Kent Brandenburg writes and I agree ‘My Christianity isn’t tethered to what other people are doing or have done.  Christianity is the truth.  If I were one of eight remaining believers on earth, it would still be true.  I don’t doubt it when people don’t live it.  I feel sorry for them, but they haven’t affected what I think about Christianity itself.  My Christianity is tethered to the Bible, God’s Word.

I’m writing about this, because of an article in Newsweek that came out on Tuesday this week, written by Issac Bailey, “I’m Struggling with My Christianity After Trump.”  Something with that title in a major publication would be a head scratcher, except that most “Christianity” today and probably for most of history isn’t and hasn’t been actual Christianity.  No one should be surprised about counterfeit Christianity.  Bailey says he got his doubts about Christianity itself from the reality that professing Christians voted for Trump.  I’ve heard other people say this.

According to scripture, anyone who leaves actual Christianity was never saved in the first place.  Nowhere says a true Christian can lose his salvation.  He can’t leave it, because he’s kept by the power of God (1 Peter 1:5).  A believer cooperates with what God does in saving him, but it is God who keeps him saved.  Scripture is clear on this.  Many passages teach the eternal security of a believer, but two verses are definitive on the point that, if a professing believer defects, he was never saved in the first place:  first, 1 John 2:19.

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

Second, 1 John 3:6.

Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him.

Read both verses.  The first one says that when someone does not continue, he never had salvation in the first place, that is, he was “not of us,” said twice in the verse.  If he was “of us,” he would “no doubt have continued with us.”  No doubt.  The second verse says that a person who sins as a lifestyle, as seen in the present tense, “sinneth,” “hath not seen him, neither known him,” that is, a person who takes on a lifestyle of sin never saw or knew Christ in the first place.  A true Christian can’t walk away from Christ.  As Jesus said in John 10:28-29, no man, including himself, can pluck a true believer out of either Jesus’ or His Father’s hand.

If you read the Bailey article, you can see he doesn’t have biblical Christianity.  I’m not saying that to be unnecessarily offensive or condemnatory.  People call themselves Christians, who are not, because there are many various forms of popular “Christianity” in the world.  That could be a whole separate article, all the different types, that aren’t Christianity.  They are fraudulent perversions of the real thing.  There is more false Christianity by far than there is true Christianity.

Most Christian denominations don’t even preach a true gospel.  You should know that.  They are preaching a false gospel.  Most professing Christians to whom I talk don’t even know the gospel.  I repeat, they don’t know it.  Churches are not clear on the gospel.  Even the ones who might believe a true gospel are more concerned about having a bigger congregation and so they do more to pander to people than tell them what they need to hear.  There has been a cumulative and comprehensive erosion of the gospel in the United States for awhile and for a number of reasons.

In the first paragraph, Bailey says his “faith is in tatters.”  Before I provide an assessment of what he says in his article, I have an opinion about what he’s doing.  I don’t think he’s going to leave his spurious version of Christianity.  He’s threatening to leave it like a child threatens to hold his breath until he dies if his parents don’t give him what he wants.  True Christians are concerned that their testimony could result in defections from the faith.  Jesus said at the beginning of Matthew 18 that it would be better to put a millstone around your neck and jump into deep water than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.

Bailey is saying that Christians are sending him into apostasy because of their vote for Trump.  This is meant to strike fear into Christians, so that they at the least become non-political or disengaged from political action.  Bailey will keep supporting actual murderers greater than any holocaust in the history of the world, the same people who booed God at their party convention, but a vote for Trump will send him off the deep end.  He’s already off the deep end.  His party is the party against divine design of the family, which is the most rudimentary and rebellious form of opposition to God in existence.

The people Bailey addresses specifically are the pro-life supporting Christians, implying that there are non-pro-life Christians.  You can be a Christian, a true one, and not be pro-life.  There is only pro-life Christianity.  Everything else is an impostor.  Sure, it might take a new Christian some time to get up to speed on this point, but he will get there, because he is indwelt by God the Holy Spirit, if he is really saved.

Many of the Trump voters, who claim to be Christians, are not.  They do have a different Jesus.  That includes some, if not all, of the people in the picture posted in Bailey’s article.  As a matter of religious or theological comparison though, these pseudo Christians have a lot in common with the type of Christianity Bailey represents.  They both have a novel fabrication or improvisation of Christianity, that is very loose with scripture.  They put more authority in their own experience than the Bible, relying more on allegorization than exegesis.

For all of Trump’s many flaws, in a political way he represented to a lot of Americans and most true Christians, a last opportunity to save the federal government from a trajectory of progressive, oligarchical totalitarianism and globalism.  Of course, that’s just a conspiracy theory, wink wink.  There is no new world order planned for the future of the United States with no borders and the eradication of Americanism.  Christians would like to keep their freedoms, freedom of religion and of speech.  They would like to stop the present course of the elimination the nuclear family, something basic like a father and mother of opposite sex with the authority to raise their own children.  The support of vouchers for education is about the freedom to educate their children in Christian values away from the humanistic, pseudo-science of gender fluidity.

It is not accident that today you hear the left use words like “cult” and “worship” as it relates to Trump.  I’m sure they’re seen as effective propaganda.  No Christian wants to be seen or known for being in a cult or worshiping a man.  Bailey among many others uses this terminology. I don’t know anyone who follows Trump, let alone worships him.  I understood why Christians would attend the rally on January 6.  I know some people who were there and none of them knew anything about breaking into the capitol building to stop the counting of the electoral votes.  I’ve explained this in previous posts, but they see both their voice and their vote being taken away.  It’s obvious to them that a two tiered justice system already exists, where a true Christian can be prosecuted for not baking a cake for a same sex wedding and yet left wing anarchists can take over a large area of an American city without opposition.  The mainstream of the media applauds it, likes it, has no problem with a Trump voter bleeding in the street.

