally barred from having a lottery, but that matters not to our politicians and other opportunists.


The 1990s fight against video poker here was very valid. Since gambling and drinking are the only two sins whose existence churches have acknowledged for most of the past century, they all got involved, held big public meetings and carried on in full regalia. Well, one pulpiteer actually wrote in a guest editorial in the Greenville News that since it was a political issue, he had a hands-off policy on it!


In other words, he was a supposed heir to Martin Luther, the great fearless Baptists by whose blood the Bill of Rights was painfully birthed, or some other tradition, had a policy of the government-media complex getting first dibs on everything. If that colossus took up a subject it was off-limits to him. Hopefully by now it's crossed his mind that that's a statement of who his god really is, his highest authority.


Our age is ironic if nothing else, isn't it.


/\/.\/\/.