I need to offer a full apology to white evangelicals. I was wrong. You were right.
I make no excuses and offer no explanations or caveats. I wish I would have listened to you and taken your warnings seriously.
The other day, I saw an image of a Christian pastor falling backward as masked, armed soldiers pepper sprayed and shot him in the head with nonlethal bullets on the streets of Chicago. His crime was simply being present in and among the least of these by peacefully protesting government violence against immigrants.
Rick Pidcock
This use of force by the government against Christians is exactly what you’ve warned us about for years.
For decades, you told us the U.S. government would one day criticize Christian sermons. And you were right. After Bishop Marian Budde preached a sermon about mercy, the House of Representatives drafted a resolution “condemning its distorted message.” Even the president himself said Bishop Budde was “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.”
I’d never seen a government come after pastors like that. So it didn’t seem possible. But it happened.
We laughed when you claimed the U.S. government would one day arrest Christians during prayer. But again, you were right. When William Barber was praying for the poor while wearing a “Jesus was a poor man” clerical stole in the Capitol Rotunda, the police interrupted and arrested him.
“This use of force by the government against Christians is exactly what you’ve warned us about for years.”
When we were kids, you made movies for us to watch about Christian heroes who went into dangerous places on the earth to rescue, feed or heal the least of these, while facing threats from the government. We thought your movies were cheesy and over the top. Surely, nobody would want to shut down Christians who were feeding the hungry or treating the sick. But that’s exactly what happened when the U.S. government shut down USAID, causing Christian humanitarian work to implode and leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths with millions more on the way.
You were right when you said the federal government would one day police our words, telling us what we could and could not say about such topics as race and ethnicity or gender and sexuality. I wish I would have listened to you because now the U.S. government has created a list of 350 words that must be erased from government websites and documents.
They’re also banning books that don’t align with their views either. And they’re accusing those who don’t agree with them on issues related to gender and sexuality of being the ones causing violence.
I’ll never forget watching those rapture videos in my Baptist high school chapel or reading the Left Behind books about the government starting a one-world religion. For a while, it scared me. But over time, I started meeting Democrats in real life who didn’t seem at all interested in starting a one-world religion. They’d never even thought of such an idea.
So eventually, I stopped believing in it. But I never should have stopped because now we have the Pentagon hosting worship services and telling the whole nation we need to bend the knee to their God. They’ve even gone so far as to claim their God is training the military as ambassadors of this one-world religion. I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to your warnings.
Looking back in hindsight, I remember a music video coming out in 1994 for the Ray Boltz song, “I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb.” It opened with a child asking his dad if the world always had been this way. Then the dad told him about the early church and said the government back then “tortured them and killed them and they even left their bodies to rot as an example to other people.”
I had no idea back then that a man named Charlie Kirk would one day promote Coca-Cola-sponsored public executions of people, including of the president’s political opponents.
The dad in the music video told his son about the Christians who were arrested, “Many of them had children just like you that they had to leave behind.” The song lyrics talked about Christians being “brought before a tyrant’s throne.” It seemed unrealistic because we lived in a democracy and didn’t have kings. The only ones who really talked about kings were us white evangelicals because we said Jesus was a king and we’d one day rule and reign over the whole earth with him.
But that seemed so distant because we were the victims, right?
At one point in the music video, when the Christians are praying in their home, soldiers burst in with guns and drag them out. At the end of the video, the dad is crying as the soldiers take him out of his son’s arms. And with tears streaming down the kid’s face, he watches his dad being taken away, likely never to see him again.
It all seemed so over the top. Who would think of story lines like this?
But now it’s all coming true. The people who took over our government thought of storylines like this.
“The people who took over our government thought of storylines like this.”
Now we’re seeing the government taking parents away from their kids during church services or in school car lines. In fact, the president of the United States purposefully removed protections against arrests at churches.
The government is now using Black Hawk helicopters at night to drop federal agents onto apartment building roofs. They’ve barged through doors and taken terrified naked children into the streets and zip-tied them there at 3 a.m.
Neighbors are being asked to turn in their neighbors. Family and friends are being silent bystanders.
Then people are being taken away and placed in camps surrounded by alligators and pythons.
So white evangelicals, I have to admit you were right. All these violent things you imagined and warned the government would one day do are coming true.
I was so foolish to have disbelieved you. I offer no excuses for my failure to listen. If you have it in your heart to forgive me, please forgive me. But whether you can find it in your heart to forgive me or not, please let me know where we can begin working to stop the government from hurting more of us and to repair what’s gone wrong.
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.