Were the evangelicals who stood by Glenn Beck’s side in the Restoring America Rally practicing what Francis Schaeffer called co-belligerency?
Dr. Richard Land, the president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, after the rally said to Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, “That was extraordinary. I’ve never heard a cultural figure of that popularity talking that overtly about his faith. He sounded like Billy Graham.”
My question is, “Can a Mormon sound like the gospel preacher Billy Graham?”
At the rally, Beck said, “America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness.”
Which god are we to turn back to? Should America turn back to Allah or Jesus or the Mormon’s gods who used to be men before they earned deity?
There were many gods represented at the rally among the ecumenical group of 240 ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams.
Francis Schaeffer defined co-belligerncy: “A co-belligerent is a person with whom I do not agree on all sorts of vital issues, but who, for whatever reasons of their own, is on the same side in a fight for some specific issue of public justice” (Francis Schaeffer, Plan for Action: An Action Alternative Handbook for ‘ Whatever Happened to the Human Race?’, Flemming H. Revell, 1980, p.68.).
Co-belligerency is “working at the grass-roots level” in terms of social issues. Does the same apply to co-operating for spiritual issues? The Restoring America Rally was not just a social concern.
Here is how Ross Douthat of the The New York Times appraised the event: “This was a tent revival crossed with a pep rally intertwined with a history lecture married to a U. S. O. telethon – and that was just in the first hour. There was piety – endless piety, as speaker after speaker demanded that Americans rededicate themselves to God.”
Albert Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., expressed deep concerns: “There is something very strange going on here. I don’t understand the disconnect on the part of Christians.”
The apostle Paul warned that we are not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. So which of the two was going on? Co-belligerency or compromise?
