In this thought-provoking episode, we delve into the complexities of cultural and political identity through the eyes of seasoned commentator Ronald Dart. With incisive reflections on the fluid labels imposed on Christians in politics, Dart draws parallels between the historic moral landscape and today’s cultural decline. Highlighting the flawed premises that many on the religious right base their strategies on, Dart brings clarity to why political victories fail to translate into cultural triumphs. Through examples and prophetic insights, this episode challenges common assumptions while urging a reassessment of spiritual priorities in the modern age.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 02 :
I told you so. Months ago I told my audience that Christians were making a big mistake when they allowed themselves to be characterized as the Christian right. There are those who believe, you know, that Jesus was a conservative. Others believe Jesus was a liberal. Neither one of those groups understand the first thing about Jesus Christ. I warn my audience that getting locked up with one political party, one political bloc, one movement, allows the public to just dismiss the Christians and their agenda. They can say, oh, well, you don’t have to pay any attention to them. They’re just the Christian right. That’s just a bunch of people trying to impose their morals on the rest of us. Paul Weyrich, who is a Christian conservative speaker and writer, wrote in February of 1999 to tell his readers that they had lost the culture war. He said, and I quote, What many of us have been trying to do for many years has been based on a couple of premises. First of all, we have assumed that a majority of Americans basically agrees with our point of view. That has been the premise upon which we have tried to build any number of institutions, and indeed, our whole strategy. It is I who suggested to Jerry Falwell that he call his organization the Moral Majority. This is Paul Weyrich speaking. The second premise has been that if we could just elect enough conservatives, we could get our people in as congressional leaders, and they would fight to implement our agenda. He goes on. In looking at the long history of conservative politics, from the defeat of Robert Taft in 1952 to the nomination of Barry Goldwater to the takeover of the Republican Party in 1994— I think it’s fair to say that conservatives have learned to succeed in politics. That is to say, we got our people elected, but that did not result in the adoption of our agenda. The reason, Breivich continues, is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions. A collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics. Now, I don’t think Weyrich has this quite right. It isn’t so much that politics has failed, because politics just does what politics does, nor is it that the culture has overwhelmed politics. I think it is that at every step of the way, politics is a reflection of the culture. In a democratic society, the government is us. Politics? Well, politics is merely us governing ourselves and perhaps making a botch of the whole thing. But he is right about the moral collapse of our culture. One political commentator asked recently what had happened, he said, since Gary Hart. He said back when Gary Hart was running for president, one affair, one incident, one girl, and he had got run out of the presidential race for that one affair. And it was with a consenting adult, somebody his own age or at least his own generation. Well, his co-host observed, well, the world has changed completely since then. And it sure has. I don’t know if you’re old enough to have noticed it or not, but… A lot of people think that the government and government policy and laws that we pass change the attitudes toward race in this country. I don’t think so. I think it was television entertainment. Martin Luther King was a powerful influence among blacks. But as far as people who did a lot to change the attitude of whites, Archie Bunker did more to change that than Martin Luther King ever did. Face it, every evening, a handful of people in the entertainment industry are teaching morals and values to the next generation. That is where the culture war is being lost. And hey, sin is always more entertaining than righteousness, and it is certainly a lot funnier for a situation comedy. So that’s where the war is being fought. Well, not really. It’s not even being fought. It’s just being lost there. Weyrich continues his letter, and he’s right about this. He says, “…that’s why I am in the process of rethinking what it is that we who still believe in our traditional Western Judeo-Christian culture can and should do under the circumstances.” Please understand, he says, that I am not quarreling with anyone who pursues politics, because it is important to pursue politics, to be involved in government. It is also important to try, as many people have, to retake the cultural institutions that have been captured by the other side. Then he goes on to say, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the United States is becoming an ideological state. The ideology of political correctness, which openly calls for the destruction of our traditional culture, has so gripped the body politic, has so gripped our institutions, that it is even affecting the church. It’s true. The church has rolled over. Or if it hasn’t rolled over, it’s had to adapt its methods to the culture and has lost its identity, has lost its unique flavor, because it is attempting to imitate the flavor of the culture that is around it. Weyrich continues, It has completely taken over the academic community. It is now pervasive in the entertainment industry, and it threatens to control literally every aspect of our lives. He is right, you know. As I observed in an earlier program, it was titled Civil Religion, the system has