Focus on the Family president Jim Daly hosted conservative pastor Tony Evans to discuss the importance of voting yesterday, which Daly kicked off by claiming that just a single vote brought Texas into the Union, would have stopped Hitler from coming to power, made German a second language in the US and defeated John F. Kennedy. While of course every vote is important, unfortunately, Daly’s list is entirely false and based on urban legends.
Daly made sure to keep the program nominally nonpartisan but did discuss why evangelical voters should prefer a conservative non-Christian candidate over a left-leaning Christian and lamented the supposed tendency of African Americans to only vote only according to race. While it was already clear who Daly and Evans wanted listeners to support, they made their pitch more apparent when the two asserted that the current administration is quashing freedom and attacking Christians. Daly warned that government keeps getting “bigger and bigger and wants to take away more and more of our freedoms” and Evans maintained that there is an attempt “to remove God from government” by increasing its size and weakening freedom.
Daly: Going back to this idea when government gets bigger, our liberties tend to get smaller. The Founding Fathers were uniquely geared to understanding corrupt government and what happens when tyranny occurs. How do we guard against that in this modern day? It seems like nothing new under the sun is occurring and as government in the US gets bigger and bigger and wants to take away more and more of our freedoms, how do we actually respond?
Evans: I think the church of Jesus Christ has to rise up as a unit and say it is unacceptable to remove God from government, it is unhistorical, it is certainly biblio-centrically unacceptable and therefore we’re going to as responsible citizens raise up godly people to run for office; we are going to vote for people who have biblical value system to get into office; we are going to on the various levels of government make our voices heard; we are going to register our people to vote on Sunday after church; we are going to make a comprehensive statement that we are not to be denied as Christians our freedoms in America and we can argue clearly from the Bible on small government. You know 1 Samuel 8, He says if you elect a government of me it will expand, it is going to overtax you and it will take, take, take, take, take, and you will lose the freedom that I intended for you. That’s what is happening in America and that is why God’s people have got to vote for the right government.
Adding a dose of pseudo-history, Daly argued that the Founders established the US government according to the Bible and Evans said that the US is modeled after biblical Israel and the Garden of Eden.
Daly: Tony, as we look at the mandate in the Bible to vote there is so much there and the Founding Fathers again were brilliant in understanding God’s design for things and the Scripture is pretty clear and really the Founding Fathers in creating a Republic based it on their biblical understanding of God’s ordination of government, didn’t they?
Evans: Absolutely, they went right to Exodus 18, how Israel was organized as a representative government, and used that as a pattern for the government of the United States. The principles and the freedom which dominates the uniqueness of the United States is drawn right from Scripture, in fact freedom started with God in the Garden, ‘from every tree of the Garden you may freely eat,’ there was broad freedom, limited regulations and dire consequences, that’s how government is supposed to work, so whenever government gets too big it gets unbiblical.
