Once converted always confortable?

George Alexander Chadwick [1840-1923], Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, opened his Exodus commentary with a bracing reality: “It is one thing to admire abstract freedom, but a very different thing to accept the austere conditions of the life of genuine freemen.”¹

Freedom survives only where people accept the hard work liberty demands. Over the last century, much of American Christendom has admired freedom from a safe distance – inside the four walls of the church building – while refusing to engage in the rough and tumble of the public square.

Across the last century, Evangelical and pro-life Catholic Christians – half unregistered and half not voting – have behaved as though securing liberty for our children were painless and easy. The result is predictable: those who live in rebellion against the Lord choose the representatives who then draft and pass laws that codify their profane values. Culture, in turn, becomes the public liturgy of the nation’s secular religion, now lording it over America.

American writer, commentator and leader in the conservative movement M. Stanton Evans [1934-2015] warned that orchids do not grow by accident; they require the right climate, soil, and care. “Ignorance of or indifference to these matters will predictably result in failure. Ignorance of or indifference to the safeguards needed for the growth of liberty will issue in a like result – but with effects more baleful to consider.”²

Liberty, like an orchid, dies without the right culture, habits, and guardrails – something the American founders preached.

Os Guinness presses the point: no enduring free civilization has ever been built on atheistic foundations. A culture with no claims on its members – and no curbs on their desires – has no future. “Freedom requires a firm refusal of what is false, what is bad, what is excessive, what is ugly… When everything is tolerable, nothing will be true; and when nothing is true, no one will be free.”

He concludes with an indictment of our age: we have turned from the founders’ vision and from the Jewish-Christian and classical truths that made lasting freedom possible, chasing seductive but lazy-minded alternatives that are now proving disastrous, and becoming “caricatures” of our original liberty – both fascinating and repellent to the watching world.³

Living as a free people is rugged – requiring habits, duty, and sacrifice. The “once converted, always comfortable” theology and eschatology of the last century amounts to malpractice, biblically as well as culturally.

Protestant clergyman and historian Benjamin F. Morris [1810-1867] recorded a far sterner formation undergone by our forebears:

“The persecutions of the Puritans in England for non-conformity, and the religious agitations and conflicts in Germany by Luther, in Geneva by Calvin, and in Scotland by Knox, were the preparatory ordeals for qualifying Christian men for the work of establishing the civil institutions on the American continent. ‘God sifted’ in these conflicts a whole nation that He might send choice grain over into the wilderness, and the blood and persecution of martyrs became the seed of both the church and the state.

    “It was in these schools of fiery trial that the founders of the American republic were educated and prepared for their grand Christian mission, and in which their faith and characters became strong and earnest with Christian truth. They were trained in stormy times, in order to prepare them to elaborate and establish the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty and of just systems of civil government.”⁴

Hardship was not accidental; it was preparatory as God sifted a people for the hard work of self-government.

If we mean to keep our freedom, we must recover the disciplines that keep it: tell the truth, keep our covenants, endure, work with integrity, love our neighbors, and take responsibility at the gates – showing up where our town is governed.

Some 150 years ago, Senate Chaplain Byron Sunderland [1819-1901] warned of this very drift: “We have been so long without the burdens of government as to have almost forgotten the price of our birthright and to have cast away the only safeguards of its continuance; we have proved ourselves unworthy of our inheritance, in our contempt of that virtue that alone affords protection to society, in our blind disregard of the Christian foundations on which alone the great interests of a nation can permanently rest.”⁵

As to the spiritual, Solomon immortalized in Proverbs 14:34 that Righteousness exalts a nation, while sin is the disgrace of peoples. 

In his excellent Proverbs Commentary, Dr. Bruce K. Waltke [born 1930; age 95], the foremost living authority on wisdom literature in the Old Testament, elucidates that “ultimately, a nation’s exaltation rests on its piety and ethics, not on political, military, or economic might. Abroad, a sinful nation breaks treaties, spreads propaganda, lies, and bullies the weak. At home, it lets justice decay – rewarding criminals and idlers, while overtaxing and intimidating the upright.”

Evangelist and Bible commentator Maxie D. Dunnam [born 1934] observes in his insightful exposition of the book of Exodus [1993] that Pharaoh’s own advisers soon knew he was contending with a power greater than any they had faced. 

So too today: as Gideons and Rahabs step into America’s public arena, it will not be long before secularists recognize that a Power greater than secularism has entered the square.

Watch Vice President JD Vance as he addresses the American Renewal Project below:

David Lane

American Renewal Project

1. G.A. Chadwick, The Book of Exodus; 1890.

2. M. Stanton Evans, The Theme Is Freedom; 1994.

3. Os Guinness, A Free People’s Suicide; 2012.

4. B.F. Morris, The Christian Life and Character of The Civil Institutions of The United States; 1864.

5. Byron Sunderland, Introduction to Benjamin F. Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States [1868 ed.].

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