Through the emergence and the rather unhealthy celebration of Donald Trump by most church folks, I believe that God has allowed a clearer expression to be given to long-standing, festering afflictions of the soul of the American portion, and to a large extent, significant portion of the global church itself.
Over a long period of time, true values of godliness, of true witness to the death and resurrection of our LORD, of unqualified commitment to the pursuit of the divine will, have been substituted for values which systematically degraded pristine Kingdom values and focus, first in the hearts of Christian faithful, and consequently in the world around.
Part of that value corruption includes the substitution and passing off of patriotic and nationalistic feelings to natural political entities for commitments to God’s Kingdom, the elevation and celebration of self interests and the human ego, carnal understanding of the use of power, among many others.
The greatest casualty of the degradation of God-centredness has been the SIGHT and spiritual perception of many who subscribe to a gospel which focuses on self rather than on God.
One of the sad ironies of human experience is if you want to degrade or take out the sustaining power of anything, just make it popular or acceptable to all! Contrary to what obtained about twenty years ago, the word “kingdom” has now become a cliché on the lips of almost every professed Christian, and is now subject to all kinds of abuse.
Most of those who mouth the word have no clue how much their own lives and faith are rooted in SELF, the very antithesis of any true Kingdom commitment. In certain respects, nationalism and patriotism to earthly entities and causes are being confused with Kingdom loyalty. In other instances, people have been and are still going into “ministries” for reasons that are far below the divinely approved ones.
While some do so because they find themselves at a life’s juncture where they cannot do any other thing, others simply went in there to enjoy the perks and influence that come with the activity. There are yet others who inherited them from their biological parents.
With the exception of a remnant few, blind leadership has been replicating its notion of inaccurate gospel over generations and it has left a good portion of the visible church utterly prostrate and powerless. In the midst of the degeneration, the usual church and “ministry” activities are still actively on.
A church steeped in disobedience, having lost touch with the source of the authority with which it can compel the world, now constantly seeks alternative carnal short-cuts to “force” a moral order on an unruly world it had been given an original divine mandate to show the way of light.
Peculiar American Church Disease
As a result of its unique historical position and influence, the American church jurisdiction has been particularly plagued with an unusual share of these ills which, it has “exported” in large scale to other jurisdictions. This is said without prejudice to the fact that the American church has undoubtedly been used by the Lord to project the gospel to far-flung corners of the earth. However, as a result of various human issues, huge collateral damage has also been done along the line.
Apart from tendencies for widespread physical immorality, a feature of the liberal culture of that society, the purity of the US church’s faith and witness has also been particularly vitiated not just by pernicious materialism, but also by the marriage of cultural, nationalistic and political values with what should ordinarily be an undiluted focus on God’s Kingdom.
Unknown to most average American “religious” Christians who style themselves “conservatives”, and the majority of who currently are white, the Christian God has taken on the form of a ruthless capitalist who is very much in love with private capital accumulation by anyone who can muster the wherewithal to do so. And because it is difficult to draw a line between divinely allowable enterprising spirit and where human greed begins to encroach, the average American has created a “god” whose virulent capitalistic instincts is such that he doesn’t even care for the weak.
If you’re unable to “make it”, you are perceived as lacking in enterprise. Any intervention by those who are in authority to utilise state means to improve the well-being of the vulnerable and the weak in the society is considered a cultural taboo! It’s branded “socialist”. And of course, in the rigidly ideological minds of an average US citizen, God can never have anything to do with anything tagged “socialist”. Not even the provision of something as basic as an affordable health care scheme for all is good enough for those wretched of the earth!
Donald Trump’s desire to overload the US Supreme Court with hardline conservative judges goes beyond pushing back on the gay culture and abortion adherents, but most importantly to destroy minority civil rights gains, and of course, to wipe out what remains of the most important legacy of their country’s first black president, the Affordable Health Care scheme, established by Barack Obama to make basic health accessible to the poor of the poor of the leading and only advanced Western nation without affordable health care for its own citizens.
A lot of the judicial appointments which those backing Trump from the church have been touting as a project to further God’s causes are not exactly so. Far before their “Christian” credentials, those being appointed are first of all chosen because they mostly are rabid warriors for rightwing cultural practices that have nothing to do with God and His purposes.
Apart from abortion and gay rights, these individuals are well known for their fierce opposition to and denial of the realities of climate change and environmental protection issues solely because of material business considerations (capitalism); opposition to widening voting rights, to stricter gun controls, and to the expansion of health care opportunities. They have also been noted for their “nativist opposition to immigration” in a nation into which their own forebears were immigrants!
