AFA - The Left Belittles Prayer – but God Is What We Need

Last week, the shooter in Minneapolis of little children in a Catholic church-school during mass was discovered to have written on one of his weapons, “Where is your god [sic].” He used a picture of Jesus on his target in practice before the big day of shooting last Wednesday.

And now the Left says to us in effect: “Don’t pray, just prey.” The last part refers to allowing unfettered evil to flourish – to continue to prey on the weak and vulnerable.

As Gary Bauer noted last Thursday: “Satan wrote the script for the atrocities that transpired yesterday at a Minneapolis Catholic church and school. The transgender shooter’s message, ‘Where’s your God now,’ wasn’t referring to Allah. It was referring to the God of the Bible, the God Catholics, Jews, and Protestants worship. The only God, by the way. ‘Where’s your God now’ was Satan mocking God.”

It’s amazing to see how swift the condemnation from the Left was against even the idea of prayers – as if prayers alone were the solution offered to try and stop these things. They do hint at the solution: to get back to the knowledge of God, the one who is there and who will hold us all accountable one day.

As to the condemnation of prayer, consider these examples:

▪Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frei, who almost single-handedly destroyed his city in the wake of the George Floyd riots, spoke of prayer as if it were nothing. After all, the children in the church-school were literally praying when the bullets began to fly.

▪Jen Psaki famously blasted prayer as useless. She posted on X: "Prayer is not freaking enough. Prayers does not end school shootings….Enough with the thoughts and prayers."

▪Fox News quotes other leftist leaders who blamed prayers or, at best, called them useless.

By the way, I think we have no clue how many times God spares us from the complete ravages of sinful attempts to kill. Perhaps enough to see it was a real threat, but with much less damage than could have been. I always remember reading the details of the Columbine shootings. The two killers aimed to kill a thousand people. Thank God that they fell short by 986 (or 984, if you count them).

In another August (1984), then presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, gave a speech at a Dallas Prayer Meeting on the importance of recognizing God in the public arena – if for nothing else, its impact on morality: "We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever. We command no worship. We mandate no belief. But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave it bereft of belief. All are free to believe or not believe; all are free to practice a faith or not. But those who believe must be free to speak of and act on their belief, to apply moral teaching to public questions....Without God, there is no virtue, because there's no prompting of the conscience. Without God, we're mired in the material, that flat world that tells us only what the senses perceive. Without God, there is a coarsening of the society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under."

George Washington said as much. The father of our country warned us not to undermine “religion and morality” in his Farewell Address. He said that “national morality” will not be able to “prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

The Founders might not have agreed on all details of theology, but they agreed on the notion that God will hold us accountable one day.

As Thomas Jefferson observed, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just – that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

As a nation, we are still reaping the consequences of a terrible string of Supreme Court decisions from the 1960s and 80s. They ruled against school prayer, Bible reading at school (as devotional), creation being allowed to be taught, even the Ten Commandments (with its famous line: “Thou shalt not murder”) were disallowed at school. It’s as if the Left, through their surrogates on the High Court, went out of their way to build a firewall against the children in the schools learning anything about God. And now we’re reaping the consequences.

As Os Guinness, the great Christian thinker and author, postulates in his book, A Free People’s Suicide: “One cannot point to a free and lasting civilization anywhere in history that was built on atheistic foundations.” Ultimately, America’s only two true options are: Revival or Ruin.

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Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is the executive director of the Providence Forum, an outreach of Coral Ridge Ministries. He has written/co-written 33 books, including George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Providence Forum founder Peter Lillback, Ph.D.) and What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.). www.crm.tv

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