So why did I immediately follow the author's announcement with the video of another pastor? Well, think about it! God is speaking to many in these days of turmoil and confusion. Most of us know that MAGA/Donald Trump is using religion as a tool...with some of those who claim to be Christians, accepting him as if he actually was...a...christian... If he had at some point during the past 8 years showed some sign on actually becoming a follower of Jesus, don't you think we would already know that? But, even as questions were specifically asked, he dodges the question because he can't answer anything about the Bible... Like, a simple question: What is your favorite scripture... No, he couldn't say, even the shortest one ever written--"Jesus Wept." Me, I like singing the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23, but my two favorites are: "Be Still and Know that I am God." and "I will lift up my eyes unto the hills from which cometh my help. My help cometh in the name of the Lord."
So why this particular video by Pastor Tim? Because he is talking about discernment as a gift of the Spirit. When he mentioned smell, I immediately remembered two different times and places where the smell was so overpowering that I had to walk out... So, with this new contact, I want to explore my gifts to verify that I am NOT using God in any way; but to share His words as given to me...
But let's go on to the new book I am reading... The title is clear. I immediately wanted to read it. What I found was the book reading as if we were talking to a pastor about our concerns, our worries, about what has happened... So far, as I told him in a recent email, I've been highlighting most of the book--it is thankfully confirming what I have come to know... God is speaking to many to let them know, to confirm that what is happening is NOT of God...
One final note: I'll be spending quite a lot of time on this book. The author has recently moved but he has given me authority to use his words as I find important to share and we will be doing an interview sometime in the future, format undecided at this time.
PROLOGUE
A Confrontation in Church
It was a typical Sunday morning. I wrapped up my sermon and joined the worship band to lead the congregation in a final song. When we finished I dismissed the people with a blessing, then I turned my back to the pews to set my bass guitar on its stand. When I turned around a few seconds later I jumped, startled. A man from the congregation had bounded onto the platform and stood mere inches from me. I’m an introvert even by Minnesota standards, and I covet my personal space. He was a large, athletic guy who’d recently started attending the church, and he towered over me as he held out his hand. I took it and said, “Good morning!” But he wasn’t in a “good morning” sort of mood. He gripped my hand tightly and emphasized each word.
“Pastor,” he said, “You. Need. To shape. Up.”
“Oh?” This is my go-to response when a person says something strange or out of character. I’ve found that a simple “Oh?” invites them to rephrase and take another run at it. But he squeezed my hand harder and pulled me closer to himself, his eyes boring into me. “You need to start preaching the truth. You need to expose what’s going on in this country — no more excuses — no more of this watered-down stuff.” He’d said things like this before, insisting I speak out about this or that cultural or political issue roiling the country. But this felt different. This felt like intimidation, plain and simple. I don’t remember all his words, but I remember his anger. He glared down at me as he spoke and held my hand hostage until he’d had his say.
He ended with something like, “I’m giving you one more chance. You need to start telling the truth. I’ll be watching what you say.” He released my hand, and I felt the blood surge into my fingers as they pulsed back to life. He walked away. I stood silently for a moment — puzzled — trying to make sense of what had just happened. This was December 2015, a few months before I retired from pastoral ministry. Over a dozen Republican candidates were gearing up for the primaries that would eventually make Donald Trump the GOP nominee for the 2016 presidential election. But I knew little about that. I couldn’t have picked most of those candidates out of a lineup. And that’s what bothered this fellow. He wanted me to care as deeply as he did about the hot-button cultural issues these candidates were hyping as they tried to position themselves within that lineup. I couldn’t have known, back then, just how appropriate the “picking out of a line-up” metaphor would become to describe the eventual winner.
From Conservative Activist to Apolitical Pastor
As a pastor I never talked about politics in church, and I barely followed the news. It’s not that I didn’t care. Far from it. It’s because I used to care too much. Before I entered pastoral ministry, I’d been quite active in the pro-life movement. I spoke in churches and public schools on behalf of the unborn, and I volunteered to help elect pro-life candidates. In those years, I saw the Republican party as an ally in fighting for the sanctity of human life. And coming from a conservative Republican family, the marriage between my pro-life convictions and the GOP felt like a natural fit.
