https://johnpavlovitz.com/2019/04/11/the-terribly-tiny-god-of-maga-christians/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=facebook_page&utm_medium=John%20Pavlovitz
I’ll give you the title and the first couple of lines:
The Terribly Tiny God of MAGA Christians
“I feel sorry for professed Christians who support this President. They have a profound and fundamental spiritual problem: their God is too small.
“They passionately worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male …” - John Pavlovitz
I suppose I should say at the outset that I have people in my life who see the world through a different political spectrum than I do. I try not to diminish them. They don’t seem to be bent on diminishing me. What follows is my own reaction to one man’s article; one man, that is, who appears to think that all professed Christians that support the current President should be painted with a single brush. I do not think I am stepping over any lines to suggest that the author seems to be a snarky arrogant person who does what snarky arrogant people of every ilk typically do. They belittle opposing points of view. Mr. Pavlovitz takes it a step further. He comments on the “smallness” of the god of those who do not share his political views.
I guess I’m not sure what a MAGA Christian is supposed to be. I am a Christian. I am a conservative. I don’t own a MAGA hat, but I don’t belittle anyone who does. I support this president whenever he stands for conservative and Christian values as I understand them. That does not mean that I am at all persuaded that he bears the fruit of new birth. I believe that he HAS to tweet due to the axiomatic bias of the media, Hollywood, and much of academia. At the same time, I cringe when his tweets reflect a thin skin, boorishness, childishness or other expressions of questionable decorum. I wish he would be a little cleverer at times with those tweets.
I’ve always struggled with the proper balance between political activism and simply attempting to live as a reflection of God’s light in the world. That, no doubt, will put me on the outs with those MAGA Christian boogeymen wherever they exist (my bad, boogey-persons). Having said that, those MAGA enthusiasts are as entitled to a seat in the marketplace of ideas as is any attendee at any women’s march where the participants wear hats fashioned in the image of their most private body parts, as any persons who lobby for as many abortions as possible, as any Occupy Whatever advocate, as any Black Lives Matter devotee, or as any ANTIFA thug.
So, let’s get down to the size of my God, Mr. Pavlovitz. First of all, I have never thought of Him as white or Republican. On the contrary, I believe in a Creator Who spoke everything into existence by divine fiat. I believe in a God Who insists that He be regarded by His creatures, particularly those made in His image, as holy-other. I believe one of the perks of being the Creator of everything is that He is entitled to set the norms for human morality, something He has done through natural revelation, through His prophets of old, through the testimony of the Twelve, through the apostles and prophets of the New Testament era, through His self-revelation in the fully-God and fully-man Christ, as well as in the Holy Scriptures that encapsulate all these concepts and that steer us, in every Bible book, to Jesus as the remedy for our fallen condition.
And, though all have sinned and missed the moral mark of perfection, I believe in a God Who is big enough to rescue any penitent sinner while remaining immutable enough to not need to lower His standards with every new cultural whim. He maintains His holiness and justice in the same act by which He expresses His love and mercy … the cross of Christ. Deviations from the moral norms established in creation remain sinful whether they be theft, incontrollable rage, sexual aberration, slander, divisiveness, cruelty, lawlessness, or any other vice. Any sinner can make a claim that he is wired toward the way of his iniquity of choice, and one claim is as invalid as the next.
So, let’s take a look at your god, Mr. Pavlovitz. Your god does not seem to be able to stick to his guns in terms of moral law. Your god seems to be afraid to allow others, who do not share a progressive frame of reference, into the debate without disparaging them. Your god is so small that he seems to feel compelled to back away from his original declarations of truth for fear of being rejected by the masses. He is so insecure that he wants to cling to whatever will preserve his popularity. So, he is now content to be known solely as a god of alleged social justice, because he is powerless to rescue and transform sinners or to sanctify them for eternity. Yours is the deity of that “form of godliness” devoid of power of which Paul spoke. It seems to me that if anyone is guilty of erecting an idol in his own image, and declaring said block of wood, hunk of metal, bar of soap, or figment of imagination to be his “god,” it is you, Mr. Pavlovitz.
Mr. Pavlovitz, I see that you are a representative of a denomination that has a noble history of pursuing legitimate social justice causes. In the meantime, social justice has become that movement’s identity to the point that its other fine history, that of proclaiming a sanctifying gospel, has been surrendered in the pursuit of attempting to remain viable. Currently, that movement is disintegrating on a very public stage, because fully half of its leaders and pastors, so it seems, are more interested in pursuing a progressive concept of social justice than they are of simply proclaiming the gospel of Christ entrusted to them.
You keep your sentimental little god that you have whittled on the back porch of your progressive mind, Mr. Pavlovitz. I will continue to try and understand the God Who has made Himself known to us in the Person of His Son.
