One month ago, headlines proclaimed, “Grandson of Billy Graham: The Pulpit is No Place to Speak on Social Issues.”

The headlines were in response to comments made by Tullian Tchividjian, Pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, during a panel discussion on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Pastor Tchividjian had said, “I think, in my opinion, over the course of the last 20 or 30 years, evangelicalism, specifically their association with the religious right and conservative politics, has done more damage to the brand of Christianity than just about anything else.”

He added, “That’s not to say that Christian people don’t have opinions on social issues and we shouldn’t speak those opinions, but Sunday morning from behind the pulpit is not the place, in my opinion.”

To give this further context, he explained, “It’s not so much religion in the public sphere as much as religion in the pulpit, behind the pulpit, that’s my primary concern. As a preacher, my job when I stand up on Sunday mornings to preach is not first and foremost to address social ills or social problems or try to find social solutions. My job is to diagnose people’s problems and then announce God’s solution to their problems.”

Was Pastor Tchividjian right? Have we politicized the gospel from our pulpits? Have we mixed with the culture wars with the gospel?

On the one hand, he is absolutely right, and to the extent we have confused allegiance with the Republican or Democratic Party with allegiance to the kingdom of God, we have damaged the cause of Christ.

The gospel message is divisive enough already, proclaiming that salvation is found only through Jesus. Why make it even more divisive by identifying Jesus with partisan politics?

I’d much rather defend Jesus than defend Barack Obama or Sarah Palin or Joe Biden or Ted Cruz, although to be sure, I have far more in common with some of the names on this list than with others.

And because the Republican Party has stood much stronger on a number of key moral issues than has the Democratic Party (at least in terms of their respective platforms), and because movements like the Moral Majority were associated with Republican leaders, Pastor Tchividjian is right to speak of the damage done to the gospel by associating it with conservative politics. (I’m speaking broadly here, fully aware that there are many voters who claim the Democratic Party is the more caring and compassionate in terms of the needs of the poor, also drawing a large percentage of conservative Black voters.)

It is also very easy to get so focused on social issues that we take our eyes off of Jesus, as if our primary calling was to “reclaim America” or stop abortion or preserve marriage rather than our primary calling being to make disciples and glorify God.

On the other hand, Pastor Tchividjian is absolutely wrong, since there is no separation between the gospel and culture, between how we live in society and how we live in our private lives, between the lordship of Jesus inside the four walls of a church building and outside that building.

Joel McDurmon, a resident scholar at American Vision, addressed this mentality in his Introduction to the reprint of Alice M. Baldwin’s book, The New England Pulpit and the American Revolution. He spoke of those who would say, “Christians should not preach politics! We should preach the ‘Gospel’ only!”

He responded, “Of course, this assumes that the Great Commission applies only to the inner, private lives of people and the salvation of their souls for the next world alone. In short, it limits the definition of the Christian calling in such a way as to exclude its social aspects up front.”

Put another way, we are called to go make disciples, but how do disciples live? How do we function in the world – in our marriages, families, schools, and places of business? How do we live as salt and light in the society?

That’s why it was preachers of the gospel who were at the forefront of the American Revolution (as carefully documented by Baldwin), preachers of the gospel who were at the forefront of the abolition movement, and preachers of the gospel who were at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement.

Do you think that Dr. Martin Luther King thought to himself, “Well, I shouldn’t be mixing the gospel with social issues”?

Conversely, we have no sympathy today for the German pastors who stood idly by as Hitler rose to power and began to make his murderous goals known. Should they have simply focused on the personal problems of their congregants?

And when a young woman in one of our congregations is contemplating an abortion, is that a personal issue or a social issue? When parents are trying to understand how to respond to the announcement that their son is “marrying” another young man, is that a personal issue or a social issue? When kids come home from school with virtually pornographic sex-ed material, is that a personal issue or a social issue? When a family is falling apart under the duress of severe economic pressure, is that a personal issue or a social issue?

There is also the matter of perspective, as an inner city black pastor once said to me, “You’re trying to get prayer back in the schools. I’m trying to get education back in the schools.”
Is that a personal issue or a social issue?

Recently, Rev. Franklin Graham addressed the concern that “your father wouldn’t get onto these subjects,” as he spoke about the need to stand up against the rising tide of secularism in our country.

He responded, “Wait a second. My father, when he was going to school, they had a Bible in school,” he continued. “When he was going to school, they had the Ten Commandments on the wall. When he was going to school, you could pray in school, and the teachers would lead in those prayers.

“Our country has changed. And we’ve got to take a stand.”

He also said, “Now I’m not talking about Baptists or Republicans and the Tea Party. I have no confidence that any of these politicians or any party is going to turn this country around. The only hope for this country is for men and women of God to stand up and take a stand.”

