Beloved John Piper: A Punching Bag for Right-Wing Christians

I'm going to start this article by saying I have no idea what is even happening with Christian politics at this point. It used to be that people held convictions about things politically as Christians that you could disagree with, and people were not ready to throw tomatoes at you. No longer! Everything is a political war.

Beloved John Piper seems to get the brunt of it when it comes to the Christian right-wing. I say the Christian right-wing and not Christian conservatives because these Christians have now taken on an identity that is more in line with being right-wing for the sake of being right-wing than it is about being a conservative.

Whenever Pastor John, whom I love, says something these right-wing Christians don't like, he seems to end up taking on WAY more heat than he deserves. The reason for this is that people can no longer separate their politics from their religion. We've heard things about the radical left basically being a replacement for religion. I agree with that. However, there is a "right-wing Christianity" that is so inundated with being right-wing that they have forgotten to first go to the Bible.

Here is what Pastor John actually said that seems to be causing an uproar.

https://x.com/JohnPiper/status/2026794393487700346?s=20

Now, the question I have to ask is whether Pastor John would have simply quoted the verse with no commentary (as he has done before) if he had received the same outrage. And I think he would have. And that's a HUGE problem! Do we believe the whole Bible is the word of God or not? But some right-wing Christians seem to find some verses in the Bible objectionable. The absolute audacity of this is unreal! But the kicker is that with Pastor John's commentary, it literally is not even talking about immigration. Pastor John is actually generalizing the verse to talk about something that affects every Christian, namely, the bondage of being a sojourner in a foreign land. This is backed up elsewhere in the Bible where Paul says, "Our citizenship is in heaven." That seems to be what Pastor John is talking about, and Christians are disagreeing with him on that. At some point, you have to ask, what is even happening with these Christians criticizing Pastor John at this point? He wasn't making a political point! And yet, "Christians" are trying to act like he is taking their sacred cow of the right-wing away from them! I honestly have so few words I can even use to describe this... I will say, however, that it appears that the Christian Church in America is ripe for the same sort of thing that happened in Germany in the 1930s. Now, maybe you think I am wrong about that... But when I say America is "ripe" for it, I am saying that Christians on the right today are so concerned with anyone criticizing their sacred cow of right-wing conservatism that they are willing to criticize Pastor John over his comment. It seems like the stage is set for Christians to take this much further, and repeat, in a similar fashion, as how the Christian Church in Germany was polluted by the talking points of the Nazis and Hitler.

For all the "make no peace with evil" or similar posts I see on X, what seems plain to me is that they have only replaced one evil with another.

That's it for this one!

God bless you! Until next time!