For instance, in August 2020, a three-man judicial panel presided over by a Trump-appointed judge struck down a California law which banned the use of “weapons with high-calibre magazines”. Also, how is God’s interest served by the determination to load the Supreme Court with judges who are certain to throw out the Affordable Health Care scheme of the Obama administration, which if carried out will deprive millions of Americans, including poor Christians, access to affordable health care?
Because their appointments are usually on a lifetime basis, their decisions can last generations. While any decisions they make to pacify their church supporters on abortion legalisation or gay rights can never eliminate those evils from the society anymore than you can use a law to push back on adultery or fornication, their ideological decisions on matters of race and guns, healthcare or voting rights for more people can have devastating effects on the lives of peoples, among who will be Christians unfortunately.
Complex Relationship between Faith, Culture and Politics in the US
Because most Christians outside of the US hardly take time to figure out the usually very complex cultural and political permutations behind what appear to be ordinary faith-based issues, they can read rather ridiculously simplistic religious meanings into these matters.
This is what is being played out very clearly in the hue and cry over abortion and homosexuality, for which most in the church world have been putting their hats in the ring for an individual who’s merely out to prey on a largely undiscerning church to fulfil an unbridled ambition.
America’s mainstream conservative, religious Christianity equates patriotism to the American state as loyalty to God’s Kingdom. Whenever they describe themselves, the familiar identity badge they display is that of: “Christian conservative patriot”. For anyone familiar with their language of identity, the catch and the emphasis are on the word “patriot”. The import of that word is one of a strong sense of ownership that the whites feel towards the territory called the US.
The word also carries a suggestion that God gave it to them while other racial groups do not share in that divine sense of ownership. The United States of America, according to this worldview is a special territory on earth, a sort of a kingdom of God.
God’s own literal country! But it’s all a nationalistic idea that has nothing to do with true Christian or Biblical values. So when they use these kinds of clarion calls to rally and mobilise support for a political project like Donald Trump, it amounts to a preying on the name of God to prosecute a selfish, human agenda.
A further fallacy is that the mentality by and large regards the famed “American Dream” as the bar of success to which everyone must aspire in God, because as they claim, America is founded on biblical values, and so it is inherently “good”.
Again, this is a deliberately falsified narrative that ignores the facts of that country’s history, and which has been used to bury and sustain centuries of evil and injustice, which is now being vigorously challenged by painstaking historiographical efforts.
For the record, and for the attention of Christians who have bought into a fat lie, the equality declarations in America’s founding independence document emphatically did not include “forcibly enslaved” blacks among those who were created equal before God. Thus America was founded and built on the morally dubious and contradictory reputation of “declared” godliness while at the same time utilising the blood of slaves — fellow human beings — as oil in the engine of its economic development.
While in its July 1776 declaration of independence from Great Britain, US founding fathers were making the bold claims that “…all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with rights that, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…”, America kept its black people in chains and manacles.
And the man who played a central role in drafting that document, Thomas Jefferson, the third US President, kept black slaves, one of whom he used for his own sexual gratification (Sarah “Sally” Hemings) and through whom he fathered children. The prevailing attitude then was that black people, a significant portion of the human race who God created equal, were either inferior or just less than proper humans. Therefore, they were deemed no better than beasts of burden which did not deserve any right to life. That attitude has continued till today in varied ways and forms so much so that America, “God’s own country”, is still being reminded that “Black Lives Matter”.
The peculiar “God” of America’s mainstream, conservative and popular Christianity also appears to sanction the practice of gun ownership. A vile culture which apparently developed out of the need that white interlopers had to ward off natives who had been forcibly deprived of their own lands, and to keep enslaved blacks, especially on the Southern plantations constantly compliant or killed.
Generations of whites continue to feel threatened by those who have been condemned to permanent endurance of the scars of historical and prevalent ongoing deprivation and racial injustice. The US gun business is a multibillion-dollar industrial complex. The gun lobby in America continues to sustain itself on keeping mostly Republican politicians on its lucrative payroll.
And when you hear such a well-known prophetic voice like Rick Joyner moaning publicly about some imaginary enemies trying to take their guns away from them, you are left wondering what Spirit-filled person would be crying over the fear of being deprived the ownership of a murderous weapon! But what this highlights is how these people’s Kingdom identities still pale in relation to their nationalistic, patriotic and earthly cultural identities.
