Evangelicals and fundamentalists have a lot of hopes for our government to change and behave differently.  You may have noticed that we just missed plummeting over the fiscal cliff by plunging into a deficit chasm.  Evangelicals and fundamentalists want our government to tighten the belt, cut the spending, and take responsibility with the national debt.

President Obama did a successful job at winning the campaign.  He did it by telling a majority of people what  they wanted to hear.  He won by offering to ignore the constitution and give the larger number of people what they wanted.  He was willing to cut his losses with those clinging to their guns and their religion.  They couldn’t make him lose.  He was a success.  He got the most votes.  It will hurt the country in the long run, but he won. He knew that most people would want what he had to say and what he would give them or at least what they thought they might get from him.

To varying degrees, evangelicals and fundamentalists are functioning in the same way President Obama did.  You don’t want to be a loser.  You don’t want to get the least number of votes (attendees), so you enact policies that are popular to more people.  Why should the government stop acting like it does, when evangelicals and fundamentalists won’t stop what they’re doing?

The government needs to keep the right number of people not paying any taxes at all, pleasing the most possible people, and to do that, through the legislative and executive branches, it agreed to raise taxes on those earning over 400,000 a year.  Lots of congressmen caved on this, perhaps thinking that it’s what people voted for in the election.  American’s “love a winner” and why not go with the winner?  His popularity is up right now and it would just look like sour grapes to oppose him.  Far more people make less than 400,000 dollars than do make that much. California has already raised income taxes on the same group of people in order to keep from cutting from the school budgets.   It was passed by proposition in which the people voted to take more money from those making over 250,000 a year to pay for everyone’s schooling and keep teachers employed.

People don’t want to give up their lives.  They want somewhere to lay their heads.  They want to pull down their barns and build greater.  They want to bury their fathers.  They don’t want to deny self.  They don’t want to take up their cross.  Church leaders know that.  They know that message won’t fly, even though it’s the truth.  So they design their program and it’s marketing around self-serving, self-gratification, sensuality, ease, and comfort.  Church will be fun.  Your kids will have fun.  You’ll find friends.  We’ve got programs for everyone that will make everything as nice as possible for you.  That’s not how Jesus or the apostles operated, but it is how evangelical and fundamentalist churches function today.  A very few do not, but a large majority do.

And if the goodies aren’t offered, the offense is taken away.  The short term truth isn’t very appealing, and long term thinking (what is faith) isn’t enough.  Everyone knows that.  Because of that, the people who are successful are either avoiding altogether or very much diminishing the short term truth.  They maximize the niceties in the short term—casual, rock music, short, programs, ease, fun—what amounts to a kind of therapy for the self-seeking, excluding or hiding the long term realities like the government deals with the national debt bomb.  What you get are a lot of unconverted people, but larger numbers of what is labeled as church growth and success.

So while the same evangelicals and fundamentalists (albeit in lesser numbers even in this) are complaining about the way the government is operating, they function the same way.  All of this is readying the world for a total apostasy where men are lovers of their selves and lovers of things.  The Jesus of the Bible is morphed into a Santa Claus type of figure with his goody bag of therapy, fun, entertainment, and good times.  There is no wonder the government would not be serious about doing anything differently.