In 1629, the first American balloting for an election occurred in Salem, Massachusetts. The issue? Choosing a minister and choosing a Christian teacher for the colony. “Such is the origin of the use of the ballot on this continent; [Samuel] Skelton was chosen pastor and [Francis] Higginson teacher.”  So writes George Bancroft, an early American historian, on this first election on American soil in Volume I of his 6-volume, History of the United States of America (1882).

Historian Paul Johnson writes in his 1997 classic, A History of the American People: “In a sense, the clergy were the first elected officials of the new American society, a society which to that extent had a democratic element from the start.”

And Christians in America have been voting ever since.

Founding father Samuel Adams once said, “Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote…that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.”

However, there has arisen a feeling among some professing believers that somehow it is spiritual to not participate in something as earthly as politics.

As the late Dr. D. James Kennedy, noted pastor and author, once said: “A Christian said to me, ‘You don’t really believe that Christians should get active in politics do you?’ And I said, with tongue in cheek, ‘Why, of course not, we ought to leave it to the atheists. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have anything to complain about. And we’d really rather complain than do something, wouldn’t we?’”

But today we find ourselves in such a mess in America that the very least Christians could do is vote, and vote our Biblical values.

Some people have written off elections because they think it’s all rigged. They look at some of the anomalies that have occurred in recent balloting, and they think, “Why should I even bother? My vote won’t count.” Well, if you don’t cast a vote, your potential vote certainly won’t count.

With great understatement, Gary Bauer notes in his End of Day Report (10/28/22), “We know unhinged leftists are not constrained by the basic teachings of Judeo-Christian civilization. They feel justified in doing anything and everything necessary to win.”

But if Christians show up in great numbers, we can overcome the potential for cheating because the Christian conservative voting bloc is huge.

About a decade ago, Alveda King, the niece of MLK, made some interesting observations about Christians and voting in an interview for television.

Alveda told me, “I hear remarks from both sides of the aisle. You know, ‘God’s not a Republican’ and ‘God’s not a Democrat.’ And so, we as God-fearing people don’t need to try to lock in a position to a political party, but certainly our votes must always follow our values.”

One of those values is against abortion and for life. Meanwhile, the left is embracing abortion to the hilt. When we vote Biblical values, we obey what the Lord would have us do.

Writing for the Washington Times (10/30/22), Everett Piper, a former president of a Christian college, opines on how far to the left the left has gone these days because of things like the castration of children and pornography in the schools: “The Democrat party is now so extreme that no serious follower of Christ can align with it. There is no longer any such thing as a ‘Christian Democrat.’”

The aforementioned Dr. Kennedy once declared that it is indeed a sin not to vote. His proof-text was from the passage in the Gospel, where Jesus said that we should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s (Mark 12:17).

On the issue of voting, he said: “For non-Christian Americans, voting is a privilege and responsibility; for Christians, it is a duty demanded by God that we should fulfill.” [Emphasis his]

It has been said that in America, we get the kind of government we deserve.

Historically, Christians in America applied their faith to virtually every sphere of life, including their politics. While the founding fathers were not all Christians, the vast majority of them were, and more importantly they had a Biblical worldview.

So, for example, they divided power, since they knew man is sinful. James Madison, one of the key architects of the Constitution, noted: “All men having power ought to be distrusted.” This is a Biblical perspective. Sometimes people complain that the Constitution limits the amount of power any one single branch may have. That was by design.

The only poll that counts is the one you cast at election time. Don’t sit this one out. As the late Bishop Harry Jackson once declared, “Too many people died for the right of all people in the nation to vote.”

Does voting matter anymore? Does it really matter whether I contact my elected representatives? You probably have considered these questions many times.

Paul Johnson, in his excellent book Modern Times, recounts the 1960 Presidential election where John F. Kennedy squeezed out a victory over Richard M. Nixon. Kennedy supposedly won by only 120,000 votes out of nearly 69 million total votes cast. This victory was clouded by questions concerning the vote count in Alabama and in Illinois, thanks to the Daley machine.

Johnson states that Nixon did not challenge the result of the election because he thought it would damage the presidency and so America.

Does this sound familiar?

There is no doubt that the 2020 election also had a lot of fishy elements to it, probably even more than the 1960 election.

What if concerned citizens in our nation had said in 1960, it doesn’t matter if I vote anymore? What if concerned citizens had said that in 2016? Not voting would have been a disastrous decision. Yes, we know that there are many conspiracies, irregularities, and the like, but we cannot abandon our duty as concerned citizens.

Consider the results of the Georgia race for U.S. Senate in the 2020 election.