I grew up in rural Minnesota. My parents were public school teachers, farmers, and devout Catholics. In Minnesota in the 1970s, those three identities usually meant a person would vote for the Democrats. But my parents had their own ideas. They followed their convictions to the Republican party, and I followed along. I don’t want to oversell my conservative leanings as a lad. After all, I was reading Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in elementary school, not William F. Buckley. But I did have a poster of Richard Nixon on my wall in second grade, and I did wish they’d all just leave him alone about the Watergate stuff. But the abortion issue, far more than my parents’ Republican leanings, drove my early political beliefs.
I believed at a young age that unborn babies deserved the protection of law. I saw it as an issue of justice and basic human rights long before I could have expressed it in those terms. I studied the issue in more depth during my high school years. While other kids did normal things, such as their assigned homework, I worked on developing a “consistent human life ethic” that could guide my future political involvement. And I landed on some positions regarding the sanctity of human life back then that I still hold to this day. While I’m no longer convinced the realm of law and politics will solve our divisions regarding abortion, I still believe the unborn child is a human being. I still want desperately to do my part to foster a culture of respect for human life in our nation. I also developed some other pro-life views in high school that I still hold to this day. For instance, I still oppose capital punishment — not because I think it’s unwarranted in some cases or unbiblical, but because I’m skeptical that our system of justice can be trusted to enforce it in a fair manner. And I’ve always favored, from my earliest memory, some common-sense form of what we used to call “gun control.” I grew up in an extended family of sportsmen and NRA members. I had unfettered access to a small arsenal of hunting rifles, shotguns, and pistols from the time I was old enough to enroll in a gun safety class. And I still think it’s insane that our political system can’t find a way to protect the ownership of those sorts of weapons, while banning the ones that enable an untrained teenager to hold dozens of police officers at bay.
As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, those three issues don’t sit well together in the platforms of either of our major political parties in America. So I found it difficult, from the start, to align my consistent pro-life ethic with support for one political party over the other. Even back then, they were drawing the battle lines in ways that made little sense from my perspective. In recent years I’ve come to see that I ignored, or explained away, whole sets of additional issues that I would now place under the banner of “pro-life.” But in 1984 the anti-abortion issue carried the most weight in my thinking, so I cast my first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan, who spoke directly to that concern. And because I agreed with him on the sanctity of life I found it easier to buy the rest of the package. And by casting that first vote and participating in Reagan’s landslide victory over Minnesota’s own Walter Mondale, I solidified my personal attachment to the GOP.
Over the next several years I married Jane, my high school girlfriend, started a family, and grew deeper in my faith. And my pro-life convictions grew, as well. But even though I was raised as a Catholic, I didn’t link my views on the sanctity of life as tightly to my faith as one might imagine. In fact I remember arguing once with some friends who said my pro-life convictions were simply a way of pushing my faith onto others. I insisted that my religious beliefs had nothing to do with my concern for human life. And whether that was entirely true or not, I believed it when I said it. I didn’t start linking my pro-life sensibilities to my faith in a conscious way until January 1989, when I attended a service at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis on pro-life Sunday.
Pastor John Piper delivered the best biblical defense that day that I’d heard for the sanctity of human life. I started attending his church because that message resonated with me, and I eventually joined the church and began to identify as an evangelical. But I don’t blame my involvement at that church for the narrow and strident political person I became during the next few years. In fact I think the preaching I heard at Bethlehem kept me from going off the rails, and it provided a framework for the much healthier approach I developed later on. I think my time at Bethlehem prepared me, years in advance, to say “no” to Donald Trump when he arrived on the scene.
I respected the fact that Pastor Piper cared deeply about the sanctity of life, and he spoke about it and took personal actions to lift that value in the world. But he modeled a careful approach to preaching that kept the ultimate focus on God and God’s kingdom. I took his preaching as a warning against the idolatry of placing our hope in some ideal “Christian” kingdom on this earth. He called us to live and to speak prophetically within the culture, but not so we could seize the levers of earthly power. He challenged us to live sacrificially — to faithfully display the values of another kingdom.
