20th June 2000
Is there room for faith in this millennium?
Text of address to the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship
House of Commons
Chairman, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, good evening.
It is now over a year since I was approached by David Campanale, chairman of the Christian Peoples Alliance, to consider standing as a mayoral and assembly candidate in the London elections.
Apart from the obvious question, ‘Why me?’, an immediate issue to tackle was the use of the word Christian in the name of a political party. Was it right to use a term relating to faith so directly and overtly in this new millennium? The deeper question - ‘ Is there room for faith in this millennium?’ was in essence a key question that I had to think through before responding to the invitation from the Christian Peoples Alliance.
The implicit thesis
There is an implicit assumption in this particular question, which needs to be challenged. The assumption is that faith is either a luxury or old-fashioned. A luxury we can no longer afford. Or something that has gone past its sell-by date and therefore to be swept out as we enter a new millennium. So, is there room for faith any more? Can we still afford it?
But I want to argue that faith is neither redundant nor selfish. As G K Chesterton has said: “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
The character of faith
Is faith a luxury?
The history of the past two millennia shows us that faith is not a luxury. Luxuries are usually owned by wealthy people, or acquired by poor people when they should be acquiring more useful things. But look at the history of oppressed peoples from the early Christians in the Roman arena, to the slaughtered hundreds and thousands of Rwanda and many other tragic countries, and time and time again you will find that people have let everything else go provided they could hold on to faith – for they know that their faith was the one thing they needed above all: to endure, to survive, and to face the perhaps even more appalling problem of living with people after some sort of peace has been negotiated.
Faith, theologically the evidence of things not seen, gives people who are in the most extreme circumstances the ability to envisage a better world and work for it. Jeremiah, faced with the ruin of his nation, the prospect of exile and a personal future of disaster, bought a field.
Faith is the life raft that keeps hope afloat. When, a minute or so walk from here, the Great Fire ravaged the old palace of Westminster; the people saved the Great Hall and let the rest burn. And in the darkest moments of the past centuries, people all over the world have watched possessions, treasures, even families pass away, and held on above all to faith, because for them it was no luxury but the key to all their hopes. Facing terrible pains and sorrows, Job cried out, ‘I know that my Redeemer lives’, though all the evidence pointed to the opposite.
When as a family we were expelled from what is now Pakistan to flee to East Africa, and then expelled from East Africa to Great Britain, the priority in both cases was to ensure that the symbols of our faith, the Holy Books and the icons from the home temple accompanied our family to our destinations - a reflection of the fact that our family and indeed community did not see these symbols of our faith as a luxury but as essentials. A visual reminder of hope rooted in our faith. As the great Indian poet and scholar, Rabindranath Tagore said: “Faith is the bird that sings while dawn is still dark.”
Is faith redundant?
To answer that question one must ask what faith achieves. For faith is more, of course, than the belief, in extremity, in what cannot be seen. Faith is also the pattern of life for millions in this country who choose to live according to the principles of what cannot be proved by science or seen by empirical observation. Critics of faith often say that such belief has no place in the modern world.
I was recently having lunch with a FT100 Company Chairman. He asked me about my faith and, of course, I was off. I presented my views and gave what I felt was my best. I explained my multi-faith upbringing. A Hindu home, Sikh worship and a Muslim education, followed by an encounter with Christ in a pub. An encounter that transformed my spiritual outlook and made me a follower and disciple of Jesus with the Bible as my point of reference. But when I asked him for his views on faith, I was frustrated and saddened. In essence he said, “Does life have to have meaning? God does not exist. Faith is redundant.”
There are several counters to that position of which I will only pick a few.
First, the history of ideas and of thought in the last century is a story with faith as its frequent footnote. Many of the great thinkers acknowledged the realm of faith even if they were not believers: ‘I try to imagine the simplest way God could have done it,’ said Albert Einstein, and similar quotations could be collected from a very large list of celebrated names.
The contribution of faith to thought is immense, and it goes back way beyond the twentieth century. Take the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the birth of Newtonian science: the Royal Society had a majority of Christian thinkers in it, many of the earliest scientists and naturalists were Christians – James Hervey, for example, and Gilbert White. The old accusation that science and faith are incompatible is not borne out by history.