On November 3, 2020, the results for David Perdue (R) vs. Jon Ossoff (D):

Perdue: 2,462,617

Ossoff: 2,374,519

Perdue received 88,098 votes more than Ossoff, but since Perdue did not receive a majority of the votes, there was a runoff.

What happened in the runoff?

Perdue got 247,638 fewer votes.

Ossoff 104,596 fewer votes.

And guess what, Ossoff won the election.

The greatest voter fraud in Georgia in my opinion is the 247,638 voters who didn’t bother to show up for the runoff and vote again for David Perdue. Ten percent of the people who voted for Perdue in the first election did not bother to vote the second time.

These 247,638 voters said it didn’t matter. How well did that work out for us?

A similar travesty was seen in the special election between Raphael Warnock (D) vs. Kelly Loeffler (R).

I have no doubt that during the 2020 election wicked men and women did everything they could to subvert the results.

I would still argue that, on the whole, the greatest source of voter fraud is when Christians fail to vote or, even worse, vote for the wrong candidate.

Someone has stated (we don’t know who) that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Some people would say this statement now applies to voting. The results are cooked already. It is insanity to expect a different outcome.

This logic is faulty in terms of the voting process and the effectiveness of voter participation. First of all, the above quote relates to situations where you have the power or ability to change something. Second, when we go to the polls there are numerous races. I don’t think it is accurate to say that every single race has been rigged. Have we reached the point where elections are a total farce? I don’t believe so, and thinking this way will inevitably only encourage those that stand against us.

Believing you will escape the insanity by sitting out the entire process is just a different color of insanity.

So, we don’t trust in ourselves. While we acknowledge we cannot control our own destiny and future, disengagement is not the solution. Until our vote is taken from us or the system is entirely rigged, we must fulfill our duty. We must not give into discouragement and fatalism.

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This intellectual revolution began with four lectures in late 1915 presented to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The lectures were given by Albert Einstein, and before the end of the year Einstein would publish his argument for a “General Theory of Relativity.” Those lectures launched an intellectual revolution, and Einstein’s theory of relativity is essential to our understanding of the modern age.

The 100th anniversary of a scientific theory is not necessarily a matter of great cultural importance. Einstein had developed his Special Theory of Relativity a decade earlier, but his General Theory–extended to the entire cosmos–was breathtaking in its revolutionary power. Einstein replaced the world of Newtonian physics with a new world marked by four dimensions, instead of just three. Time, added as a fourth dimension, changed everything.

Einstein summarized his own theory in these words:

“The ‘Principle of Relativity’ in its widest sense is contained in the statement: The totality of physical phenomena is of such a character that it gives no basis for the introduction of the concept of ‘absolute motion;’ or, shorter but less precise: There is no ‘absolute motion.’”

Thus, time, matter, and energy are relative, and not absolute. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Thomas Levenson recently called Einstein’s theory “the greatest intellectual accomplishment of the twentieth century.” The Economist, marking the centennial of Einstein’s lectures, called the General Theory of Relativity “one of the highest intellectual achievements of humanity.” It is no exaggeration to claim Einstein’s theory as the very foundation of modern cosmology.

And yet, most modern people–even well educated moderns–have little idea of the actual theory or of its scientific significance. In everyday life, Newtonian physics serves very well. Cosmologists may depend on Einstein’s theory in their daily work, but few others do.

Nevertheless, the cultural impact of Einstein’s theory extends far beyond the laboratory or the science classroom. As the twentieth century unfolded, Einstein’s theory of relativity quickly became a symbol and catalyst for something very different — the development of moral relativism.

Einstein was not a moral relativist, nor did he believe that his theories had any essential moral or cultural meaning. He recoiled when his theory of relativity was blamed or credited for the birth of modern art (Cubism, in particular) or any other cultural development.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin defended Einstein against any such charge:  “The word relativity has been widely misinterpreted as relativism, the denial, or doubt about, the objectivity of truth or moral values.” He continued, “This was the opposite of what Einstein believed. He was a man of simple and absolute moral convictions, which were expressed in all he was and did.”

Fair enough. Albert Einstein was not a moral relativist and his theory of relativity has nothing to do with morality. The problem, however, is simple — Einstein’s theory of relativity entered the popular consciousness as a generalized relativism. The issue here is not to blame Albert Einstein. He is not responsible for the misuse, misapplication, and misappropriation of his theory. But, in any event, for millions of modern people relativity was understood as relativism. And that misunderstanding is one of the toxic developments of the modern age.

