Marginalised?

James Dobson warns that Christians will not be ignored by the Republican Party.

We’ve never been that marginalized in our culture and government — and won’t be anytime soon, the efforts and epithets of big media notwithstanding.

Unfortunately, he is wrong. Unless the there is dramatic change in the American church, it will become more and more marginalised.

The last election proved one thing. The Christian vote is no longer united or large enough to swing an election. Politicians watch the way the wind is blowing. Those who watched the last election carefully realise that while Sarah Palin won additional votes for the Republican Party, she lost more votes than she brought in. The Republican Party will never trust its future to a hard-core Christian again. A seriously evangelical Christian candidate is no longer electable in the United States.

Conservatives Christians will continue to rant against the lying liberals, but the reality is that more and more Americans are becoming liberal, just as the number of conservative Christians is declining.

Those who think that Christians will continue to hold sway in the political sphere are living in the past. The reality is that the Christian influence on America culture is declining fast.

This has already happened in my country, only a couple of decades earlier. When I was young, a majority of Members of Parliament from both political parties were Christians. The Prime Minister carried a copy of the Ten Commandments in his brief case. When the church spoke on political issues, the politicians took notice.
Over the last few decades, the percentage of Christians in our nation has declined dramatically, partly under the influence of secular media and education. Now a Christian in Parliament is a rarity.

For a long time the Church continued to strut and speak as if it was an important voice, just as James Dobson is speaking now. However, the politicians soon realised that strutting is not the same as substance and now the church is mostly ignored.

The future is here. The American church is heading rapidly down the same path. It is just a few years behind. Unless things change dramatically soon, the church will become marginalised.

The good news is that God will not be marginalised, but that is a different thing.