Second, the evidence of faith in the lives of those who previously lacked it is also a strong strand in history. John Newton the slave trader is just one example, but one could go back as far as Saul the persecutor or as recently as Malcolm Muggeridge.
Thirdly, faith is the exercise of belief in what cannot be normally apprehended, and so faith brings us into contact with the Absolute and with the spiritual. Take that away and life becomes drab and artificial, for we are not purely physical beings, but we have in us a longing that will not find rest except in faith.
And people like Alexander Solzhenytsin lead us to contemplate the unseen and to interpret the confusing everyday world in the light of absolute truth.
Fourthly, and I am drawing on Christian specifics here, faith is our only way out of our fallen existence and without it we have no hope at all. Take for example that object of the most vital faith, the resurrection: if we have no faith in that, we are of all people most miserable, says Paul.
Fifthly, and with this I will move on, true faith always brings about social change. The great religious revivals, where that religion values life, have changed lives for the better. Livingstone brought commerce to Africa, Wesley was responsible for major educational programmes, William Carey campaigned against Suttee (Bride burning) and female infanticide in India– the list could go on. And social change can also happen at the smallest level, in the home, in schools, and so forth.
When I was challenged to respond to the poverty and deprivation I saw first hand in the slums of Bombay, it was my faith that challenged me to respond to make a difference, however small the difference might be.
I remember my eldest sister challenging me when I said I would give up my seven-figure salary and big job (7,000 employees worldwide, $200 million in turnover) to start the Christmas Cracker project. What difference can you make? Is there any hope for the poor in this world? In essence her response was: Why bother? My response based on my faith was: We must have hope. A difference of one pound by one person replicated a million fold, by one million people, would make a million pounds of a difference. In the event, Christmas Cracker mobilised over 50,000 young people to raise over 5 million pounds! Now I can assure you that the step of faith that was taken did make a difference for many in the developing world.
As someone has said: “Faith makes the uplook good, the outlook bright, the inlook favourable, and the future glorious.”
The necessity of faith
I am arguing therefore that not only is there room for faith but that faith is a necessity.
If faith is necessary what should the lawmakers do?
If faith has this crucial role and function in society, what should the responsibility be of the lawmakers? Let me suggest a few things for you to think about.
Moral government
One of the great topics of modern life is the quest for moral government. Ethical social programmes and moral law making are at the heart of manifestos. A large part of the public statements of the political parties represented in parliament is made up of claims, explicit or implicit, that the party in question is more moral than other parties.
But can one have morals in a vacuum? Can one do ethics out of context? I suggest that for morals to work they must be derived from something, they must have a basis in something higher than morals, and that demands faith. As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, you cannot sew without first tying a knot in your thread.
Civil Rights
We are currently seeing, especially in India and Africa, attempts by secular governments to limit the rights and freedoms of religious people, for example attempting to force different faith-groups to use the same place of worship – or indeed to deny them a place of worship at all. I hope we are not so naïve that we cannot see similar programmes on the horizon in Britain. But if faith is desirable and necessary, it should be part of the basic policy of any government to allow faith to grow in communities and be properly accommodated. Only one government formally declared itself an atheist state, and that was Enver Hoxha’s Albania. The nation he created was the most socially deprived and individually fettered in Europe.
Godly government
A government that draws its values and frames its legislation in the light of a “Higher Law” will be making law from a unified perspective, not simply creating ad-hoc legislation. Human imperfection notwithstanding, the result will be a recognisable application of a core moral philosophy.
Government not only implements morality but also prescribes it, by the public perception that “What is permitted/legal is therefore moral”; and if governments are to define morality, it is preferable they do so out of the broad “higher law” overview, than out of a series of disparate legal rulings.
It has been encouraging to see an acknowledgement of the Christian faith and values from Prime Ministers such as Harold MacMillan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair in the UK and from the likes of Presidents Carter and Regan in the United States.
But while individual leaders and politicians acknowledge faith as essential, a question that arises is: “To what extent does an individual’s faith guarantee/influence legislation that is consistent with their faith?”