Much of what Bailey wrote just isn’t true and other parts are misrepresentations, slanted in a dishonest way.  He might just be deceived, but I believe he knows what he’s doing.

• True Christians don’t pray to Jesus.  They pray to God the Father like Jesus taught.
• The group filmed “praying” in the front of the Senate chamber, it’s obvious, don’t represent biblical Christianity.

• True Christianity isn’t white or black, as in “white church” or “black church,” as Bailey represents it.
• All the things that Franklin Graham said about Trump are true.  Graham doesn’t represent biblical Christianity, but I understand why a Christian would appreciate the list of accomplishments he mentions.

Bailey argues that Trump was not pro-life, because Trump oversaw a 200% increase in civilian deaths in Syria and Iraq in his first year.  That is a very specific statistic that does not relate to the issue of being “pro-life” as defined.  Pro-life means that you’re against murdering unborn children.  How many civilians would die if ISIS continued on unfettered?  That’s more difficult to measure, but that is why a very narrow, cherry-picked statistic was necessary for an opening statement.  Trump oversaw a quick dismantling of ISIS his first year and then evacuation so that less future death would occur.  Consider the following statistical chart of civilian deaths in the Iraq War between 2003 and 2021:
Look at the Trump years, 2017-2020, compared to the previous ones.  This belies what Bailey writes, his assuming, it seems, that no one would fact check him, if it even mattered.  Despite Bailey’s twisting of the meaning of pro-life, nevertheless, more civilians were killed in Iraq in 2014 during the Obama presidency than during the entire four years of the Trump presidency.

• Bailey blames Trump for the murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.   No president has been more pro-Israel than Trump.  Israel says this.  There were fourteen mass shootings during the Obama years.  It’s sheer political opportunism to blame mass shootings on a president.  Was Trump also to blame for the 2017 Las Vegas shooting at a country western concert? Those were mainly Trump deplorables getting gunned down.
• Another argument Bailey makes is that abortion rates go down during Democratic presidencies, because of government programs.  It wouldn’t surprise me if there were higher unintended pregnancies when Democrats are president, because of greater support for contraception, most of which is abortifacient.  Those aren’t called murders, but they are.  Since 1965 over 11 million have been murdered by abortifacients, that don’t show up as abortions.  That would be a good explanation for lower abortion rates too.

Pro-life people, of course, want to end all abortion, so the rate would decrease to nothing if they had their way.  Instead, with the support of Bailey, almost 70 million have been murdered in the United States, which would be enough to cause a Christian to defect, except that’s impossible for a true Christian.  True Christians are happy about slowing down the abortion rate.  They don’t, however, support contraception as a way of getting there.  A true Christian opposes fornication and all sexual sin that results in an unintended pregnancy.  For a biblical Christian, an unintended pregnancy is by definition one outside of marriage.  If Bailey is a Christian, he should support the biblical position, which is abstinence.  That would also end the AIDS epidemic.

• Insurrection occurred all summer with BLM and Antifa, doing far more damage and causing far more death than the capitol “riot.”  Is that justified to Bailey, because he agrees with socialism and actual fascism?  When you see the picture of unarmed crazies in costumes, a truly thinking person doesn’t see the comparison.  One of the five “killed,” used as a statistic by the left, was an unarmed woman, who threatened no one with violence.  Where is the outcry?  Three Trump supporters died of natural causes.  The one police death has hardly been covered.  What happened there?  Why isn’t there more coverage of his death?  Not his funeral, not the way he’s been used politically, but what actually happened to him?

Bailey says that 60% of white Catholic voters voted for Trump, implying that Catholics are Christian.  He lumps them with evangelicals who supported Trump.  This is the most tell-tale evidence that he doesn’t understand biblical Christianity.  He is pro-abortion.  He is against the death penalty for murder.  If you are a Christian, you support what God supports.  You believe the Bible.  Bailey does not.

The crucial aspect for a lasting faith, which is actually a saving faith, is the object of that faith.  My faith doesn’t stand in men.  The object of faith is Jesus Christ Himself, and He never fails.  I believe the Bible.  My faith comes by the Word of God.  1 John 5:4-5 say:

4 For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. 5 Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?

One reason true Christians won’t be swayed by what occurs in this world is because they aren’t living for this world.  They are living for the next world, the kingdom of Jesus Christ and the eternal state. This reminds me of the hymn, My Faith Has Found a Resting Place, by E. E. Hewitt:My faith has found a resting place,  Not in device nor creed;I trust the Ever-living One,  His wounds for me shall plead.  I need no other argument,  I need no other plea;It is enough that Jesus died,    And that He died for me.Enough for me that Jesus saves,  This ends my fear and doubt;A sinful soul I come to Him,  He’ll never cast me out.My heart is leaning on the Word,  The written Word of God,Salvation by my Savior’s name,  Salvation through His blood.My great Physician heals the sick,  The lost He came to save;For me His precious blood He shed,  For me His life He gave.’ https://kentbrandenburg.com/2021/02/10/questioning-christianity-because-of-what-one-sees-occurring-in-the-world-or-from-people-who-call-themselves-christians/