taken on a life of its own. The government is no longer just a function of any one man. No one man can direct this system. It’s taken on a life of its own above and beyond any human direction, and its object is to control everything within view and within reach. It looks like government, but in truth it is a civil religion that sees all other religions as rivals. Muslims are rivals. Islam is a rival. Christianity is a rival. Judaism is a rival. And the government? The government is all. Civil religion? unfortunately for us all, is amoral. It doesn’t care about right and wrong. It doesn’t care about morals. It is concerned first and foremost with preserving and perpetuating itself against all rivals. Its motto is, What Works. And that’s all it cares about. What works to its ends. Weyrich continues, Quote, suffice it to say that the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture. Even now, for the first time in their lives, people have to be afraid of what they say. I never thought that would be the case in this country, where you’d have to be watching every step that you make. We’re supposed to have freedom of speech here, aren’t they? Weyrich continues, this has never been true in the history of our country. Yet today, if you say the wrong thing, you suddenly have legal problems, political problems. You might even lose your job or be expelled from college. Certain topics are forbidden. You can’t approach the truth about a lot of subjects. If you do, you’re immediately branded as racist, sexist, homophobic, insensitive, or judgmental. And he’s right about that. Because we’ve come to the place now in this country to where even in the most, what you would think were liberal bastions, and liberal you would think means you’re free to say what you want to. We fight for freedom of speech. We’re all concerned about our civil liberties. And yet in our academic institutions, politically incorrect speech is punished. Weyrich continues to say if in Washington State and Colorado, After we have spent years talking about partial birth abortion, we can’t by referendum pass a ban on it. We have to face some unpleasant facts. I no longer believe, he says, that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values. Well, how about that? We have finally come to realize that most Americans don’t feel this way anymore. Do you have any idea what a change that represents in the structure of the moral structure, the set of values that we hold in this country? You know, it’s about time, I think, and this is me talking. It’s about time people started waking up to this little nasty little piece of news. Christians are strangers and pilgrims here on this earth, and we have no friend in high places except our God. And in trying to reform this political system, we may well have lost our witness. Stay with me.
SPEAKER 01 :
I’ll be right back after this message. Where does a Christian draw the line between serving God and serving the state? Is it ever wrong to resist? To find out, request a free program titled, Should a Christian Submit to the State? Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 02 :
Paul Weyrich continues in his letter to say this, quote, I believe that we have probably lost the culture war. That doesn’t mean the war is not going to continue and it isn’t going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. That’s why even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important. You know, I’m not sure why we should be surprised at that. Because down through history, when Christianity has been the establishment, it has not acquitted itself well at all. In fact, oftentimes it has imposed its own morals and values. Sometimes they were morals and values that God gave us in the Bible, but other times it was something else entirely. And that imposition of religion on people was never what God had in mind. Paul continues to say, therefore, what seems to me to be a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of political incorrectness or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you, he says, that the word holy means set apart, and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, set apart. This is probably one of the most important things he says in this entire letter. It’s an acknowledgment of one of the most basic things that there is about Christianity. We are a holy people. We are a people apart. And whenever we abandon that and try to join ourselves to political parties on one wing or the left, we lose track of our witness, of our message, of who we are. Weyrich continues to say, you can look in the Old Testament, you can look at Christian history, and you will see that there were times when those who had our beliefs definitely in the minority, and like it was a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated. I suppose this sounds like a revolutionary idea to some people. This is me talking. But it’s Christianity 101, the basics. We are a people apart, a holy people. We can fight the culture wars, but it has to be fought as individuals, as witnesses, not as a political power block. We are not really an army in this world. We are infiltrators. We have a message. We have a witness. And it is that message that is our business. Well, Weyrich comes to a conclusion about all this that really has a lot of merit. He says, quote, I think that we have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy. If we expend our energies in fighting on the turf they already control, we will probably not accomplish what we hope, and we may spend ourselves to the point of exhaustion. How true. The promising thing about a strategy of separation is that it has more to do with who we are and what we become than it does with what the other side is doing and what we are going to do about it. You know, as we worked our way through all the impeachment trials of President Clinton, and when