On a television interview show, “The Jim Bakker Show”, in September 2019, brother Joyner, in a full exhibition of hardline, paranoid, extreme, conservative credentials laced by undercurrents of racism which he laboured to deny, advocated the formation of gun-toting white militias as a means of defence against any gun control policies, because according to him, a “civil war” looms. “We’re not just going to attack other races; we’re here to defend and support….”, he claimed. He even quoted a biblical verse that Jesus mandated the bearing of arms for self defence! Hear him: “Christians have to get engaged in it. Jesus himself said, ‘There is a time to sell your coat and buy a sword.’ That was the weapon of their day.” Really?
The same streak was demonstrated by the Kentucky-based white pastor, Dana Coverstone whose revelatory vision went viral sometime ago. Completely contrary to the nature of Christ, he interpreted what appeared to be a credible revelation through the eyes of his ungodly culture by urging people to store up guns and ammunition in order to defend themselves against an impending upheaval.
Figuring out those against whom the guns are meant to be used should not be rocket science. For emphasis, owning and depending on murderous weapons is definitely not a culture of the Kingdom of God. The spirit which inspired that response was clearly not in the nature of Christ.
The Cankerworm of Racism
While some are bold enough to say it in unambiguous terms, most however may not say in words as they will in postures, attitudes, and in the way the society’s institutions are built, that this unique “God” of America’s politically conservative, popularly accepted Christianity believes that a portion of his own creation (the Caucasian whites) is way superior to the others in creational hierarchy. The inferior part of the human race happens to be mostly blacks, especially the ones who are largely domiciled in a portion of the earth referred to as Africa. The reason why some of their prominent ministers have occasionally devoted preaching times to emphasise that Christ is not a white person, and that Christianity is not a white man’s faith, is because there had been and still such prevalent mentality among whites. Even some of the leaders who have written extensively about the evil of racism, like Rick Joyner, have been found unable to match their own words with deeds.
This is largely because a lot of these white Christians (there are exceptions by the way), having surveyed the world’s landscape and noticing the general “backwardness” and other current natural predicaments of the black race, have concluded that the situation is because they are the biblical descendants of Ham, one of the sons of Noah, whom their father had cursed for daring to look at his nakedness.
And because one of the curses was that Ham would serve his brothers, the written word of God has been used to justify such evil practices like the 400 year-long institution of slavery, the more recent apartheid in the nation of South Africa, and a good many prevailing racist mentalities in the American church and most of Western society today.
In order to preserve what they privately believe was a “divine” ordination, the vigorous resistance of anything that seeks to overthrow that “order” is considered a kind of “holy” act. The emerging racially diluted “rainbow” world of predominant non-white, coloured people is considered a detraction from the plan of their own “God”. This would be why their reflexive mode is to see nothing good at all in their first God-ordained black president (whether anyone believes that or not is totally irrelevant), but will enthusiastically offer their backing to the reprobate white supremacist, and psychopathic Donald Trump.
Although the televangelist, Jerry Falwell Snr. reputedly formed the so-called Moral Majority in 1979, as a political action movement which supposedly “helped to establish the religious right as a force in American politics”, and did take positions against the general moral breakdowns creeping in on the society, one of the curious assignments it gave itself was also to push back on the progress that were being made by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s which included the securing of equality rights for black and coloured people.
At the moment, a good number of the current evangelical leaders who support Donald Trump, including the currently scandal-besieged Jerry Falwell Jnr., Franklin Graham, Paula White, Rick Joyner, and a motley of other white church leaders are also fervent sponsors and supporters of Trump’s vicious, evil anti-immigrant policies designed to ensure the continuing “whitening” of the American demographic landscape.
It is not entirely a surprise that the Republican Party, a traditional bastion of American nationalism and racism is the “political home” to most of these conservative, white Christians. A handful of equally undiscerning black preachers and their followers have found accommodation within that fold. The suggestion is not that there is absence of racism in the Democratic Party, it just happens to be a fact of history that the Democrats have been more open to giving accommodation and opportunities to other racial nationalities than their Republican opposite numbers.
Before they found a new ally in Trump, most of their prophetic voices in the US evangelical movement are fond of citing the administration of the ex-Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan as the example of a “golden era” of modern American presidentialism, it is not a coincidence at all that the Reagan administration remained perhaps the most nationalistic, war-mongering, murderous, but also the most racist in American modern history, until Trump of course! The same president Reagan was once caught on a now declassified tape referring to African leaders attending a UN conference in New York as “African monkeys”.
