One day after being sworn in as president and vice president, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance attended a prayer service at one of the most iconic churches in the country, Washington, D.C.’s massive National Cathedral. There they found themselves being personally insulted and vilified from the pulpit by Episcopal Bishop Marianne Budde.

According to the preacher, now that Trump is again in the White House, “gay, lesbian and transgender children … fear for their lives.” Same thing with illegal aliens, who according to Budde do most of the real work in this country: They “pick our crops, and clean our office buildings,” they “labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants,” and “wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals.” So what if they aren’t “citizens or have the proper documentation,” declared Budde. Don’t deport them, she pleaded.

Trump and Vance pretty much maintained their composure, but could clearly be seen rolling their eyes. (Trump later referred to Budde on Truth Social as a “so-called Bishop” and “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.”)

“Woke” Christianity is increasingly widespread in America. In Texas, an openly transgender pastor proclaimed “God is transgender!” while another, claiming to be a Lutheran “trans” minister, recently told CBS News, “It’s hard to relate [the Bible] to modern-day times because it wasn’t written for 2024. It was written for then.” Uh huh.

Meanwhile, in Maryland, ordained Christian ministers recently have been publicly burning incense, performing religious rituals and praying so as to officially “bless” a local abortion clinic for all its hard work killing preborn babies.

On and on it goes. Something increasingly weird has been going on with the Christian church in America for the last couple of generations, but it’s on full display now.

Fortunately, America’s 224 million Christians – that’s more than in any other nation in the world – clearly were responsible for Trump’s election victory. Yet, millions of other nominal Christians voted for Kamala Harris, even though she was one of the most openly Marxist, anti-Christian and frankly idiotic presidential candidates in the nation’s history. Remember, the final popular vote tally was 77,301,997 votes for Donald Trump versus 75,017,626 votes for Kamala Harris. Statistically that means tens of millions of “Christians” voted for the candidate Elon Musk correctly pegged as “quite literally a communist.”

On top of all that, another estimated 32 million Christians couldn’t even be bothered to vote at all! What’s up with that?

What’s up, of course, is that despite Trump’s stunning re-election victory, America remains engaged in what amounts to an ongoing civilizational war. A war not merely political in nature, but cultural, ideological, psychological and ultimately spiritual – a long-term struggle between forces of decency, morality and sanity on one side and astonishing deception and evil on the other. And logically, one of evil’s key targets would have to be the Christian church.

Consider where we are: If the overwhelming majority of Americans really are Bible-believing followers of Jesus (fully two out of every three Americans today, 68%, identify as Christians), how then can it be legal in this de facto Christian nation to amputate the breasts and sexual organs of literally thousands of confused children who are being encouraged, from many directions, to believe they’re “trapped in the wrong body”? How can it be legal to butcher and rip limb from limb thousands of beautiful, sacred, fully formed, pain-feeling human babies only weeks before they would have been born? How can “After School Satan Clubs,” sponsored by an explicitly satanic organization, be permitted within public schools across the land to recruit America’s children? How can the nation’s toddlers be subjected to “drag queen story hour” events at public libraries, during which these precious little ones are required to sit at the feet of demonically possessed men dressed as women – and sometimes dressed as demons – who seduce and corrupt these innocents by regaling them with exciting tales of heroic homosexual and transgender youths?

While Christians are winning a few crucial battles – most critically, the life-or-death re-election of Donald Trump – they have been losing most others. The harsh truth is, many Christians are either entirely absent from the battlefield, or worse, have sided with the enemy.

In her recent book, “Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda,” journalist Megan Basham documents how many of today’s churches – both leaders and congregations – have been seduced and bought off by leftist forces in the ongoing battle over America’s future. Chapter by chapter, Basham reveals how leftwing nonprofits pretending to carry the Christian torch have persuaded many evangelicals to embrace a radical climate change agenda under the seductive banner of “Creation Care,” to support suicidal illegal immigration policies by repackaging and gift-wrapping them with Bible verses as “Welcoming the Stranger,” to champion Marxist critical race theory by vowing to “decolonize discipleship from whiteness.” Even to adopt the radical and blatantly unbiblical LGBTQ agenda under the pretext of “challenging the promotion of narrow or hateful interpretations of religious doctrine.” And so on – essentially conning Christians into embracing every major leftwing ideological and moral attack on Western civilization and Christianity itself.