He’s absolutely right, and it’s time we take our stand, not with hatred, rancor, or insult, and not in the name of a political leader or political party, but in the name of Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, and in the love and truth of God.

Let us go into the world and make disciples, and let us go out into the world and be disciples.

(We reached out to Pastor Tchividjian for interaction without success but would welcome dialogue on these issues.)

This article was originally posted at The Christian Post website.

Being a Believer in America has become a complicated business lately. I should probably clarify, I’m not speaking about just any sort of believer. After all, believing “there is no god but Allah” is not complicated. You’ll earn a scandalous amount of slack and dhimmitude from a general populace too credulous to believe your insincerity. And it’s not all that difficult being a believer in Scientology or the other cultish theologies either. If a doctrinal complication pops up, it’s easy enough to amend your “divine” revelation and carry on as if the golden plates had green-lighted caffeinated beverages from the beginning.

No, I’m speaking primarily of the complications involved in following one of the more orthodox faiths like Christianity, Catholicism, and Judaism. It seems the complication stems from an unprecedented number of non-believers opining about the dictates of our God and our faith. Anyone and everyone seems willing (and somehow qualified?) to open their mouths and reveal their biblical acumen, whether they’ve actually read a page from a Bible in their lifetime or not. True, we’ve always dealt with the Matthew 7 crowd, who learned one Bible verse and has been using it as a cudgel to defend their own iniquities ever since, but this is different.

We have Marxists in the Obama Administration telling us that Jesus was a refugee, in an effort to justify open immigration. There are Anarchists, squatting in tent cities, claiming that Jesus was part of the 99%. Nearly any Muslim you meet will be more than happy to explain to you that Christ was a prophet of Allah and was saved from the Crucifixion before He died on the cross. Celebrities of all stripes stand up to declare that there is no cognitive dissonance between their Christian beliefs and their support of the homosexual movement. Pastors and spokes-idiots from major Christian congregations have waved the rainbow flag, declaring that they “aren’t anointed” to speak on sin and that Jesus “never made a statement on homosexuality”. Well garsh, the Lord never made a statement on voter fraud or sex slavery either. Are you suggesting it’s time for Christians to embrace the rights of citizens to fraudulently vote as many times as they like, bringing along their indentured harem to help stuff the ballot box, Pastor?

Why all the biblical static? Why now? Christians have always been maligned for their abstinence from worldly indulgence. Why is there so much noise around the person of Christ and so much antagonism towards the historical Christian position? As with many of the flaws of our modern world, the most obvious answer is moral relativism. The more people are educated in our morally-bankrupt public schools, the more pervasive relativism becomes.

The Hegelian “synthesis”, which Francis Schaeffer warned about, has become pandemic. We no longer live in an antithetical world, where right and wrong are incompatible. Instead of thinking in terms of thesis/antithesis, the two are now combined into a synthesis, crowning error and hamstringing truth. This embrace of Hegelian philosophy means that incompatible beliefs can now be BFFs. This is how we can explain phenomena like Jews for Palestine, LGBT Christians, Materialist Philosophers, and Christian Anarchists. When truth can be whatever you decide to make it, don’t be surprised at what walks through the front door.

Another more culpable reason for the distillation and confusion of the Judeo-Christian moral ethic is the prevalence of Milksop Christianity. When we think about some of the boldest and most unabashed voices defending Christianity today, we think of the Duck Commander, Franklin Graham, and Clash Daily’s own Doug Giles to name a few. Yes, there are undoubtedly more, but not many. With all due respect to these brothers and sisters, their firm, biblical stance today wouldn’t have even moved the needle 100 years ago. We’ve become soft and afraid, so the bold seem a bit taller today than times past.

A majority of today’s believers are biblically illiterate, not being able to distinguish between Saul the son of Kish and Saul of Tarsus. As Pastor Smiley has said, “If Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be riding around on a donkey. He’d be taking a plane, he’d be using the media.” Let that wisdom marinate for a few… But it goes deeper than biblical illiteracy, today’s church is pusillanimous. Being illiterate when it comes to God’s word is inexcusable for a Christian, but being illiterate and scared? Abhorrent.

Yes, we serve a God who advocated a gentle answer and a loving response to nearly every situation. We also serve a Lord who thrashed a crowd of people when His Father’s house was suffering materialist prostitution. We serve a God whose Justice is as fearsome as His mercy is awesome. Read about the character of God in the words of His anointed messengers: the books of the prophets and the Psalms. Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the rest are literal windows onto the visage of our God.

“Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord deceitfully,
And cursed is he who keeps back his sword from blood.

“Make him drunk,
Because he exalted himself against the Lord.
Moab shall wallow in his vomit,
And he shall also be in derision.