Government without faith is only applying bandages, not providing healing You can’t legislate to make people ‘good’ unless you are getting your definition of ‘good’ from somewhere.
Self-interest, situationalism and short-termism tend to dictate decisions and policies that are barely, if at all, to be called moral. Even when merely telling people what they must not do, government may succeed in controlling and limiting the tendency of business to operate without reference to, or sometimes in opposition to, the moral good of society. But if that is as far as it goes, government will remain capable only of applying sticking-plaster remedies. Yet in a pluralist society with many moralising voices, how can government go beyond mere expediency?
For, I would suggest, that is precisely what it must do: it is its role, almost by default. Working within the ‘higher law’ will come almost naturally to democratically elected governments.
The reason is not because democracy has some high moral character, but because electorates tend to share commonly held moral views. As we have seen, certain broad values are common to most of humanity. Few societies condone murder; most respect the elderly and the very young; some societies hold to a commonwealth of property, others (like the Kalahari bushmen) have few possessions, but few societies glorify theft. Even in societies like our own with an increasingly secular view of marriage, we do not as a nation consider adultery admirable.
Tony Blair was elected by only 42% of the population, but the other 58% of us hold to the same broad moral consensus as that 42% do! And if government in office reflects that broad moral consensus (what Christians call the ‘image of God’) its decisions will, and should, reflect that over-arching perspective to which the parts relate and from which they derive their point and direction. And that is a built in corrective to piece-meal, knee-jerk legislation.
That may all seem remarkably optimistic – a view highly vulnerable to the first adulterous cabinet minister or careless politician. But I am not suggesting that to implement a morally coherent, focused government one has to be a remarkably moral person oneself. In a democracy, the offices of state have their own moral value over and above the incumbent. Mr Clinton has confessed to good old-fashioned ‘sin’, but the office of president will survive any short- or long-term effects of his disgrace. The office is better than its holder. If the office-holder has behaved inappropriately, or fallen from grace in some way, then if it is the office that is the source of the legislation (with all the checks and balances that that implies) there should, in theory at least, be no problem.
Of course, it can go the other way. I can think of one Christian politician faced with implementing family legislation that he and I considered morally harmful. In that case the office was morally flawed; the officer, though a good person, was bound by cabinet responsibility and could not interfere with what his office was producing. However, many politicians are well known to have brought their own moral convictions with them into office, which translates into a distinctively moral way of doing politics. Frank Field, Anne Widdicombe, Emma Nicholson, Mo Mowlam and indeed Tony Blair are example, as are many Conservative and Liberal politicians: for example Quintin Hogg, in his classic 1934 Case For Conservatism; and the much-praised essential decency of John Major that has been seen (especially in his biography and TV documentary) to have been a factor in his government.
It was Franklin D Roosevelt who said, “The only limit to our realisation of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith”. In conclusion, I would argue that not only is there room for faith, but that faith is a necessity in this new millennium.
A Kansas Prayer (I had intended to read this prayer - but decided not to because of lack of time)
This interesting prayer was given in Kansas at the opening session of their Senate. It seems prayer still upsets some people. When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard:
“Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask Your forgiveness and to seek Your direction and guidance.
We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good’, but that is exactly what we have done.
We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values.
We confess that. We have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word and called it Pluralism;
We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism;
We have endorsed perversion and called it alternative lifestyle;
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery;
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare;
We have killed our unborn and called it choice;
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable;
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem;
We have abused power and called it politics;
We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition;
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression;
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.
Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.
Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent: to direct us to the center of Your will and to openly ask these things.
In the name of Your Son, the living Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen”
The response was immediate. A number of legislators walked out during the prayer in protest. In 6 short weeks, Central Christian Church, where Rev. Wright is pastor, logged more than 5,000 phone calls with only 47 of those calls responding negatively.
The church is now receiving international requests for copies of this prayer from India, Africa, and Korea.
Commentator Paul Harvey aired this prayer on his radio program, “The Rest of the Story”, and received a larger response to this program than any other he has ever aired. With the Lord’s help, may this prayer sweep over our nation and wholeheartedly become our desire so that we again can be called “one nation under God”. If possible, please pass this prayer on to your friends.
“If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for everything.”
Is there room for faith in this millennium?
