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Election 2006 is finally over with. Sort of. There will be extended battles of many kinds; some in the courts of law and some in the courts of public opinion as people spin the results of the election.

As we noted in a previous post, our main concern is and always has been the legal status of Christianity–and Christian behaviour–in our country. We are not blind to the relationship between that and may other important issues–economic freedom, property rights, a straightforward rule of law, etc.. But we know all too well that the composition of the government–and in that respect it took a decided turn for the worse–can seriously affect people’s ability to choose their eternity unhindered by adverse pressure from the state.

But let’s look at another question: how did we get into this mess? The overriding issue is one that Christians don’t support with the enthusiasm that our opponents think we do, but it’s one that’s ended up hitting us hard: the Iraq war. There are many Vietnam-era excuses as to why this isn’t going well, such as the “quagmire” business, but the basic problem as far as we are concerned is that our President has taken a fixed, unrealistic position on this issue that doesn’t advance our long-term national security: his unbending insistence that we work and fight towards democracy in Iraq.

The Middle East hasn’t known democracy from the start; any realistic reading of the Bible will confirm that. But beyond that we have a President whose idea is that a fixed position is the way to victory. A lot of Christians look at world affairs–and life–in the same way. But a fixed position is like the Maginot Line in World War II: it only invites the enemy to go around it, as the Germans did the original and the jihadis are trying to do now.

There are only two really fixed things out there. The first is that heaven is our ultimate objective. The second is that Jesus Christ is the way to get there. Beyond that we have been given flexibility in how to acheive that objective for ourselves and facilitate it fo others, something Charles Finney pointed out a century and a half ago.

We need to ask ourselves some hard questions. What good does it do to spend so much effort defending life when we produce it only to turn it over to the world and the state to direct? Or put another way, if we cannot or will not evangelise people, is it better that they not be born? (There’s a New Testament answer to this, but we’ll leave it up to you to find it.) Is our desire to acheive success in our society part of the solution or part of the problem? Or are we supporting a system that will, in the long run, work against us?

We need to take a more realistic view out of what we can expect from the state. Part of our problem is that there are too many expectionations–from all sides–of what the state can do. Attempts to politicise Katrina have had varying degrees of success, but there’s no doubt that Katrina was the state’s lowest moment, and that low moment was a bi-partisan low moment. We can expect more like it. On the other hand, it was the church’s greatest one.

We as American Christians need to look at things from the standpoint of being Christians more than being Americans, and to not confuse the two. Although we need to recognise that what we do and what we are has social value, we must also recognise that social value isn’t the determining issue–it’s eternal value.

At this point in American history, the state has the power to drive Christianity underground. A church that is caught up in equating Christian life to secular success is very vulnerable to attack. Elections such as this only put such a kulturkampf closer to reality. But the party hung on what we call Dzerzhinskii’s Dilemma will soon find itself pressed by more deadly enemies than evangelical Christianity so, like the persecution spawned by Diocletian and his colleagues, the time of troubles may be shorter than somewhat.

Christians need to stop being afraid of innovation and do so serious “outside the box” thinking on how the church will progress in a hostile culture. Like the Republicans, we need to stop focusing on deals with only short-term gain and start looking at what really counts. Only then will we not only outlast our enemies, but what the Watchtower calls their “system of things” too.

The release of Eritrean Gospel singer Helen Berhane after two years of imprisonment is a great relief, although being incarcerated in a shipping container–with its extremes of heat and cold–has broken her health. Such a stand puts to shame a lot of what passes for Christianity in the West.

It’s also a reminder that such events could, in fact, “happen here,” contrary to what most people think. The Eritrean government equated Pentecostal Christianity with Islamicism as destabilising to the country. This is no different than the left’s idea that “all fundamentalism is the same.” Almost five years ago we wrote that, had Al Gore won the election in 2000, he would have unleashed an attack on evangelical Christianity in the U.S. after 9/11, in spite of the fact that it had nothing to do with the attack, based on this idea of the left.

That is the principal reason–beyond the economy, Iraq, and all the other problems we have these days–why I cannot bring myself to vote Democrat. Should you?

The situation in Colorado with Ted Haggard is an illustration that homosexuals–well, at least some of them–will stop at nothing to try to sway the public to allow gay marriage, even when others among them know they have blown it on the issue. First, a word about people like Ted Haggard from someone who actually does ministry work: the only way to persist in God’s work is to be focused on what one is doing for God and not dependent upon the performance of other people. Although the accuser at this point can’t back up his charges, our ultimate confidence must be in God, not in people.  (Unfortunately many in his church haven’t seen it this way, as is usually the case.)

Now to the matter at hand: I still have never heard a satisfactory explanation as to why gay marriage is preferable to no civil marriage at all from those on the left. You liberals were supposed to be freeing us from such social conventions and your volte-face on this is appalling. Why should we believe you on anything else? We need to continue to vote for marriage as a union of one man and one woman until the left stops this silliness, which doesn’t look likely in the foreseeable future.