This seduction of the church, however, is not a new phenomenon. Far from it.

Four decades ago, shortly before he died, theologian and author Francis Schaeffer, widely regarded as one of the most influential evangelical thinkers of the 20th century, published a book with the spine-straightening title, “The Great Evangelical Disaster.” In it, he reflected on the culture wars raging across America – and why Christians were so absent from the struggle.

“Most of the evangelical world has not been active in the battle,” Schaeffer lamented, “or even been able to see that we are in a battle. And when it comes to the issues of the day, the evangelical world most often has said nothing; or worse, has said nothing different from what the world would say.”

Concluded Schaeffer: “Here is the great evangelical disaster – the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth.”

And remember, Schaeffer was writing about evangelicals, who generally are more conservative, as opposed to so-called “mainline” Protestants who tend to be more liberal-left.

Regarding the latter, this writer explored some of the flat-out Marxist influences on mainline denominations in “The Marketing of Evil”:

“Many churchgoing Christians scratch their heads and wonder why America’s mainline denominations so frequently seem to support leftist organizations. It’s because many of these mainline churches, at least at the leadership level, have virtually become leftist organizations! Front and center is the notoriously radical umbrella group, the National Council of Churches, which represents three dozen denominations, including the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

“How can an organization supposedly championing the interests of tens of millions of Bible-believing Christians be so passionately, obviously – indeed, almost comically – supportive of hardcore leftist causes? Writer Jacob Laksin explains in ‘The Church of the Latter-Day Leftists’:

Founded in 1950, the New York City-based NCC has, for more than half a century, remained faithful to the legacy of its forerunner, the Communist front-group known as the Federal Council of Churches. At one time an unabashed apostle of the Communist cause, the NCC has today recast itself as a leading representative of the so-called religious Left.

Adhering to what it has described as “liberation theology” – that is, Marxist ideology disguised as Christianity – the NCC lays claim to a membership of 36 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox Christian denominations, and some 50 million members in over 140,000 congregations.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the NCC has soft-pedaled its radical message, dressing up its demands for global collectivization and its rejection of democratic capitalism in the garb of religious teachings. Yet the organization’s history suggests that it was – and remains – a devout backer of a gallery of socialist governments.

So egregious has been the faint-heartedness and “accommodation” documented by these and other authors that Eric Metaxas’ recent bestseller “Letter to the American Church” likens the Christian church in today’s America with that of 1930s Germany when Hitler’s Third Reich was rising. With the exception of a relatively few courageous souls like Lutheran theologian Deitrich Bonhoeffer (hanged by the Nazis at age 39 for his involvement in the “20 July Plot” to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime), most German church leaders did and said little or nothing about the rise of Nazism. Eventually the overwhelming evil – from the death camps and crematoria to Hitler’s military invasions of surrounding nations – became far too massive for them to effectively oppose.

Yet Metaxas says the American church of today is eerily reminiscent of most churches and pastors in Germany during Hitler’s steady rise to total power and the unspeakable evil that resulted from their failure to stand for truth.

What’s really going on?

Those on the “far left” – a euphemism for straight-up Marxists – have long been obsessed with subverting and radically transforming Christianity, not merely because they are at war with pretty much everything the God of the Bible actually demands, from biblical sexual morality to the rest of His commandments. But also because, politically, they simply must undermine and redefine Christians’ biblical value system as a means of redirecting their huge voting influence, or else the left will lose every election.

If claiming the left is “at war” with the commandments of God sounds wrong or over-stated, consider that the Democratic Party’s top priorities today are: unrestricted abortion (“Thou shalt not kill”), total sexual freedom (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”), redistributing wealth (“Thou shalt not steal”), lying nonstop about their opponents (“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”) and forever plotting new ways to appropriate other people’s wealth, freedom and success (“Thou shalt not covet”). Winston Churchill encapsulated all this by describing socialism as “the gospel of envy.”

It should be clear, then, that Donald Trump was absolutely right when he claimed to supporters throughout the campaign season, “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you – and I’m just standing in their way.”

Truly, the real enemy of the far left is Christian America.