“And Moab shall be destroyed as a people,
Because he exalted himself against the Lord.”

~Jeremiah 48:10, 26-27. 42

This is the Lord we serve and this is the standard of justice to which we will be called to account. Instead of being frightened by the prospect of social disapprobation, we should fear the One who can sweep a nation away for the sin of self-exaltation. Instead of being shouted down by those still in rebellion to their Maker, we should be emboldened by our God, who, though terrible in His wrath, extended a tender hand of grace to each of us, while we were yet steeped in sin.

Stop propagating the synthesis of truth and error. Don’t allow a strident enemy of God to dictate how He will be portrayed. Too often, we become like David’s brothers, huddled in the tent, playing Parcheesi while we try to block out the slanders of Goliath. Let us instead gather our smooth stones from the river and stand implacably for our God, come what may.

During a 2009 interview on France’s Canal+TV channel that is just now being reported widely, President Barack Obama claimed that Americans needed to be better educated on Islam and that, if we compute the total number of Muslims in America, we would be one of the biggest Muslim countries in the world.

In stark contrast, and with reference to a number of President Obama’s recent comments, Rev. Franklin Graham claimed that the president “was ‘fundamentally mistaken’ about radical Islam . . . and argued that Islam ‘is a false religion’ and that ‘it is impossible for a false religion to be a true religion of peace.’”

Who’s right?

Let’s start with some simple math.

Recent surveys indicate that the Muslim population in America is slightly under one percent, so, to be generous, let’s use one percent as the figure, which would mean that roughly three million Americans are Muslim. (Oddly enough, the MuslimPopulation.com website claims that 2.11 percent of Americans are Muslims, supporting this with a reference to a Wikipedia article that puts the figure at 0.8 percent!)

According to President Obama, this figure of three million Muslims would make us “one of the biggest Muslim nations.”

Was he accurate? Not by a mile. Not by many, many miles. In fact, he was embarrassingly wrong and inaccurate.

Here’s the list of the top 10 countries with more Muslims than America (as of 2012, with figures rounded off): 1). Indonesia 209 million; 2). India 177 million; 3). Pakistan 167 million; 4). Bangladesh 134 million; 5). Nigeria 77 million; 6). Egypt 77 million; 7). Iran 74 million; 8). Turkey 71 million; 9). Algeria 35 million; 10). Morocco 32 million.

How big is America’s Muslim population looking right now? How does 3 million compare with 209 million of 177 million?

Uzbekistan, number 15 on the list, has 27 million Muslims; little Yemen, number 17, has 24 million; China, number 18, has 23 million, and Russia, number 21, has 16 million, more than 5 times our national total.

What was the president thinking?

In terms of world Islamic populations, America is about 38th on the list, meaning that we have one of the smaller Muslim populations worldwide, despite the size of our country.

The president’s error, then, would be akin to a stating that the United States was one of the world’s oldest civilizations. Not quite!

Seeing, then, that Mr. Obama was so grossly wrong in his assessment of our Muslim population (again, a matter of simple math), can he be trusted in his assessment of Islam in general?

Rev. Graham said, “I . . . believe our president is completely and fundamentally mistaken about the intolerant and violent nature of hardened Islamic followers.”

So who is more accurate when it comes to the nature of Islam itself?

Without a doubt, there are tens of millions of peace-loving Muslims worldwide, including many American Muslims.

And without a doubt, there are Muslim theologians and political leaders who deplore the actions of groups like ISIS and Boko Haram.

This means that we make a serious mistake when we demonize all Muslims and treat them as if they were murderous terrorists.

In that respect, yes, we need to be better educated regarding Islam. Absolutely.

At the same time, it cannot be denied that large Islamic countries like Pakistan and Iran mistreat and persecute Christians (especially those who convert from Islam), sometimes to the point of death; that countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan allow no true religious freedom for other faiths; and that there are a multiplicity of substantial terrorist groups using the Koran for justification, in glaring contrast with Christianity worldwide.

More importantly, even if 80-90 percent of Muslims are not radicals, this means absolutely nothing in terms of our recognition of the very real dangers posed by radical Islam. After all, what percentage of Germans were Nazis? If the large numbers don’t prevent the small numbers from taking murderous action, why does that matter?

And should we snivel at a figure of, at the very least, 150 million radical Muslims worldwide?

What our president should be doing is recognizing the tremendous dangers posed by radical Islam and making every effort to ensure that our nation is addressing these dangers both here and abroad. (This includes not calling blatant Islamic terror attacks “workplace violence.”)

To paraphrase what I’ve said before, while here in the West we are putting our heads in the sand, in other parts of the world, the heads of the victims of radical Islam are rolling in the sand.

This article was originally posted at the Townhall.com website.