Dear Lou (part two)

Dear Lou,

Again, thanks for the call. We addressed the true subject of your letter, your anger at Jim Wallis for countering your crusade against illegal immigration, so let’s talk about the smoke and mirrors part of your letter.
First of all, why go after Jim Dobson? You can’t be serious! We the faithful are grateful for the attention he’s given the family over the years, but the man is wildly off his rocker these days, and we would appreciate it if you ignore most of what he says. The latest flap about him endorsing Newt Gingrich over Fred Thompson is just the latest example. We the faithful would rather recite the prose of T.S. Eliot, who said: “It must be clear that I do not mean by a Christian State one in which the rulers are chosen because of their qualifications, still less their eminence, as Christians”, than listen to Dobson off topic.
Now about the infamous Land Letter. Yes, it is possible to justify superficially the advent of many wars via the manipulation of Augustine’s Just War Theory. The Land Letter should remind us of the dangers of trusting neoconservatives disguised as preachers. I can’t help but nod in agreement with Bill Kauffman when he writes, “the soft young men in three-piece suits who write their little pamphlets proving that whatever slaughter our government is currently engaged in is a ‘just war’ should be laughed back to the seminaries they quit,” but let’s not use Land (or those “soft young men”) as the straw to reduce JWT to hay. It should be noted that Augustine’s principles for what qualifies military action as either just or unjust stands in line with what we agreed was the highest duty of government: “that of justice.”
So Lou, we (the faithful) plead with you, don’t confuse the loudest guys in the room for speaking for the rest of us. You’ve probably heard by now that one of the signers of the Land Letter, D. James Kennedy, closed the doors to his Washington office on the same day you sent your letter to us. You might consider that a personal triumph – fewer Christians in Washington, hooray! But there are quite a few of us who are glad he’s not on K Street or M Street misrepresenting us and confusing the roles of the church and the state. We believe that God has given both the church and the state to man, and, both possess distinct purposes as determined by the same God who created and sustains them. We also believe that we need to continue to seek God because as sinners, even we the faithful lose sight of God’s priorities and the justice that can only be defined because God has established it. In spite of the fact that we get it wrong sometimes, we will not disengage from the public square, because the square only exists because the God who put the stars in place has shown us in His Word what the He requires of us and it is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with… God” (Micah 6:8).

See you around,

We the Faithful