And that’s tragic, because the Christian religion has been hands-down the most powerful, consequential and benevolent force in human history – not only for the salvation of souls, but for the well-being of entire societies. America was founded almost entirely by serious Christians – indeed, the original settlers came to these shores for the very purpose of being able to practice their Christian faith without being persecuted for it. The United States of America’s eventual system of government and founding documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, were based implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) on biblical principles. Indeed, the entire Western concept of freedom, dignity, equality and “God-given individual rights” is rooted entirely in the conviction that man, as affirmed in the Book of Genesis, is created “in the image of God.”

Yet today, America’s huge Christian population finds itself at a historic crossroads. Consider Billy Graham’s assessment:

As in the last days of Rome, Christianity to many people today has faded into mere form, lost its relevance to life and holds no central allegiance in our lives. When a nation loses its faith, it loses its character. When it loses its character, it loses its purpose for living. And when it loses its purpose for living, it loses its will to survive.
I am convinced that America stands at the crossroads of her national destiny. One road leads to destruction, and the other leads to prosperity and security. Most are going down the broad road that leads to destruction. We are going the way of Rome rather than the way of the cross.
Many will blame the Republicans or the Democrats. But it is the American people as individuals that should take the blame. We backslide as individuals before we begin to decay as a nation.

Some so-called Christian believers in America today are obviously fake – “mere form” as Billy Graham put it – with the label “Christian” just serving as the necessary social garb they must wear to get what they want. An obvious example: Most American politicians, even the most corrupt or deranged, claim to be serious Christians, from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As president, Joe Biden supported abortion up to the very moment of birth – de facto infanticide – yet always claimed to be a “devout Catholic.”

But here’s the rub. Even for the millions of sincere Christian believers who make up most of the American population, it turns out – at least during today’s ongoing culture war playing out on a thousand different battlefields – that attending church and listening to sermons and praying and singing hymns and fellowshipping and living a moral personal life (and perhaps even evangelizing) is not enough. That’s likely what all the good church folk did in 1930s Germany. The problem is that, with few exceptions, their church leaders insisted they and their flock “stay in their lane” (to use today’s vernacular) and preach the Gospel, and not “pollute” themselves with politics and other “worldly” affairs. After all, they affirmed to each other, they’re citizens of Heaven, not of this transient, broken world. We’re only here for a short time. Don’t get involved in the evils that play out in this life; instead focus on the eternal world to come.

And that’s how they got Hitler.

Yet, because of the love of a great and truly merciful God, America was spared this past November from being destroyed – yes, destroyed – by what would have been the most perverse and dangerous government in this nation’s history.

So of course, all clear-headed and right-thinking Americans – including the many millions of Christians who helped elect Trump – are today rejoicing that those in the grip of powerful deception (or who are out-and-out sociopaths) are no longer in charge of the executive branch of the U.S. government. And yet, such people are still in charge of the “Deep State,” and America’s school system from pre-K to post-grad, and America’s predatory popular culture, and most of the major news media, and most of Big Tech and social media, and the leftwing nonprofits and their billionaire financiers, and every other bastion of Marxist madness that remains dedicated – as Barack Obama put it – to “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

All of which is just to say that genuine Christians cannot kick back and “zone out” now that Trump is president and assume he’ll fix everything. That’s not going to happen without our help.

Eric Metaxas captures the post-election zeitgeist very well in this comment:

It’s not hyperbole to say that we are in a new world. … Although we are still facing all kinds of wickedness, we now have the opportunity to fight. President Trump has hit the ground running. He understands the time is short and his game face is ON.

In 1776, Thomas Paine said: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

Apart from God, this is Utopianist nonsense. But with God, it is genuinely possible. We are at a strikingly similar moment again. We can have genuine liberty and can govern ourselves.

Let’s be crystal clear: It is ONLY by God’s grace that we are here. Trump should be dead and America should be dead. But the Lord has spared him and America – for God’s purposes in history. He has given us the outrageous gift of this opportunity to do the infinity of things necessary to restore this nation to its foundations. Shall we do it? We must. It is why God has spared us. For such a time as this.

Now, I think we should all celebrate this staggering gift of God, and then we must gird our loins and pray for the Lord’s guidance in doing what He has called us to do in the weeks and months and years ahead!