it was all over, I noticed a spirit of exhaustion, even of depression on many Christian people who were so depressed that someone had been able to commit these acts in the Oval Office of the White House, lie to the courts, lie to the people, and get away with it all. Well… That’s this world. It’s not God’s world. It’s not our world. It’s not the world of Christ. It’s, in many ways, the world of the enemy. A little later, Weyrich writes, Don’t be misled by politicians who say that everything is great, that we’re on the verge of this wonderful new era, and thanks to technology or the stock market or whatever. These are lies. He continues to say we are not in the dawn of a new civilization, but the twilight of an old one. We will be lucky if we escape with any remnants of the great Judeo-Christian civilization that we have known down through the ages. You know, that’s the end of quotation. There’s a lot of truth in this. You have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to miss the moral collapse that’s going on all around us. Historically, no country has ever had a restoration of morality in a time of peace and plenty. Have they? Finally, Weyrich concludes, quote, Again, I don’t have all the answers or even all the questions, but I know that what we have been doing for 30 years hasn’t worked. And while we have been fighting and winning in politics, our culture has decayed into something approaching barbarism. We need to take a different track, find a different strategy. Yep, he has that right. We have thought that we could turn all this around by political action, and the world around us has seen our efforts as an attempt to impose our moral standards on the rest of society. We have forgotten that you can’t impose morality. Attempts to do so involve a loss of freedom for all that are concerned, including those who impose it. In fact, Christians who have attempted to change this country by political means may well have set their cause back by 50 years. What we want to see is a change of heart, and you can’t do that with politics and law. What does it take to do it? Well, stay with me. When I come back after this message, I’ll tell you what it takes.
SPEAKER 01 :
For a free copy of this radio program for yourself or to share with friends and others, write or call this week only and tell us the call letters of this radio station and today’s date. Write to Born to Win, P.O. Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44.
SPEAKER 02 :
The truth is that once a people have gone so far down the road of moral decay, it takes a calamity to bring them back again. And when you’re dealing with a nation, it isn’t going to take just a small calamity. It takes something really big. Something catastrophic. Not merely like having to fight a war. Like losing a war. What do you suppose a biblical prophet, if he were here, would say about us? About where we’ve come and what we’ve done? Well, you might read, for example, in the first chapter of Isaiah to see what he has to say about a situation just like this. In Isaiah 1, verse 2, he says, Hear, O heavens, give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. You might as well say that I’ve given them a gorgeous country. I’ve given them natural resources. I’ve given them a beautiful place to live. I’ve given them great wealth, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knows his owner. The ass knows his master’s crib. Even the dumb ox and the ass know where things are, but Israel doesn’t know. My people don’t even think about it. Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children who are corruptors. They have forsaken the Lord. They’ve even provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger. They’ve gone away backward. And God says, when you get to this place, why are you going to be stricken anymore? Because the truth is, as Israel went down the slippery slope to final destruction, there were any number of times where God chastised them, where he corrected them, where he smote them. They would fight battles and lose them, but they still retained their integrity as a people. They lost a thousand men here, ten thousand men there, and a lot of mourning in people’s homes. And they repented for a while, but not for long. And along comes the prophet and says, Why should you be stricken anymore? You will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick. The whole heart is faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. They haven’t been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment. He’s talking about the moral condition of the country, and he describes it as a body that is broken and sick and bruised and covered with putrefying sores that nobody has even attempted to heal or to bandage. Your country is going to be desolate. Your city is burned with fire. Your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it’s desolate as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a besieged city. In the end, they cry out, except the Lord of hosts had left us a very small remnant, we would have been like Sodom. We would have been like Gomorrah. You know, it’s at times like these, when the country desolate, the cities burned with fire, when the war has been lost and the people have been put in boxcars and carted off someplace else. It’s at times like these that men finally decide to seek God. They just don’t look for Him. When the stock market is at all-time highs, when their bank accounts are fat, when they all have jobs, when life is working and we’re all healthy, and life is just one big ball, nobody goes looking for God. Then there is another prophet. His name is Hosea. He says, Hear the word of the Lord, you children of Israel, for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth nor mercy nor knowledge of God in the land. But people will swear and lie, just like our people do today, killing and stealing