Apathy + Complacency = Disaster

Gene Sweeney from Sarasota, Florida came up with this simple A+C=D formula that explains what is happening in America.

Religious apathy combined with political complacency leads to social disaster.

Today too many citizens refuse to discuss politics and religion, when these two topics are the most important to society itself. I hear Christians say, “We don’t discuss politics here in the church!” I see family members, community and political leaders and the media refusing to openly discuss religion and politics for fear of being labeled.

Religion and politics were the staples of life in colonial America. It was this discussion about religion, the free exercise thereof, and politics, freedom from King George III, that led to the American Revolution. As President John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

It was religion, freedom from slavery, and politics, the Emancipation Proclamation, which led to the American Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln in a speech at Peoria, Illinois in 1854 said, “Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a ‘sacred right of self-government.’ These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.”

Religion and politics are inextricably linked.

You cannot have one without the other. Religious apathy plus political complacency leads to cultural suicide. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the separation of church and state, it effectively took God out of the public square and public schools. Since that ruling darkness, Satan, has replaced the void and he is thriving.

Take any issue facing the West in general and America in particular:

1. The threat of Islam and the Islamic State – politics and religion.
2. The Iran nuclear deal – politics and religion.
3. Gay marriage – politics and religion.
4. Government intrusion on individual freedoms – religious liberty and politics.
5. The Planned Parenthood/Industrial complex profiteering from aborted baby parts – religion and politics.
6. Obamacare – religion and politics.
7. September 11, 2001 – religion and politics.
8. The anti-Christian and anti-Semitism across the West and in the Middle East – religion and politics.
9. And on, and on and on.

Ayn Rand wrote, “The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.”

Perhaps the greatest uncontested absurdity is that politics and religion don’t mix.

---