I bring this up because I want people to know this sort of teaching can be done, and done well. My six years at Bethlehem gave me a model for how believers can work passionately for justice in this world without placing our hope in building an earthly kingdom through political means. But that’s not to say I was the best listener in those years. Despite the warnings I’d heard about attaching too much hope to my political involvement, I still managed to get myself deeply entrenched in what I now see as a right-wing echo chamber. During a stint as a courier driver I got in the habit of listening to people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on the radio. And I started getting my written news from some of the early online message boards. These sites fed me article after article from a conservative perspective, and I read nothing to counter those arguments. So by the time I entered pastoral ministry I’d become deeply committed to the conservative movement and emotionally invested in the success of the Republican party. I was giving huge amounts of emotional and intellectual energy to people who made their living stirring up my anger for profit.
I’m ashamed to admit how much of that scene I bought into. But by God’s grace, when I became a pastor I did recognize, early on, that I had to lay down my political involvement. It’s not that I immediately saw how distorted my thinking had become. I simply realized I couldn’t serve two masters. If I brought my partisanship to the pulpit it would endanger my call to serve the flock that Jesus had entrusted to my care. The most serious alarms went off in my spirit when I found that my political views were affecting how I saw the people in my congregation. I knew this couldn’t be right. It simply had to be wrong to find myself judging the people I’d been called to serve, simply because they came to different conclusions about politics.
So I made a conscious choice to put my political views aside. That proved to be more difficult than I thought, though. Given the deep partisan hole I’d dug for myself, I found the only way to climb out was to stop following politics altogether. So I entered what became a nearly twenty-year, self-imposed exile from the daily news cycle. And that two-decade fast from politics worked wonders in my life. It detoxified my soul from the poisons I’d been taking in for so long. By the time I retired from ministry in 2016 I’d spent years focusing on the kingdom of God without the added layer of distortions I’d been getting from conservative media.
So it’s no surprise that when I started paying attention to politics again, I took a hard pass on Donald Trump. But other than Trump, I still voted a straight Republican ticket in 2016 — back in the before times[1]. I was only starting to dip my toes back into politics and I didn’t realize how the pro-life movement was being manipulated to keep people like myself on a team that no longer suited us. So I voted third party for president that year, rather than voting for the pro-choice candidate, Hillary Clinton. I assumed most Christians agreed with me about Trump. I was naïve, back then. That was 2016 — the last year of the before times — the year when everything changed for so many of us. In 2016 my naivete died. I’d kept it alive for fifty years — a good run by anyone’s standards. It died hard — a long, drawn-out, painful awakening. But I do still have hope — and hope is far more useful than naivete. I’ve been promised that hope doesn’t disappoint.
Some of you may realize that the background of Patrick Kahnke is similar to mine. Not in content exactly but my background was in a small Christian Church where I was active all my life and I worked at the university for 37 years. My political involvement was minimal, if almost non-existent until hearing the Donald Trump tape about grabbing women... As Kahnke said, it was a painful awakening. Perhaps if I had paid a little more attention to... no, I'm not going there... My life was in the church and then in working in an honorable profession... I had welcomed Christ into my life at age 13 and have never lost contact, even if I was the one turning away from His guidance... But let's go on to the next part; I think it is an important statement of fact...
A Caution About the Lesser of Two Evils
Before I go further, I have to say something I’ll repeat and expand on later in the book. Please resist the urge throughout this book to reflexively go to the lesser of two evils argument, or to focus on the deficiencies of the Democratic candidate. The only reason Donald Trump is the Republican nominee again this year is because conservative Christians overwhelmingly supported him — in the primaries. Christians tell me every day that they have no choice but to vote for Trump. “You don’t expect me to vote for the Democrat, do you?” All I can say is, poll after poll shows that conservative Christians preferred Donald Trump over every other candidate — in the primaries.
