HAVE “THE TRUEST FRIENDS TO LIBERTY” BEEN TRUE?

Samuel Adams, founding father, devout Christian and a deacon in his congregational church, recognized the important role America’s preachers would always play in maintaining our existence as a free people. He said, “He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man.”

No one in this country has a greater responsibility to promote its virtue than pastors and preachers. No one has a greater responsibility to use his power and influence to protect our political offices from the intrusion into them by people who are without wisdom or virtue. From the earliest days of our Republic, most Americans understood this, and no one understood it better than America’s pastors. Today, though not impossible, it’s hard to find many people, even many pastors who understand this.

The reason pastors don’t understand or apply themselves as they should to the promotion of virtue, even where politics is concerned, and the reason people no longer expect this of pastors as they once did and still should, isn’t because they are more intelligent, biblically informed or spiritually discerning than people like Samuel Adams, the rest of the founders and their contemporaries. Quite the contrary.

There’s a root reason why America has become rotted out by sin, is enshrouded in evil and in a state of freefall. The reason is the state to which the condition and the very concept of the Gospel ministry has descended. I know this sounds like terribly critical and pessimistic thinking. I don’t want to believe it’s so. But there’s no real evidence or good reason for thinking otherwise. The good news and our hope is in the fact that God’s promise in 2 Cor. 7:14 is still in effect and claimable.