“He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction.” —Psalm 107:20

The man accused of breaking into US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home, beating her husband, and seeking to kidnap her told police he planned to target other California and federal politicians, according to a court filing yesterday. The filing quotes David DePape as telling officers and medics at the scene that he was sick of the “lies coming out of Washington DC.” He added: “I didn’t really want to hurt him but you know this was a suicide mission. I’m not going to stand here and do nothing even if it cost me my life.”

This horrific attack is not an isolated event.

According to figures from the Capitol Police, the number of recorded threats against members of Congress has increased more than tenfold since 2016, rising to 9,625 in 2021. Threats are rising against members of both parties. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed,” Sen. Susan Collins told an interviewer.

Supreme Court justices are not immune, as protests outside their homes earlier this year demonstrated. Nor are governors, as the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer shows. Unsurprisingly, the head of the US Capitol Police has called for “more resources to provide additional layers of physical security for members of Congress.”

Why has political vitriol and animosity reached such a boiling point in our culture?

Separating God from religion

Here’s one explanation: “For many Americans, politics has become a quasi-religion—especially as participation in actual, organized religion has plummeted.”

The US has long been known for our “civil religion,” which has been described as “a shared, nonsectarian faith centered on the flag, the nation’s founding documents, and God.” However, the number of Americans who believe in God has fallen to its lowest point since Gallup began asking the question in 1944. So, a simple explanation for our crisis is that Americans are replacing God with politics.

The truth is more complex.

Gallup’s survey still found that 81 percent of Americans said they believed in God. However, only 47 percent belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque, down from 70 percent in 1999. What’s more accurate to say is that many Americans have separated God from religion and then replaced religion with politics.

Why is this distinction important?

Separating religion from life

The Bible teaches a holistic religion: Jesus called anyone who would follow him to “take up his cross daily” (Luke 9:23). Every dimension of our lives is to be dedicated every day to the service of our king (Matthew 6:33; cf. Galatians 2:20; Romans 12:1).

However, the European Enlightenment that so influenced America’s founders “invented religion as an autonomous sphere of life,” thus conceptualizing “the world as divided between ‘religious’ and ‘secular.’” Darwin’s theories then taught millions of Americans that the Bible cannot be trusted outside its religious sphere. Rising materialism and secularism have focused our attention on earth rather than heaven while scientific progress has made earth more like heaven. Medical science has lessened our fear of death as we are living healthier lives while most who die do so in antiseptic hospital conditions removed from the rest of us.

The result is that most Americans no longer turn to religion to meet our most basic needs: living well in this life while preparing for the life to come. We think we can believe in God however we understand him with little or no implications for the rest of our lives.

But if religion cannot improve society, what can? What speaks to every dimension of our secular world? In a democratic republic, the answer is politics. And engaging in politics with a fervor once reserved for religion is therefore necessary, at least in the minds of those who do so.

As David French shows in his latest Dispatch article, millions of Americans (80 percent in a recent survey) are convinced that their political opponents will destroy America. Millions (72 percent in another poll) also believe that their side is losing. And millions on both sides of the political divide believe they must therefore do whatever it takes to save the nation.

Is it any wonder that animosity and violence against political leaders is becoming an epidemic?

Uniting religion and the “real world”

Today is All Souls’ Day on the Christian calendar, a day of prayer and remembrance for the faithful departed.

This day reminds us that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). This judgment is for us all: “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10, my emphases).

On that day, all illusions of separating sacred and secular, religion and the “real world,” will disappear. Every dimension of our lives will be accountable to the one true King (Revelation 20:12).

Christians need have no fear of eternal damnation since everyone who trusts in Christ as Lord “shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16 NIV). However, our eternal rewards in heaven are based on our obedience on earth: if we have served God holistically with our best, we will “receive a reward” (1 Corinthians 3:14). If we have not, we will “suffer loss” (v. 15).

How to heal our land

Politics cannot heal our nation, but living in light of eternity can.

There are approximately 210 million Christians in America. If each of us prepares for judgment by loving God with “all” our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we will love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:30–31). We will then engage our many problems not with political animosity but by “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15).

How could our culture be the same? How could we?

What the Lord did for his people of old, we need him to do for us today: “He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction” (Psalm 107:20).

Can your Father speak his healing word through you today?

Denison Forum

 “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.” —Psalm 119:97

At least 154 people were killed and 149 others were injured in a crowd surge at a packed Halloween festival Saturday night in Seoul, South Korea. In other weekend news, Somalia’s president said at least one hundred people were killed Saturday in two terrorist car bombings, though the death toll could rise. An overcrowded suspension bridge collapsed yesterday in India, killing at least 134 people.

And Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul is recovering from surgery after being attacked early Friday morning by a hammer-wielding intruder at their San Francisco home. Paul Pelosi suffered a fractured skull and injuries to his hands and right arm, but he is expected to recover fully.

Oscar Wilde observed, “The real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning.” In a world encompassed with such daily suffering, it is not surprising that we would invent holidays like Halloween and station them throughout the year.

The typical US year has ten such holidays, beginning with New Year’s Day and ending with Christmas. The Catholic liturgical year celebrates the lives of various saints on more than 120 different days across the year.

Some of our holidays serve a diversionary purpose as they distract us from the challenges we face. Others serve a more edifying purpose as they focus on faith, country, and family. But here’s a fact you may not have considered regarding America’s holidays, both sacred and secular: not one of them is found in the Bible.

Halloween and other nonbiblical holidays

Nowhere does Scripture command us to set apart a specific day for observing Jesus’ birth or his resurrection, much less our other holidays. Thanksgiving comes closest, though the biblical command is to “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18), not just one day a year.

Many of our holidays are purely secular, as with Halloween, while church tradition has created others such as tomorrow’s All-Saints’ Day (“All Hallows’ Day”), for which today is the “eve” (“All Hallows’ Eve” or “Halloween”).

If you want your holidays to come directly from Scripture, you will need to follow the Jewish religious year. It includes Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost), Sukkot (Tabernacles), and the High Holidays: Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). Each is required and described by the Torah. While the Jews have added others through tradition (such as Hanukkah), their calendar centers on biblical prescriptions.

Here’s my point: events and decisions in our lives fall into three categories—biblical, nonbiblical, and unbiblical.

Halloween is nonbiblical: God’s word does not command it, which would make it biblical, or forbid it, which would make it unbiblical. However, Scripture does teach us what would be biblical to do today, such as using the day for church outreach events, getting to know your neighbors so you can build relationships for the gospel, and spending fun time together as a family.

And it teaches us what would be unbiblical to do today, such as engaging in occult practices (Leviticus 19:31) or anything that would glorify Satan, “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44) who “comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10).

When obedience was a pleasure

The same principle applies to much of life. For example, God’s word obviously does not directly address the digital technology by which I am creating and distributing today’s Daily Article. But it does encourage biblical uses of technology such as internet discipleship, and it warns us against unbiblical uses of technology such as pornography.

How can we be sure we are doing nonbiblical things in biblical ways and that we are avoiding unbiblical things at all costs? It would be wonderful if we could simply follow our instincts and do what comes naturally to us. But this is a privilege we left behind when we left Eden so long ago.

In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis observed: “Paradisal man always chose to follow God’s will. In following it he also gratified his own desire, both because all the actions demanded of him were, in fact, agreeable to his blameless inclination, and also because the service of God was itself his keenest pleasure, without which as their razor edge all joys would have been insipid to him.

“The question ‘Am I doing this for God’s sake or only because I happen to like it?’ did not then arise, since doing things for God’s sake was what he chiefly ‘happened to like.’ His God-ward will rode his happiness like a well-managed horse, whereas our will, when we are happy, is carried away in the happiness as in a ship racing down a swift stream. Pleasure was then an acceptable offering to God because offering was a pleasure.”

How can we return to such a blessed condition?

Acting into feeling

The psalmist declared to God, “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Psalm 119:97). “Love” translates a Hebrew word meaning “to desire, to delight in, to breathe after.” The word translated “meditation” refers to one’s “occupation or thoughtful contemplation.” The two phrases reinforce each other: the more we are passionate about God’s word, the more time we will spend studying and applying it to our lives, and the more we study and apply God’s word, the more passion we will develop for it.

Counselors say we should “act into feeling” rather than “feeling into acting.” If you don’t feel love for your spouse, do what you would do if you did: go on a date, give them something you know they would enjoy, and so on. The more you do what love does, the more you may feel what love feels.

So, with today’s holiday and every other nonbiblical event or decision you encounter, spend time seeking scriptural truth and wisdom. Take note of what would be biblical and unbiblical to do. Pray for God’s Spirit to help you do the former and refuse the latter. Then do what you know you should do.

The more you live biblically, the more you will want to live biblically.

And you will obey Billy Graham’s admonition, wisdom that is especially appropriate on Halloween: “Stay close to Christ—because the closer you are to him, the farther away you are from the devil.”

Will you be closer to Christ today than you were yesterday?

Denison Forum