Could Evangelicals Save Us?

Call me crazy, call me naïve.  But why not hope that bad news could trigger a good result?

A staggering 42,000,000 Americans struggle to put food on the table every day. So in more civil days, we rallied with a safety net.  SNAP and other support programs were put in place during times when care for our suffering neighbors seemed normal.  But these merciful provisions—and even their emergency backups—are being sabotaged by ruthless members of an administration hostile to caring and compassion.  (What word other than ruthless could apply to those who previously chose to destroy 500 tons of food in a USAID warehouse on the verge of distribution to starving people?)

But hope could be on the way.  As in the old western movies, I’m envisioning a cavalry that comes galloping over the horizon just in the nick of time to rescue the townspeople and set things right. 

What cavalry?  I’m talking about the evangelical Christians.  Yes, the very same who fervently supported those politicians now regrettably revealed as being utterly hostile to all that God and Jesus stand for.

Why them?  Well, for starters, they have had a hand in making the current situation so abhorrent.  So who else could decide with unexpected urgency that enough is enough?  Who else could feel so desperately that enough is actually way too much?  Their deeply imbued religious convictions, combined with their forceful role as constituents, could conceivably transform them into a formidable power to insist on decency in government.

Besides, they fear God.  These are people who know that God is capable of hate when God witnesses despicable behavior by those claiming to honor God.  From earliest days in Sunday school, they heard this thunderous Biblical declaration by God:

“I hate, I despise your feasts.  I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.  Even though you offer me your offerings…I will not accept them.  Take away from me the noise of your songs.  I will not listen to the melody of your harps.  But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream!  [Amos  5:21-24]

They know that Jesus echoes God’s declaration.  He was quick to angrily call hypocrites “Hypocrites!” for their phony pretense of faithfulness.  And with respect to hunger, he was even more specific.  Jesus depicts the Final Judgment in which people who tended their neighbors in need would be honored in heaven, but he predicts that others will be dismissed harshly:

“Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you didn’t give me food.  I was thirsty and you didn’t give me anything to drink…”  When they protested, “But when did we see you hungry or thirsty?” Jesus replied, “When you didn’t do it to the least of these my brothers and my sisters, you did not do it to me.  [Matthew 25:41-45]

Well, of course this must particularly sting an evangelical to hear Jesus talk about the devil “and his angels”, because the very word “evangelical” has “angel” in the middle of it.  But with the preceding syllable in the Greek—“eu angelos” [εὐαγγελιστής]—it means good angel, bearer of good news, bearer of good blessings.  Any evangelical wants to be that kind of angel, not one of the devil’s angels. 

That’s why I’m counting on the extremely well organized community of Christian evangelicals throughout America to hear in the daily news the unmistakable sound of God’s trumpet call to feed the hungry, right now.  To become a massive force for good, right now.  To use their hearts, their energy, their voices, and their votes to demand that those politicians who mock God’s and Jesus’ unequivocal call to feed the hungry repent, and do the right thing, right this instant.  Now.  Not tomorrow.  Hunger doesn’t wait while political games are being played.  Hunger is immediate, and it is constant. 

No one who really loves God and follows Jesus wants to be misunderstood as a co-conspirator in depriving their neighbors of food and drink.  That’s why I am placing my hope on a massive uprising of the American Christian evangelical community to lead us all into the light right now, a unified holy voice calling for repentance of our indifference and cruelty to those who hunger.  They know that they had the Word of God implanted in them from their earliest days, and they must surely sense that it could leap forth to carry them and all of us into a re-United States of America. 

Let it be so.