Christian Education Awareness Network

November 26, 2009

by David d'Escoto

In what many consider to be one of the all time sports blunders in the 20th century, Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings picked up a fumble from the other team and proceeded to run the ball 66 yards the wrong way into his own end zone. Marshall mistakenly thought he had scored a touchdown for his own team, proceeded to celebrate by throwing the ball out of the end zone, and scored a safety (2 points) for the other team. He was left with the nickname Jim "Wrong Way" Marshall.

Taking a look at how things are going in America today, we can surely see a lot of similarity between the story of Jim Marshall's blunder and the religious conservative right.

What I believe to be one of the most obvious blunders is a common method used by the religious right to combat our country's degeneracy—political action/lobbying groups. This reactionary method of trying to "right" the country has clearly not worked. Take a quick look at one such lobbying group that began in 1979 with a small group of sincere religious conservative men who named their group the Moral Majority. This well-funded lobbying group quickly grew to over 4 million members and became one of the largest right wing forces in America. Some of the main issues that the Moral Majority lobbied for back then were: 

• outlawing abortion
• opposition to state recognition and acceptance of homosexual acts
• enforcement of a traditional vision of family life
• censorship of media outlets that promote an 'anti-family' agenda 

A short 10 years later (1989) one of the Moral Majority's leaders, Jerry Falwell, said that they were closing their doors and announced the following, "... our mission is accomplished... I feel that I have performed the task to which I was called in 1979. The religious right is solidly in place..."

Fast forward ahead a mere 10 years later to 1999 and, strangely, we find the former leader and founder of the Moral Majority, Paul Weyrich, saying in an article titled a Letter to Conservatives":

"Cultural Marxism is succeeding in its war against our culture...I believe that we probably have lost the culture war...even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important... I know that what we have been doing for thirty years hasn't worked, that while we have been fighting and winning in politics, our culture has decayed into something approaching barbarism."  

Dr. James Dobson echoed Mr. Weyrich's words this year when he finally conceded to this fact when he said in Spring 2009, "Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost...[our nation is] absolutely awash in evil...what you can do is pray, pray for this great nation… As I see it, there’s no other answer, short term."

Most religious conservative leaders today continue to run for many yards, and yes they are running hard and with passion, but, unfortunately, their methods have been taking our country in the wrong direction. We need to face the facts, Conservatives have lost on virtually every single platform that they initially lobbied for. The exact opposite has happened on every single issue they tried to promote or defend over the last thirty years. In fact, our country is far worse off economically, morally and spiritually than anyone could have imagined thirty years ago.

One of the first key areas that was missed when the Moral Majority's platform was being built was to get our kids out of the left's schools. Think about it. If the Moral Majority had the Biblical fortitude and the foresight to have made this one of their main rallying points, perhaps millions of Christian parents would have responded by pulling their kids out. Quite likely, the result would be millions more conservative adults with moral and political clarity, people who certainly would not have been bamboozled to vote this current administration in. If you disagree, look at the results of 20 years of research with over 60,000 kids from church-going conservative families who attended public schools. The hard evidence shows that the worldview of these young people has been radically altered over the years to think like secular-humanists/Marxists-socialists.

When we look at the "success" of many conservative political lobbying groups, it has been one step forward and two steps back. Everyday we are flooded with their email blasts sounding the alarm to the ploys of our newly elected radical left government. Yes, these groups need our phone calls, emails, letters or dollars, but why we are stuck in the defensive mode? We are in this reactionary rut because we have nearly lost our offensive edge. Our offense in this battle should not only be our current leaders, but also pastors, parents and those leaders of tomorrow. Unfortunately, since millions of parents have allowed their children's worldview to be radically altered these past few decades by sending them to public schools, there are now very little new recruits to reinforce our defense and hardly any new talent for our offense. It is clear by our failures that we have been trusting not in God but in man for our solutions. We have failed to obey our Lord when looking for political, economical, and material answers to our problems. His way has never nor will ever fail.

In Psalm 20:7 King David writes, "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God." The great Bible scholar Matthew Henry makes the point that in order to truly trust God we need to show "...a believing obedient trust in God".. Trusting means obeying God, even when it comes to making hard choices.

Let us show the fortitude of our founding fathers, patriots and saints that have gone before us and take the first step in trusting and obeying God by pulling our kids out of the left's schools. It is time we stop running the wrong way and stop looking for wrong solutions in wrong places? The left doesn't need us to score any more points for them.