As the U.S. heads into the last weekend of campaigning (and television ads) before the election, we’d like to remind everyone of some of the pieces you can see about this election:

• The Democrats and National Security: Dzerzhinskii’s Dilemma, which discusses the whole problem that Democrats have with effective security for our country
• Electing the Unelected, on why you shouldn’t just vote for the person
• The Best Way to Get the Vote Out, discussing the role of patronage and civil service in election turnout and the course of our government
• Going from Bad to Werts, on the elitist goals of the left.  A tip of the hat is in order to John Kerry on reminding us of how important that problem is.

Finally, we have some words for Harold Ford on who loves God and who doesn’t.

John Kerry’s shot that those who don’t study will end up in Iraq betrays one of the central problems we have in this country: those from its upper reaches don’t end up in the military any more.When we had Selective Service, people from all walks of life ended up in the military and in combat. My father, coming from a privileged background, did his Coast Guard stint in World War II. Others did also. With the end of the Vietnam War and the draft, we basically ended up with an all volunteer army that is drawn largely from the less privileged parts of society. The military, to use the expressive phrase of one NPR correspondent, reflects lower middle class values, and it does so because that’s where its people come from.
Now liberals are whacking these people from both sides. One the one side, they moan and groan about how they need all of these new programmes to rescue people from backgrounds where their families are broken, they’re poor, etc. When our glorious public school system–the most imporant agent in helping upward social mobility–fails them and they turn to the military to fix the problem, they’re taken pot shots at by the likes of John Kerry.

Years later, my father, in one of his riper moods, observed that only rednecks would work in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department. My response to that was simple: “Who else wants the job?” We need military people, police people and firefighters to protect us, irrespective of whether you think that Iraq is the way to do that most effectively or not. I’m glad to be associated with groups like the Church of God Chaplains Commission, who help to minister and support these people with trained and spiritually vibrant chaplains.

Kind of reminds me of a line from Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick: “I’ve come from the upper class to mend your rotten ways…”

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Subsequent to the above, we have been reminded that John Kerry “prophesied” the problem he alluded to above: in 1972, he feared that an all-volunteer army “would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown…We must not repeat the travesty of the inequities present during Vietnam. I also fear having a professional army that views the perpetuation of war crimes as simply ‘doing its job.’” Not a high view of people not of his own “kind,” if you please. But, as G.K. Chesterton used to say, the rich have already been bribed…

We have ringside seats to what is without a doubt the ugliest race this election cycle: the race between Harold Ford and Bob Corker for the U.S. Senate seat from Tennessee.

It doesn’t surprise us that Harold Ford has tried to play to religious voters. In Tennessee, it’s almost a necessity; there aren’t enough secularists here to carry the day. Now Ford informs us that Republicans only fear God while Democrats fear and love God, and he tells us not to judge.

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there are two truisms in government that make such statements absurd.

The first is that government is all about judging. Government gets things done by exerting its coercive powers on people. It’s that simple. That involves judgement. Anyone who watches any television show about courts–real or fictionalised–knows that. You decide, for example, that speech against certain groups of people are “hate crimes,” then people who do these things are deprived of their liberty because you thought such things were wrong. Tax increases? You judged that the government needed to take the people’s money (and thus their substance and life) because you wanted to do with it what you pleased and not let them keep it. Divide up Iraq, like you want? That’s a judgement too, Harold.

That leads us to the second point: government and love don’t go together. That’s one of the things that’s wrong with gay marriage: homosexuals want the government to affirm their love for each other, but love isn’t what the government is all about. Government is about power and control. We love our country, not our government.

We should also point out that the Democrat party is in fact the home of the “God-hating liberal,” as we learned the hard way growing up in a place where there were a good number of them. This may be hard to see from Tennessee, which is what Harold Ford is hoping for. That’s one reason why we wrote Electing the Unelected, which bears repeating at this stage.

While most Americans are focused on Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is just as critical and, in some ways, more important. Little known to many is the fact that Pakistani President Pevez Musharraf has been playing both ends against the middle since 11 September 2001, and that he may be about to get burned for it. Most people don’t realise that Musharraf is one in a line of military leaders who have dominated Pakistan since Muhammad Zia-al-Haq overthrew Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977.

The year before that, I had as downstairs neighbours a pair of Texas A&M students, one cowboy and one Pakistani. The cowboy lamented the fact that his apartment mate, a Muslim, wouldn’t eat fatback in his beans. The Pakistani griped that the law of his country was based on British law and should be replaced by one based on Islamic (Shar’ia) law. Sure enough, Zia-al-Haq did just that, executing Bhutto to round things out in 1979. (Note to college students: listen to your Muslim classmates and neighbours, you just might learn something!) Islamic law, with the madrassas to teach it, have become embedded in Pakistani society ever since.

But Musharraf, possibly the slickest politician in the world (more so than even Bill Clinton, and in a lot more dangerous political arena) did a remarkable volte-face to support Bush’s "war on terror" after 9/11. His idea is primarily to keep the "balls up in the air" and not to get crushed by the U.S. (to say nothing of India) on one side and the Taliban/Islamicists on the other. Now he’s trying to "de-Islamicise" Pakistan’s laws, especially concerning the status of women. But he’s finding out that a population drilled in this kind of thinking doesn’t go quietly.

Will he succeed? It’s amazing that he’s gotten as far as he has. But the jury is still out.