By Bob Linn

Two weeks into the new year, President Ronald Reagan’s son, Michael, breathed his last at the age of 80. The statement from the family read: “Michael was called home to be with the Lord.”

Through his books, journalism, speaking, and broadcasting, Michael Reagan championed the legacy of his father. He worked also to champion the resurgence of the church in American society.

Twelve years ago, Michael Reagan wrote to the nation in his syndicated column that the American church was not doing its job to engage in America’s cultural battles. It was in April of 2013 that he blamed our pulpits for failing to lead their congregations in a public stand against “same sex marriage.”

It was a strong rebuke to America’s pulpits and pews for their lack of passion to preserve the cultural integrity of the nation and hence, our form of government.

In light of the hands-off politics approach of the church evident in so many of the American pulpits today, America’s 18th century political class would have agreed with Michael Reagan.

Recently, England’s Dr. Joseph Boot wrote: “There is a profound irony in American pastors using their pulpits and religious freedom to attack the Christianization of culture given that the American nation was effectively founded by evangelical Puritans and was radically shaped throughout its history, in all its public institutions, by Christianity.” America’s founding is the fruit of her early pulpits who understood that government’s laws were simply religion articulated with clarity regarding the proper way a nation’s people behave as a political entity.

Author Dr. Alice Baldwin, educated at Cornell and the Sorbonne, became professor of history at Duke University. Her 20th century classic, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution is a rebuke to the 21st century American pulpit. She writes: “The constitutional convention and the written Constitution were children of the pulpit. To the men of New England who had been nourished from their youth on election sermons and who had been thoroughly enlightened by their pastors in theoretical and practical politics, it was natural to turn to the ministers when they needed someone to express their ideas of government.”

On Thursday, October 11, 1798, John Adams, second President of the United States, spoke to the militia of Massachusetts about the fact that the republic they’d just established relied not on government structures, but a people baptized with those Christian values which shaped our Constitution. President Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People.”

For the pulpits of America not to educate the American church on issues of private and public morality and morality’s relationship to politics, industry, and entertainment is akin to the establishment of a formal partnership with those who are intent on overseeing the destruction of America and its historic position of godly leadership in the world.

Even the famed German atheist, Jurgen Habbermas, once an academic who mocked Christianity, has since stated that the decay of Europe is due to one reason only: it has abandoned its Christian roots. He said, “Christianity has functioned as more than a precursor or catalyst . . . the ideas of individual morality, human rights, and democracy is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. To this day, there is no alternative to it. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”

For the pulpit to neglect to teach the Christian his civic duties is to turn 21st century civilization over to those who have no answers for mankind’s future but only a disdain for its Christian past.

Marcello Pera, the Italian intellectual and former President of the Italian Senate, stated, “The apostasy of Christianity is exposing the entire West to the risk of a grave cultural and political crisis, perhaps even to a collapse of civilization.”

It is the church who bears the good news that the future trajectory of all nations is to the throne of the King of kings (Isaiah 2:2,3; Micah 4:1,2). For that reason alone, the pulpits of America should be trumpeting the good news both Isaiah and our American founders made so clear: “Your God Reigns!” – Isaiah 52:7