As Walter Isaacson, Einstein’s most important biographer, explains:

“In both his science and his moral philosophy, Einstein was driven by a quest for certainty and deterministic laws. If his theory of relativity produced ripples that unsettled the realms of morality and culture, this was not caused by what Einstein believed but by how he was popularly interpreted.”

That is exactly the issue. Einstein, Isaacson reveals, was an influence on the emergence of relativism as a major theme in modern art, philosophy, and morality, even if that was not his intention at all. In Isaacson’s words, “there was a more complex relationship between Einstein’s theories and the whole witch’s brew of ideas and emotions in the early twentieth century that bubbled up from the highly charged cauldron of modernism.”

Historian Paul Johnson gets it exactly right as he describes the cultural impact of Einstein’s theories:

“Is was as though the spinning globe had been taken off its axis and cast adrift in a universe which no longer conformed to accustomed standards of measurement. At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.”

Johnson goes further, arguing that “the public response to relativity was one of the principle formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.”

By the middle of the twentieth century, moral relativism was a major influence in the cultural revolutions that reshaped entire societies. Artists, filmmakers, authors, and playwrights were joined by an army of psychotherapists, academics, liberal theologians, and academic revolutionaries — all seeking to reject absolute moral norms and absolute truth and to establish relativism as the new worldview.

They were stunningly successful.

As Allan Bloom famously observed in his 1987 bestseller,The Closing of the American Mind, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”

Moral relativism and the rejection of absolute truth now shape the modern post-Christian mind. Indeed, relativism is virtually taken for granted, at least as an excuse for overthrowing theistic truth claims and any restrictive morality.

And so, Einstein is variously blamed or thanked for a moral revolution he never intended or wanted. The lesson for the rest of us is clear. Not only do ideas have consequences, they often have consequences that are neither foreseen or predicted.

Or, to put it another way — as we think about the centennial of Albert Einstein’s famed lectures on the General Theory of Relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences back in 1915, let us remember that what happens in the lecture hall will not stay in the lecture hall.

This article was originally posted at AlbertMohler.com

Kathleen Parker is the “conservative” columnist liberals can count on to bash conservative personalities and causes. This is why her column is syndicated by the Washington Post and why she is featured on the Chris Matthews show.

Now, Parker has done her best imitation of lesbian MSNBC-TV commentator Rachel Maddow by writing a column bashing Uganda’s Christian majority for considering passage of a bill to toughen laws against homosexuality. This has been a Maddow cause for months, and Parker is now on the bandwagon.

When the MSNBC-TV host isn’t attacking Christians here and abroad for opposing homosexuality, she is promoting homosexuality in the U.S. military, as Post media critic Howard Kurtz was recently forced to acknowledge in a story about her preoccupation with this matter. But it’s really not surprising. Maddow’s show is an extension of her lesbian lifestyle. She is gay and proud and given free rein at MSNBC because of her role as the first “out” lesbian to host a show on a national cable news network.

It’s another “first” for the homosexual lobby and the media, which seem to go together.

Parker’s interest in the issue is not as clear but it may stem from her eagerness to please those who syndicate her column and quote her approvingly in the liberal press. This is how “conservatives” become mainstream media stars. However, her column is even worse in its accusations and charges than what we can find in the hysterical gay press. Parker finds those Christians opposed to homosexuality in Uganda and who base their opposition on the Bible to be in favor of “genocide.”

Losing complete control of her senses, Parker states that a proposed law against homosexuality constitutes “state genocide of a minority [that] is proposed in the name of Christianity…”

Once again, as we have documented on so many occasions, the death penalty in the bill is only one provision and is for “aggravated homosexuality” or serious crimes mostly involving homosexual behavior targeting children and spreading disease and death.

The potential genocide in Uganda is the AIDS epidemic that the government and Christian leaders are successfully combating. They understand, although Parker apparently does not, that homosexual behavior promotes the spread of AIDS.

There is a myth that AIDS in Africa has been spread exclusively through heterosexual conduct. But the internationally acclaimed medical journal The Lancet last August published the first scientific study showing that male homosexuals are more often than not infected with HIV than the general adult population in sub-Saharan Africa. The study is titled, “Men who have sex with men and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Here, all of this is out in the open and well-known. Indeed, the Cato Institute held an event on Wednesday in which HIV-positive writer Andrew Sullivan strode to the podium during a conference on “gay conservatives” with ashes on his forehead from having attended a Catholic Church Ash Wednesday service. Sullivan was caught soliciting a partner for dangerous “bare-backing” sexual practices and has since “married” another man. This is “conservative?”