As in other church jurisdictions around the world, there are very credible prophetic voices in the US church, but there are also outright charlatans. There are many more who are otherwise credible but have not been able to free themselves from the baggage of racist politics and cultural pursuits. Many of these have prophesied, they have written books, built globally recognised ministries, they continue to teach from the scriptures, but at the core of their humanities, they remain strong cultural ideologues. They talk a lot about God and His Kingdom, but their essential identities and allegiances remain rooted in such earthly identifiers as race, ethnicity and nationality.
It is prophets with these range and quality of sights that a number of unsuspecting Christians in other church jurisdictions including Africa continue to rely on for direction on where God is going on major issues.
Nature of Prophecies
Rather than be a solution, Donald Trump is like a magnifying glass, a manifestation of all that is wrong with the dominant values in that society. He is the fruit of the years of investment of the American white-dominated church in carnality and unrighteousness, among which racism ranks very high.
People can prophesy, including the fact that a particular individual will be the president of a country, but it doesn’t establish such prophecy givers as valid, reliable mouthpieces of God in every and most cases. In any case, diviners and enchanters have been known to make better of similar prediction activities!
What is going to validate the position of the throng of Trump believers is not whether he gets elected again (he may well be if God wills it), or whether anyone prophesied about his coming. The real issue is the nature of what they are hearing or have heard; and what powerful influences from within themselves, working through their cultural strongholds and natural belief systems that have not been purged by God’s Spirit are polluting their prophecies? And how are they understanding and interpreting what have been shown to them?
With or without the knowledge of those caught in the trap, ingrained attitudes of the soul, entrenched mental constructs, and deep-seated historical and cultural strongholds can determine what people prophesy. Spirits that are out to deceive can also speak through anyone who have not purged themselves of cultural and ideological idols and other self-centred agendas, just as it happened to those prophets of Ahab. Ahab’s prophets prophesied what they “saw” with their agenda-skewed sights, but what they did not realise was that there were “forces” beyond their range of discernments that were responsible for what they were so sure was from God!
“Then the LORD said to me, ‘The prophets are prophesying lies in my name. I have not sent them or appointed them or spoken to them. They are prophesying to you false visions, divinations, *idolatries* and the *delusions of their own minds” (Jer. 14:14).
Even in situations when God truly reveals anything to some people, these natural mental or soulish inhibitions can massively colour the spins and interpretations they give to visions and prophecies. While prophecies should not be despised, new testament realities require believers to test the spirits (including inspirations, natural colouring of opinions, etc) that may lie behind prophecies.
There is no leader, no king who gets enthroned without either God’s outright ordination or at the very least, His approval. It does not matter whether Donald Trump is elected or re-elected, but what matters is where God is going, what point He is making, why has He permitted such a course of development? And this is where things can probably get seriously muddled up. Prophecies, visions and interpretations can take on the forms of idols strongly resident in the minds of those promoting them.
Even if Donald Trump gets to be president for eight years in a row, and succeeded in filling all the US court systems with right-wing conservative judges, it is highly unlikely that it will positively affect the fortunes of the American church, least of all the global church in any way. By the time he leaves, he would merely have used an unsuspecting church people for his ambition, and nothing tangible will happen.
No amount of legal enforcement measures from the Congress and the White House can make America or Americans more Christlike or give the church an influence or power that it has not earned by God’s approval. Only if and when that church is led by credible leadership into a death experience to all of its own internal ills can the power of God descend to change the conditions of people’s hearts. While you can use law to push back on others’ encroachment on your own rights, abortion and homosexuality can never be reduced or eliminated by legal proscription. Only a holy partnership of the Church with the Head of the Body can fundamentally alter afflictions of the human hearts and minds.
US’s Hegemony Unravelling
The age of modern hegemonic empires on earth as defined by the US ascendancy since the Second World War is coming to a “divinely ordained” ending. The political and economic influence of the US is rapidly waning. The edifice is unravelling. The reasons for this, it must be emphasised, is not because of homosexuality and abortion which are mere distractions that the enemy has sold to an undiscerning church, and which is making everyone to throw in their lots with an ungodly leadership which God has allowed for an entirely different purpose than they have figured out.
Homosexuality and abortion are not different from or worse than the other evils rampant in the American society. They are no worse than pornography which the US exports on an industrial scale, or than the needless bloodshed from gun violence; nor are they worse sins than rampant racism within both the larger society and the church of God in that country.
What may not be immediately apparent to many “prophesyers” and those who uncritically follow them is that Donald Trump may well turn out to be one of the veritable instruments in the divine plan to accelerate the internal combustion of that system. With his natural predilection for lawlessness and barefaced corruption, a ruthless pursuit of his personal ambitions, and his constant resort to pressuring and exploiting that society’s racial fault lines, he has so far not disappointed.