We’ve got more going on here than the lesser of two evils. If we truly don’t want candidates like Trump to represent us we have to be willing to do two things. The first is to start caring about the primary elections as much as the extremists do. And second, if they do give us an extremist candidate, we must vote against that candidate in the general election. Otherwise we perpetuate a system that only feeds more extremism. I’ve walked the talk on this issue. I don’t care for Nikki Haley — I think she’s one of the more cynical politicians in the nation, as evidenced by her entirely predictable endorsement of Donald Trump in the end. Apparently she draws the line somewhere south of being repeatedly called “Birdbrain” and hearing her husband’s military service mocked by a man who turned in a doctor’s note about bone spurs to avoid Vietnam. Even so, she’s not Donald Trump. So I walked down to my primary polling station in St. Paul this spring, asked for a Republican ballot (which, in St. Paul, is a bit like ringing a bell in front of myself and crying “Leper! Leper!”) and I voted for Nikki Haley.
I’m not a purist — I’m not an idealogue — I’m willing to vote for imperfect candidates. But Donald Trump is not a merely “imperfect” candidate. He poses a serious threat to the nation and to the Christians who fall for his appeals. Voting for Trump is exponentially more corrosive to our conscience than voting for any other candidate on the ballot.
Trump is not different by degree from the rest of the imperfect candidates we choose between, every time we vote. He’s different in kind. That’s why his superfans love him. Heaven help us if we let Donald Trump’s superfans set the direction for Christians in America.
Why Christians Must Oppose Donald Trump
The issues that drove my parishioner to confront me aren’t new. Donald Trump didn’t invent them. Trump has used those issues to capture the support of believers. He’s learned that as long as he gives us what we want on some cultural issues, we’ll work hard to keep him in power — no matter how depraved and abusive his tactics might be.
Followers of Jesus aren’t designed for such twisted arrangements. A vote for Donald Trump is not morally neutral. It comes at a devastating cost to our inner person. For many followers of Jesus their first vote for Trump pricked against their conscience. I know this because they’ve told me. Some even felt a little dirty, like they were slipping behind the curtain into a peep show rather than a voting booth. It felt a bit humiliating, but they decided that voting against their beliefs on some cultural issues would have felt worse. Many of them watched Trump’s actions as president, though, and vowed not to make the same choice in 2020. And some followed through on that vow.
But many others listened to their friends and spiritual leaders who rationalized Trump’s corruption and lies, and they stayed on the team. And by the second time they voted for him they could almost convince themselves that, just maybe, in some three-dimensional chess version of kingdom politics, all their misgivings and compromises might someday add up to having served God by voting for Trump.
My fear for many Christians in America this year is that the third time will be the point that confirms their trajectory. I don’t know how followers of Jesus come back from voting for Trump a third time, after everything we’ve seen. I’m not talking about anyone’s salvation — I’m talking about the serious damage it does to our conscience to suppress what we know to be true. Donald Trump demands allegiance to a false version of reality. Jesus demands that we walk in truth — He is the Truth.
That dual allegiance can’t coexist in a believer unless we do some serious, destructive work to divide our own mind. It's a soul-destroying practice, dividing our mind, but I get why we do it. I understand the problem — and I think we can fix it, together. The problem is that we’re operating out of a false view of the kingdom of God and a false understanding of our mission in this world. Our minds are divided because we’re trying to make sense of a broken, faithless theology. We’re doing our best to live in a way we’ve been taught, but we didn’t learn that way from Jesus.
Some wealthy and powerful political and religious leaders have gotten their wealth and power by keeping us confused about these things. As long as we remain confused about our calling in this world, Christians will continue to empower people like Donald Trump. And that’s a problem.
The world knows that followers of Jesus are Donald Trump’s most important voting bloc. When we vote for him we confirm what the world believes about us — and more importantly, what they believe about our faith.
We prove the tight association between Christians and a demagogue who is understandably feared and reviled by a strong majority of our neighbors. Trump claims to speak for us. And when we vote for him we tell the world that he’s right. But does he speak for you?
Can you see why I've highlighted almost everything I've read thus far? For me, this is God's giving me, personally, a confirmation that everything I've believe was correct... He's provided this book that says it is alright to question, even when my own family said I was wrong... He's confirmed that he too questions how this could have happened, while not (yet?) giving us an answer... But one thing I do know, this man is not only a Christian--he's a follower of Jesus! And He believes what Jesus died for... and it didn't include bringing religion into politics for power... I know that there are others out there who are in the same situation, not knowing whether to speak out...Read this book, I already know it will help and respond to your concerns.
God Bless
Gabby
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