and committing adultery. It’s all over the place. It’s even shot through our entertainment. It’s a part of our humor. It’s a part of what we enjoy when we sit down before the television set in the evening. All these crimes, he says, break out, and the blood from one crime runs into the blood of another crime. Therefore, the land will mourn. Everyone that dwells in it will languish with the beasts of the field, the fowls of the heaven, and the fish of the sea shall be taken away. You’re going to go so far down this that you’re going to destroy your environment. Therefore, you shall fall in the day, and the prophet has been trying to tell you everything’s going to be all right. He’ll fall with you in the night. My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, he says, I will reject you. I mean, there are people around this country who read from the Bible. There are people who are projecting God’s voice over the land. I do it myself right here on this radio station as I read from the Scriptures to you. And I tell you what God has said in the past. And God says, I don’t change, not like you do. So the knowledge is being sent out, but it’s being rejected far and wide. And God says, you reject knowledge, I will reject you. What a deep and profound sadness comes over me as I read that verse. You take a nation, you take a people like ours who have lost the culture wars. People who have forgotten God, and not more important, but just as important, they have forgotten the law of God. They have forgotten those standards that God laid down in the Bible a long time ago that he revealed to man about how life works, about those things that are destructive to human relationships and human behavior, about those things that destroy families, destroy children, that tear up our lives. The law of God tells us how to live. It says don’t lie. It says be faithful to your wife. You keep on forgetting the law of God, he says, and I will forget your children. I guess it’s one thing to take a chance with our own life. It’s another thing altogether to take a chance with the life of our children. And finally, Hosea says… As they were increased, speaking for God, as they were increased, so they sinned against me. What a description. And you know, it’s absolutely consistent with human nature, and it’s absolutely consistent with the pattern that’s developed in our country over the past 10 and 20 years. As we have gotten wealthier, so we have forgotten God, so we have forgotten His law, so we have laid aside common sense morality and common sense value systems. The more we have, the more we sin. Now, if you’re God, and you look down on a nation like this, and you see, well, the more wealth they’ve got, the more sins they commit, so I suppose that the solution to their problem would be what? You fill in the blank. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist. All you’ve got to do is just read that thing, and you know that if you’re God, well, the best way to stop the sinning is to take away the wealth. One wonders just how long this merry-go-round that we’re on will last. As they were increased, so they sinned against me. Therefore, God says, I will change their glory into shame. Well, if you are not maybe impressed with Hosea, maybe we could try a warning from the wisest man who ever lived. His name was Solomon. He says in Proverbs 124, citing wisdom, Because I have called and you refused. I have stretched out my hand and no one would listen. But you have said it not, all my advice, and you don’t want any of my reproof. Okay? I will laugh at your calamity. I will mock when your fear comes. When your fear comes as a desolation and your destruction comes like a whirlwind. When distress and anguish comes upon you. Then they’ll call upon me, but I won’t answer. They’ll seek me early, but they won’t find me. for they hated knowledge, and they did not choose the fear of the Lord. They would have none of my advice. They despised all of my reproof. So here’s what’s going to happen. They will eat the fruit of their own way and be filled with their own devices, for the turning away of the simple will slay them. And get this, the prosperity of fools shall destroy them. There’s a connection, you know, in people’s minds between our wealth and our willingness to admit we are wrong. We are getting richer by the day. We think we must be doing something right. It doesn’t matter if our president is a liar and a cad. We’ve got lots of money. Let’s not rock the boat. If this is the way it is, then brace yourself. It may not be this year or next, but there is a reckoning coming, and it will be more than a bit of unpleasantness when it comes. If we can’t learn to do right when things are going well, we’ll have to learn it when things are going bad. It’s a law of history, not to mention the Word of God. What can you do about it? Isaiah 1, verse 16. Wash yourself. Make you clean. Put away the evil of your doings before my eyes and stop doing evil. Learn to do well. Seek judgment. Relieve the oppressed. Judge the fatherless. Plead for the widows. Come now and let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If you be willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land. If you refuse, if you rebel, you shall be devoured with the sword, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it. This is not a political activity. It’s not something you can put together by getting a movement going. It’s not a matter of government. It’s a matter of the heart. If indeed we have lost the culture war, it’s probably because it’s a war we should not have been fighting in the first place. For we who are Christians are called not as warriors, but as witnesses.
SPEAKER 01 :
Until next time, this is Ronald Dart, and you were born to win. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1 888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at
