It's About God, America!!! Updated

It's not often we feel the need to update an essay barely a day after posting it, but Michigan Democrat John Dingell's comments about Obamacare on a radio talk show earlier this week must be highlighted:

...when you're going to pass legislation that will cover 300 (million) American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people. (bold font added)

"To control the people". This is all the window you need on leftist thinking in order to understand the real purpose of nationalizing healthcare. No Founding Father of America would have given one nanosecond of thought to the idea that the purpose of the American government they were designing was to control the people. It was to acknowledge and protect the God-given freedom of the people from the tyranny of government. The people were to control themselves by living to the best of their ability in accordance with the God-given moral teachings that accompanied their God-given freedom.

The idea of America is about that simple. And that idea is just as intact today as it was before Sunday's vote, and as it was in 1776. So don't fear that the idea of America can be lost or overthrown. It can be attacked, and has been attacked regularly since its founding, but it will endure--because of the Giver of that freedom and of those moral teachings is also intact. But we do have to fight to defend the American idea, and we have to recognize the true nature of today's attack. See below!!!

March 24, 2010

What happened in the U.S. House of Representatives on March 21, 2010 was an attempt to drive a stake in the heart of America’s central organizing tenet: our faith in and reliance upon the God of Judeo-Christian theology. It's a part of what's been in the works for over a year.

Don’t be obtuse; don’t be willfully ignorant; don’t be wishfully naïve; don’t be spiritually undiscerning; above all, don’t allow your faith to steer you into even fainthearted acquiescence in this abject evil. It IS evil, and it needs to be understood as such, and resisted, visibly and forcefully, with every ounce of your faith and prayer and action.

The nationalization of healthcare in America is not about solving a ‘crisis’—when polls steadily show 75%-85% of Americans were and are satisfied with their existing healthcare arrangements, there was and is no crisis. The nationalization of healthcare is not about caring for the uninsured—for a fraction of the cost of the February 2009 stimulus, every single one of the 32 million uninsured could have been given coverage, and for several years. The nationalization of healthcare is not about making government the instrument of God and good works; this is the fundamental perversion of the concept of ‘liberalism’ that has occurred over the past several decades, as we outlined here, here and here. Individual people can and should be those instruments of good, but when human government takes on that role, it is ultimately human authority using the power of the gun to take from some and give to others, or otherwise direct human activities and control human freedom. The results are never good works.

The nationalization of healthcare does not reflect a harmless swing of the political pendulum that does not concern the church. It is not dismissible under some high-minded but utterly misguided notion of ‘rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’.

It is the singular method of forcing all Americans, and by extension, all the rest of humanity, to fully and finally accept human government in place of God.

If you think that last sentence is alarmist or too extreme, sit yourself down and force yourself to think again. The design of nationalized healthcare is that human government becomes the definer and regulator of what is called ‘health’ for all of the governed, and the sole determiner of what life’s potential shall be for any individual. Do you not see how absolute and far-reaching that is? Everything we eat, drink, think, say or do can be regulated in the name of the government’s evaluation of its impact on our physical and mental health. Everything.

And as an outgrowth of the gross perversion of the notion of separation of church and state, the nationalization of healthcare necessarily elevates a 100% godless view of men, women and children—i.e., the state’s view—into controlling law, and in its godlessness it is necessarily amoral and immoral. Think about this for a moment. The government thinks your attitudes toward abortion, homosexuality, marriage and sin generally are a phobia that raises the cost of caring for your health, and also thinks those attitudes are coming from your church. How about some new regulations ordering the churches to stop teaching these ideas that harm the state’s view of what’s best for your health?

Think this could never happen? Don’t be a fool. The nationalization of healthcare lays the foundation for this kind of mischief—what exactly will stop it? The will of the people as expressed in our democracy? Just like the will of the people stopped the Democrats from passing the nationalization of healthcare in the first place?

Stop deluding yourself into thinking this is manageable, evolutionary change, and that the church's job is to help people accept it peacefully.

Stop believing this is a mere change in the manner by which, healthcare services are delivered and paid for, but that there will no difference in the qualities and motivations of health care providers, or in the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship.

Stop embracing the preposterous notion that this was a progressive step to escape the devils who work for insurance companies in favor of the angels who work for the government.

Stop the lightweight thinking that believes there’s good in the nationalization of healthcare if we’ll only have enough Christian faith to see it.

Stop pretending if we’ll just love the President more, all will be well. This is not about the persona of Barack Obama; it is about godless thinking running amok and taking humanity directly on a path of darkness, discord and destruction.

We do not wish personal harm on Obama, and we’d be happy to have Obama wake up to the evil he is doing and reverse course. But what is going on is much bigger than any human personality. The core thinking of this administration has to change or be removed from any pretense of authority.

The founders of America knew that too much power in human government leads to tyranny. That’s why they designed a limited government based first and foremost on an affirmation of the preeminent role of the Creator and of His relation to the free men and women of His creation, including the ‘endowment’ of them with inalienable individual rights. The nationalization of healthcare and its attendant government control of health decisions cannot possibly be reconciled in any way, shape, manner or form with a God-given, inalienable individual right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is why when it is imposed on America, it is an altogether different level of threat to humanity than in any other place on earth where socialized medicine has been tried (and socialized medicine has been a disaster in every one of those places, even without the broader implications on faith that are at stake in America). There is no excuse for people of faith to not see this.

Do not underestimate the darkness into which this administration is leading the nation and the world. As Ronald Reagan said, ‘if we ever cease to be one nation under God, we will be a nation gone under.’ The vibrancy and greatness and goodness of America have been the direct result of the unfettered faith and Judeo-Christian worship of its people. That is now directly threatened and deeply in danger. The nation needs prayer warriors of every denomination to fight back with every ounce of faith and Christian practice that can be mustered.

This is no time for blithe assurances that faith can simply continue within the confines of individual conscience. Of course it can in a literal sense, but the society-wide yielding of all matters of health, life and death to any human government brings a collective darkness that only the rarest and the strongest of believers can resist. Many, many others will just have the light of faith extinguished, and history shows that monstrous barbarism and carnage will follow in this trail. It is also not responsible to step back from the fray and hide behind some notion that none of this matters because the afterlife is the only thing that’s important to Christianity. Jesus may have been able to shrug off the claims of power over him by the state, but he was a little ahead of the rest of us. But we can and must stand up for our faith as he did.

Decades of American power and affluence have apparently diluted and distorted the ministry’s ability to see evil when it is right in front of them. The American lay people see it, and are wondering when, if ever, people of the cloth and the pulpit are going to renounce timidity and step up and scream to high heaven of the need to stop, reverse and destroy this evil. It’s no wonder many congregations are dwindling. Where are the churches who understand not just Christianity’s importance to the world, but America’s importance to Christianity? Where are the ministers who are unafraid to call evil what it is?

The good news in all this is the potential for powerful positive and immediate change for the nation and the world if only a small portion of Judeo-Christian leadership unites around the defeat and reversal of this evil. It can be done. David’s defeat of Goliath is in the bedrock of Judeo-Christian theology. The defeat of Goliath came much easier and faster than anyone watching might have expected. But it required David to see the threat for what it was, to volunteer to meet it, and to go forward without fear.

American communities of faith can do the same.

Paul Gable

March 23, 2010