Ram Gidoomal CBE
Text of address to the Parliamentary Christian FellowshipHouse of Commons
Chairman, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, good evening.
It is now over a year since I was approached by David Campanale, chairman of the Christian Peoples Alliance, to consider standing as a mayoral and assembly candidate in the London elections.
Apart from the obvious question, ‘Why me?’, an immediate issue to tackle was the use of the word Christian in the name of a political party. Was it right to use a term relating to faith so directly and overtly in this new millennium? The deeper question - ‘ Is there room for faith in this millennium?’ was in essence a key question that I had to think through before responding to the invitation from the Christian Peoples Alliance.
The implicit thesis
There is an implicit assumption in this particular question, which needs to be challenged. The assumption is that faith is either a luxury or old-fashioned. A luxury we can no longer afford. Or something that has gone past its sell-by date and therefore to be swept out as we enter a new millennium. So, is there room for faith any more? Can we still afford it?
But I want to argue that faith is neither redundant nor selfish. As G K Chesterton has said: “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
The character of faith
Is faith a luxury?
The history of the past two millennia shows us that faith is not a luxury. Luxuries are usually owned by wealthy people, or acquired by poor people when they should be acquiring more useful things. But look at the history of oppressed peoples from the early Christians in the Roman arena, to the slaughtered hundreds and thousands of Rwanda and many other tragic countries, and time and time again you will find that people have let everything else go provided they could hold on to faith – for they know that their faith was the one thing they needed above all: to endure, to survive, and to face the perhaps even more appalling problem of living with people after some sort of peace has been negotiated.
Faith, theologically the evidence of things not seen, gives people who are in the most extreme circumstances the ability to envisage a better world and work for it. Jeremiah, faced with the ruin of his nation, the prospect of exile and a personal future of disaster, bought a field.
Faith is the life raft that keeps hope afloat. When, a minute or so walk from here, the Great Fire ravaged the old palace of Westminster; the people saved the Great Hall and let the rest burn. And in the darkest moments of the past centuries, people all over the world have watched possessions, treasures, even families pass away, and held on above all to faith, because for them it was no luxury but the key to all their hopes. Facing terrible pains and sorrows, Job cried out, ‘I know that my Redeemer lives’, though all the evidence pointed to the opposite.
When as a family we were expelled from what is now Pakistan to flee to East Africa, and then expelled from East Africa to Great Britain, the priority in both cases was to ensure that the symbols of our faith, the Holy Books and the icons from the home temple accompanied our family to our destinations - a reflection of the fact that our family and indeed community did not see these symbols of our faith as a luxury but as essentials. A visual reminder of hope rooted in our faith. As the great Indian poet and scholar, Rabindranath Tagore said: “Faith is the bird that sings while dawn is still dark.”
Is faith redundant?
To answer that question one must ask what faith achieves. For faith is more, of course, than the belief, in extremity, in what cannot be seen. Faith is also the pattern of life for millions in this country who choose to live according to the principles of what cannot be proved by science or seen by empirical observation. Critics of faith often say that such belief has no place in the modern world.
I was recently having lunch with a FT100 Company Chairman. He asked me about my faith and, of course, I was off. I presented my views and gave what I felt was my best. I explained my multi-faith upbringing. A Hindu home, Sikh worship and a Muslim education, followed by an encounter with Christ in a pub. An encounter that transformed my spiritual outlook and made me a follower and disciple of Jesus with the Bible as my point of reference. But when I asked him for his views on faith, I was frustrated and saddened. In essence he said, “Does life have to have meaning? God does not exist. Faith is redundant.”
There are several counters to that position of which I will only pick a few.
First, the history of ideas and of thought in the last century is a story with faith as its frequent footnote. Many of the great thinkers acknowledged the realm of faith even if they were not believers: ‘I try to imagine the simplest way God could have done it,’ said Albert Einstein, and similar quotations could be collected from a very large list of celebrated names.
The contribution of faith to thought is immense, and it goes back way beyond the twentieth century. Take the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the birth of Newtonian science: the Royal Society had a majority of Christian thinkers in it, many of the earliest scientists and naturalists were Christians – James Hervey, for example, and Gilbert White. The old accusation that science and faith are incompatible is not borne out by history.