Like Kathleen Parker, he is still considered a “conservative” by some and was introduced by Cato executive David Boaz, a member of the Independent Gay Forum and pro-marijuana activist. Like Sullivan, Cato is also misleadingly described in the media as “conservative” too many times to mention.

Today, as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gets underway in Washington, D.C., participants will find a literature table established under official CPAC auspices from a homosexual Republican group calling itself GOProud. CPAC organizer David Keene, whose lobbying activities have been an embarrassment to the conservative movement, approved letting the gay rights organization officially attend the conference, despite complaints from traditional conservative groups such as Catholic Families for America.

Talk of tolerance and diversity aside, male homosexuals constitute most of the HIV-AIDS cases and they are still prohibited from donating blood because of their propensity to come down with various life-threatening diseases. Facts are facts. But don’t expect to see this information analyzed and reviewed by the mainstream media when considering such issues as allowing active and open homosexuals into the Armed Forces and into close quarters with normal heterosexuals.

Gay activists complain that thousands have been forced out of the military because of their homosexuality. The evidence, in the form of opinion polls and letters from former military officers, suggests that many thousands more will leave if the military brass force acceptance of homosexuality-and the diversity training that will inevitably go along with it-on the military rank and file.

The purpose of the Ugandan bill, quite clearly, is to keep homosexuality in the closet, where it used to be in this country. The country’s literal survival may depend on passage of this legislation, after it undergoes hearings and some revisions.

The bill will likely have more of a deterrent effect than anything else. Some of the controversial passages, such as restrictions on “touching,” are included for the purpose of defining homosexual behavior. It may sound strange to Americans who are accustomed to in-your-face homosexuality on national television and almost everywhere else in society, but Uganda is serious about avoiding a return to the time when a notorious homosexual king was ruling the country and tortured and killed young Christian men who resisted his homosexual advances.

Ironically, Parker makes reference to this terrible period, but only to contrast it with a frightening future in which she speculates that gays will be offered up by authorities in Uganda as martyrs for the gay rights cause. To drive the point home, a gay rights group recently held a news conference in Washington, D.C. featuring an alleged gay rights activist from Uganda wearing a paper sack over his head. It was a good publicity stunt, designed to generate sympathy and attention for people who only want the “right” to celebrate a behavior that is a documented public health hazard.

Hedge fund manager George Soros, who is behind the campaign to homosexualize Uganda, doesn’t wear a bag over his face and doesn’t need to. He operates mostly out in the open, in the name of promoting his version of an “open society” here and abroad. The problem is that most of the liberal media agree with his policies and proposals and therefore don’t shed light on what he is doing in terms of interfering in the affairs of not only the U.S. but other nations of the world.

In fact, the Ugandan legislation seems designed to send a message to Soros and his minions in the foreign homosexual lobby to keep their hands off Uganda’s families and kids. Soros funds efforts to legalize homosexual behavior and prostitution in Uganda and other African nations. It’s too bad Parker didn’t notice and condemn that. But such a reference might provoke criticism from the left, and she wants to avoid that so she can keep going on the Matthews show.

The eminent historian Paul Johnson, who was recently on C-SPAN taking questions from viewers, has something to say about this. His book The Quest for God  laments that Western society made a huge mistake by decriminalizing homosexuality and thinking that acceptance of the lifestyle on a basic level would satisfy its practitioners. Instead, he wrote, “Decriminalization made it possible for homosexuals to organize openly into a powerful lobby, and it thus became a mere platform from which further demands were launched.” It became, he says, a “monster in our midst, powerful and clamoring, flexing its muscles, threatening, vengeful and vindictive towards anyone who challenges its outrageous claims, and bent on making fundamental-and to most of us horrifying-changes to civilized patterns of sexual behavior.”

Today, this monster makes even more demands and inroads, especially into our government, as President Obama appoints subversives such as homosexual activist Kevin Jennings to the Education Department, and some poor mixed-up “transgendered” person to a post at Commerce. Plus, adding to our health care problems, he has lifted the ban on AIDS-infected foreigners from traveling to and living in the U.S.

His gays-in-the-military proposal would not only make the Armed Forces a laughingstock but would end its value as a fighting force capable of defending us against foreign threats. Indeed, a homosexualized military could itself become a threat, just like it was in the Nazi period.

Instead of finding a “monster” in a gay rights movement that wants to impose itself on all of us, including our children in the schools, Kathleen Parker finds the monster to be the Christians in Uganda who want to spare their children from a lifestyle that too frequently ends in premature death. She accuses them of “genocide” for being patriots and good parents. Shame on her.

Parker’s “conservatism” is a farce and a fraud. But it seems to be in fashion at CPAC this year.