Some of their own prophetic voices have been talking about seeing situations akin to a “civil war”. Ordinary folks with a bit of knowledge of that system, including ex-gang members have been talking about what they know of an impending possible racial war as armed Nazi-inspired far-right, white supremacist groups emboldened by Donald Trump have been massing in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, making contingency plans for war-like violence. God forbids, but the US is fast degenerating into a state previously thought impossible or was the fate of failing, third world states under totalitarian leaders.
Just a few days ago, 13 members of a violent, gun-bearing, white supremacists militia gang were arrested and some are now being charged for plotting to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan State, Gretchen Whitmer. It has been described as a serious *domestic terror* case. The democratic governor had been a constant target of threats from violent, far-right, pro-Nazi groups which have called for her to be “lynched and beheaded” because of her strict lockdown policy to stem the rising tide of Covid-19 in that state.
Prior to his contracting the virus, Donald Trump had been against any lockdown because he needed to tout the economy as his achievement for re-election purposes. Lockdown undermines all of that. He therefore had been egging on these violent groups to create mayhem where possible. He specifically called the members of a militia, terror group _”Wolverine Watchmen”_ “good people”, and sought to pressure the governor to “make a deal” with them! The group must have responded to Trump’s earlier call to “liberate Michigan”. The state Attorney General announced a charge which includes attempts to instigate a civil war, plans to take over the state legislature, and to kidnap government officials including the governor.
Such groups have been growing exponentially since Donald Trump’s presidency started, and in recent times, they have announced plans to overthrow state governments they believe are “violating the US constitution”. This are exactly the same phrases and language individuals like Rick Joyner have been employing, calling for “christian” militias! Since the start of the Obama administration which he admitted to reluctantly accepting as God’s preference, Joyner had been using his broadcasts to complain about how their Republic’s “constitution had been broken”, and the need to use martial laws, and violent militias to restore things. No wonder they found refuge in a race-baiting, violence-inclined Donald Trump! But are these consistent with the ways of Christ?
All faithful believers are called upon to examine their faith and consciences on how these attitudes align with the interests of God or His Church. Is this how God works to bring change to a society, let alone His church, by instituting a government that openly supports racism, sponsors violence and back armed militias?
These folks clearly have given the faith of God’s Son a totally different colouration from what we know as the biblical pattern. How christians have been unable to figure out that there is something awkward, something so distasteful and so distinctively ungodly in this kind of unholy alliance by a section of the church with a totally anarchic leadership is just plain startling!
As for those who continue to operate under the illusion that racism is a distant problem of the Western hemisphere, and who are totally oblivious of its *defiling potential on the Church’s consecration*, I wish to bring to their attention that a number of faceless Nigerian immigrants have been killed like George Floyd by racist policing, and any of these could have been anyone’s relatives. I will also commend to them the words of Rick Warren, the pastor of the Saddleback Church that: “Racism is not some minor issue to God. It’s at the heart of the Gospel”. Warren obviously knows what some in our midsts are splendidly ignorant of.
Blinded by Hypocrisy
Church jurisdictions in various parts of the world are grappling with differing growth and maturity challenges. It is quite clear that the evil of racism ranks very high among the most serious challenges that the American church requires an uncommon grace of God to overcome. And it can if it wants to. But if it doesn’t address this as a major sin problem, it will be unable to access the grace needed for spiritual rulership and dominion. And because its larger society will always remain wide open to satanic influences, it will have to be relying on means and elements not sanctioned by God to fight such ills.
“You hypocrites! First remove the log from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
The wisdom of Matthew 7:5 is that if you have a plank, a beam, or a log (suggesting big sizes) covering your own eyes, it is practically impossible to clearly see or figure out a speck (like a tiny dust) in another’s eyes.
There is always the requirement of a bigger adjustment in one’s own condition that is a precondition for the authority to discern properly, and be able to carry out even a far smaller adjustment in others or in surrounding environments. How can a church that is internally struggling with a problem as spiritually compromising as racism so hypocritically think it has divine authorisation to fight or remove homosexuality, abortion and all other secularist anomalies from the society?
Its continuing inability to see the diseased state of its own spiritual health as the root of the many problems in the wider society means that it will constantly be drawn and diverted to routes and solutions not approved by the LORD, including looking up to an opportunistic, overly ambitious TV reality showman.
Olushina Adisa contributed this piece from London where he is based with his family.