Second, the evidence of faith in the lives of those who previously lacked it is also a strong strand in history. John Newton the slave trader is just one example, but one could go back as far as Saul the persecutor or as recently as Malcolm Muggeridge.
Thirdly, faith is the exercise of belief in what cannot be normally apprehended, and so faith brings us into contact with the Absolute and with the spiritual. Take that away and life becomes drab and artificial, for we are not purely physical beings, but we have in us a longing that will not find rest except in faith.
And people like Alexander Solzhenytsin lead us to contemplate the unseen and to interpret the confusing everyday world in the light of absolute truth.
Fourthly, and I am drawing on Christian specifics here, faith is our only way out of our fallen existence and without it we have no hope at all. Take for example that object of the most vital faith, the resurrection: if we have no faith in that, we are of all people most miserable, says Paul.
Fifthly, and with this I will move on, true faith always brings about social change. The great religious revivals, where that religion values life, have changed lives for the better. Livingstone brought commerce to Africa, Wesley was responsible for major educational programmes, William Carey campaigned against Suttee (Bride burning) and female infanticide in India– the list could go on. And social change can also happen at the smallest level, in the home, in schools, and so forth.
When I was challenged to respond to the poverty and deprivation I saw first hand in the slums of Bombay, it was my faith that challenged me to respond to make a difference, however small the difference might be.
I remember my eldest sister challenging me when I said I would give up my seven-figure salary and big job (7,000 employees worldwide, $200 million in turnover) to start the Christmas Cracker project. What difference can you make? Is there any hope for the poor in this world? In essence her response was: Why bother? My response based on my faith was: We must have hope. A difference of one pound by one person replicated a million fold, by one million people, would make a million pounds of a difference. In the event, Christmas Cracker mobilised over 50,000 young people to raise over 5 million pounds! Now I can assure you that the step of faith that was taken did make a difference for many in the developing world.
As someone has said: “Faith makes the uplook good, the outlook bright, the inlook favourable, and the future glorious.”
The necessity of faith
I am arguing therefore that not only is there room for faith but that faith is a necessity.
If faith is necessary what should the lawmakers do?
If faith has this crucial role and function in society, what should the responsibility be of the lawmakers? Let me suggest a few things for you to think about.
Moral government
One of the great topics of modern life is the quest for moral government. Ethical social programmes and moral law making are at the heart of manifestos. A large part of the public statements of the political parties represented in parliament is made up of claims, explicit or implicit, that the party in question is more moral than other parties.
But can one have morals in a vacuum? Can one do ethics out of context? I suggest that for morals to work they must be derived from something, they must have a basis in something higher than morals, and that demands faith. As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, you cannot sew without first tying a knot in your thread.
Civil Rights
We are currently seeing, especially in India and Africa, attempts by secular governments to limit the rights and freedoms of religious people, for example attempting to force different faith-groups to use the same place of worship – or indeed to deny them a place of worship at all. I hope we are not so naïve that we cannot see similar programmes on the horizon in Britain. But if faith is desirable and necessary, it should be part of the basic policy of any government to allow faith to grow in communities and be properly accommodated. Only one government formally declared itself an atheist state, and that was Enver Hoxha’s Albania. The nation he created was the most socially deprived and individually fettered in Europe.
Godly government
A government that draws its values and frames its legislation in the light of a “Higher Law” will be making law from a unified perspective, not simply creating ad-hoc legislation. Human imperfection notwithstanding, the result will be a recognisable application of a core moral philosophy.
Government not only implements morality but also prescribes it, by the public perception that “What is permitted/legal is therefore moral”; and if governments are to define morality, it is preferable they do so out of the broad “higher law” overview, than out of a series of disparate legal rulings.
It has been encouraging to see an acknowledgement of the Christian faith and values from Prime Ministers such as Harold MacMillan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair in the UK and from the likes of Presidents Carter and Regan in the United States.
But while individual leaders and politicians acknowledge faith as essential, a question that arises is: “To what extent does an individual’s faith guarantee/influence legislation that is consistent with their faith?”
