I try not to get into politics here, but it’s hard to avoided in the current political and cultural climate, so sometimes in must be addressed, thus Brandon and Christianity.
Some of you may hear faint echoes of a famous saying by Tertullian in my title, one of the more well-known church fathers (155-220), and a tenacious early apologists for the Christian faith. In the context of fighting the paganism of his day he made the statement, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The connection to my thoughts on this issue to that saying and what he meant in his context would take many blog posts, so you’ll have to trust me. That name, as most know, has come to represent more than a name. What should Christians think about all this, given the impetus behind it is a vulgar phrase directed to the current occupant of the White House, and more importantly, everything he represents? I thought the answer was obvious until I went to church Sunday, and learned that our pastor and elders don’t quite see things the same way I do. I will quote a portion of an insert in the bulletin about “Honoring God and Governing Authorities”:
We submit to human government because human government has been appointed by God (Romans 13:1-7). But our submission to human government is subordinate to our ultimate submission to God himself. The apostolic word: “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) spans the centuries into our times as well. cutting to the contemporary chase, what should a Christian do regarding the current government vaccine mandate being debated in our nation? Let us be clear: Those who would ever cry, “Let’s go Brandon” should stop and fall before the Lord in deep repentance; such words are an attack not just on human government, but upon God who appointed it. But those who slavishly follow human government without weighing the government’s demands by the scriptures must repent as well. Our prayer is that we will be people who take every thought captive to obey Christ, and that we will do so prayerfully, lovingly and patiently.
Thankfully, the leaders of our church realize there can be disagreement about these things, and I could not disagree with this more.
The reason is that we don’t live in the first century when all political power was a one way street where Rome held all the cards, and brutally so. Rather, we live in the 21st century in a radically different context. Like Tertullian, Christian thinkers have interacted with non-Christian thinkers and ideas for almost 2,000 years. What Christians in the first century thought about their relationship to the state is not necessarily what Christians have thought in the 20 centuries since. Specifically, we live in a world where the Christian West developed thinking and systems of government that no longer got their authority from “might makes right.” We also live on the other side of the American Revolution, with legal and constitutional remedies to challenge unjust laws and government actions. None of this can be found in or justified by wooden interpretations of Scripture, including Romans 13.
So how can a challenge like Let’s Go Brandon, crude though it is, be considered “an attack,” and not only on government, but on God? Based on this, the American Revolution was an attack on God. They rightly say government’s demands must be judged by Scripture, but the Bible isn’t a book of political philosophy, and that judgment is not always so simple. When we stand against what we believe is an unjust mandate forcing Americans to take an experimental vaccine or lose their job, we don’t appeal primarily to Scripture, but to the Constitution. This us just one example of the tyranny of the current administration. Another example is something that most Americans don’t know about (because they get their news from biased corporate media), and would swear could never happen in the United States of America.
On January 6 of this year there was supposedly an “insurrection” at the capitol, and the media narrative became Trump and his supporters were trying to take over the government. This narrative is a complete lie, but what most Americans don’t know is that the government has been holding political prisoners for most of the year for purely political reasons. I encourage you to watch these two short interviews, here and here, and if your blood doesn’t boil after watching them, you have no blood. Watching them, and knowing what I know about Jan. 6, not to mention November 3, and everything an illegitimate president has done to destroy this country, I have great sympathy for the sentiment behind Let’s Go Brandon. I praise God I live in a country where such citizens can curse the most powerful man in the country, and not get sent to a gulag, the January 6 prisoners notwithstanding.
If it’s the vulgarity that bothers some Christians, fine, but what it represents is perfectly biblical: resistance to the worst government tyranny in the history of America. Mind you, none of those exclaiming the vulgar version or it’s tamer substitute, has actually committed violence against the government. All the violence is on the political and cultural left, with Antifa and BLM only the most egregious examples. No, patriotic Americans who despise the current administration are showing their resistance in all the legal and peaceful means the Founders of America gave us. Whatever is said, or however it is said, the message is the same: We the people will resist a tyrannical government that wants to control every area of our lives.
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