Government without faith is only applying bandages, not providing healing You can’t legislate to make people ‘good’ unless you are getting your definition of ‘good’ from somewhere.
Self-interest, situationalism and short-termism tend to dictate decisions and policies that are barely, if at all, to be called moral. Even when merely telling people what they must not do, government may succeed in controlling and limiting the tendency of business to operate without reference to, or sometimes in opposition to, the moral good of society. But if that is as far as it goes, government will remain capable only of applying sticking-plaster remedies. Yet in a pluralist society with many moralising voices, how can government go beyond mere expediency?
For, I would suggest, that is precisely what it must do: it is its role, almost by default. Working within the ‘higher law’ will come almost naturally to democratically elected governments.
The reason is not because democracy has some high moral character, but because electorates tend to share commonly held moral views. As we have seen, certain broad values are common to most of humanity. Few societies condone murder; most respect the elderly and the very young; some societies hold to a commonwealth of property, others (like the Kalahari bushmen) have few possessions, but few societies glorify theft. Even in societies like our own with an increasingly secular view of marriage, we do not as a nation consider adultery admirable.
Tony Blair was elected by only 42% of the population, but the other 58% of us hold to the same broad moral consensus as that 42% do! And if government in office reflects that broad moral consensus (what Christians call the ‘image of God’) its decisions will, and should, reflect that over-arching perspective to which the parts relate and from which they derive their point and direction. And that is a built in corrective to piece-meal, knee-jerk legislation.
That may all seem remarkably optimistic – a view highly vulnerable to the first adulterous cabinet minister or careless politician. But I am not suggesting that to implement a morally coherent, focused government one has to be a remarkably moral person oneself. In a democracy, the offices of state have their own moral value over and above the incumbent. Mr Clinton has confessed to good old-fashioned ‘sin’, but the office of president will survive any short- or long-term effects of his disgrace. The office is better than its holder. If the office-holder has behaved inappropriately, or fallen from grace in some way, then if it is the office that is the source of the legislation (with all the checks and balances that that implies) there should, in theory at least, be no problem.
Of course, it can go the other way. I can think of one Christian politician faced with implementing family legislation that he and I considered morally harmful. In that case the office was morally flawed; the officer, though a good person, was bound by cabinet responsibility and could not interfere with what his office was producing. However, many politicians are well known to have brought their own moral convictions with them into office, which translates into a distinctively moral way of doing politics. Frank Field, Anne Widdicombe, Emma Nicholson, Mo Mowlam and indeed Tony Blair are example, as are many Conservative and Liberal politicians: for example Quintin Hogg, in his classic 1934 Case For Conservatism; and the much-praised essential decency of John Major that has been seen (especially in his biography and TV documentary) to have been a factor in his government.
It was Franklin D Roosevelt who said, “The only limit to our realisation of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith”. In conclusion, I would argue that not only is there room for faith, but that faith is a necessity in this new millennium.
A Kansas Prayer (I had intended to read this prayer - but decided not to because of lack of time)
This interesting prayer was given in Kansas at the opening session of their Senate. It seems prayer still upsets some people. When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard:
“Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask Your forgiveness and to seek Your direction and guidance.
We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good’, but that is exactly what we have done.
We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values.
We confess that. We have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word and called it Pluralism;
We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism;
We have endorsed perversion and called it alternative lifestyle;
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery;
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare;
We have killed our unborn and called it choice;
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable;
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem;
We have abused power and called it politics;
We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition;
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression;
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.
Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.
Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent: to direct us to the center of Your will and to openly ask these things.
In the name of Your Son, the living Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen”
The response was immediate. A number of legislators walked out during the prayer in protest. In 6 short weeks, Central Christian Church, where Rev. Wright is pastor, logged more than 5,000 phone calls with only 47 of those calls responding negatively.
The church is now receiving international requests for copies of this prayer from India, Africa, and Korea.
Commentator Paul Harvey aired this prayer on his radio program, “The Rest of the Story”, and received a larger response to this program than any other he has ever aired. With the Lord’s help, may this prayer sweep over our nation and wholeheartedly become our desire so that we again can be called “one nation under God”. If possible, please pass this prayer on to your friends.
“If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for everything.”
