Writing in response to Dr. Robert Gagnon’s recent post declaring categorically that the entire Democratic Party is “demonic” (see below)—as an evangelical pastor, I’d like to offer another perspective. I’m doing by best here to follow Scripture in all this confusion—and I’m pretty sure the diagnosis is way worse than most of us think. God, help us all.

James calls “bitter jealousy and selfish ambition…demonic” (Ja. 3:14-15). Will you, Dr. Gagnon, apply that biblical standard across the board to both “parties”? No. You won’t. You would suddenly have to employ “nuance” for sins of the heart that are not nearly as measurable as murdered babies and flagrant sexual profligacy. Yet it’s no less demonic—is it?!—and it is far more insidious, precisely because of its immeasurability. Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, Bob.

Does it ever give anyone who thinks this way pause to consider that the “party” (the Pharisees) most adamant about reestablishing God’s holy Law in the land—unlike the shadowy principles from God’s Law we rightly work to see established in our land—were the primary object of Jesus’s rebukes and condemnations. That concerns me for readers of this kind of leavening rhetoric.

Let’s keep in mind: you can’t dispense with the entire first table of the Law, as well as the commandments against adultery and against covetousness, the latter of which Paul calls idolatry (Col. 3:5), and pretend you have anything like righteous laws in the land. Can you have any righteous laws if they are not predicated on the laws to have no other gods, no idols, no blasphemy, no Sabbath, no honoring of parents? What about not charging interest? What about laws concerning sojourners? What about the year of jubilee? They were all made to work together. Are we smarter than God? Have we progressed beyond all God’s commands? Can’t we just admit the whole system is ungodly in the most proper sense, even while we fight for justice as best we can?

This is why the Church is necessary. It’s an institution that alone follows God’s Law—because it alone worships the God who gave it in the “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1; 16)—but the Church can’t enforce them. To the degree the church takes up a sword to enforce “God’s law” it ceases to be the church. It ceases to understand its distinct identity and calling. The Church in our context takes up the sword today by taking the hand of those who, under God, are appointed to carry it. Instead of maintaining our proper prophetic distance, we lose ourselves in nuptial affairs thru rhetorical alliances. The upshot? Namely this: the more Christians fight for a church-sponsored state, the more they end up with a state-sponsored church. Then the two start looking strangely similar. I believe the church needs to start looking in the mirror.

Only the Church can obey the Law of God and the commands of its Lord, according to his standards of righteousness—keeping in mind that God is an extremist: “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (Ja. 2:10). We’re all guilty of all of it, because “he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law” (Ja. 2:11).

Unrighteousness ain’t about disobeying a command but disobeying the commander. Only the Church can obey the commands of God because they are confessionally obeying the Commander! Promoting laws without the Law-giver is a damning religious humanism. When morals and “godly principles” get abstracted from the God who gives neither, but who rather gives concrete commands, it creates scales of human judgment that form the basis for all manner of unholy alliances, none of which can be properly or practically understood as the Church.

God’s plan for the Church is to confess its own unrighteousness, and thereby the unrighteousness of the world, and proclaim the good news of God’s grace in Christ—and indeed to bear witness to his righteousness through the “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1; 16). That’s how the Church becomes a light to the nations. But the message in this post is effectively telling half the nation they are already light, because only the other side is dark, even demonic. Skubala!

I could be wrong, but I would hazard an educated guess that posts like these are not leading anyone to repentance and faith in the Gospel but are much more likely only perpetuating the cancerously growing problem of people gathering for themselves teachers to scratch their itching ears in a campaign of disgust against “others” whose overt unrighteousness distracts them from their covert self-righteousness. It’s all filthy rags.

The selfish ambition of absentee republican fathers is as filthy and demonic as the dead babies of would-be democrat mothers. Because it’s all entangled. You don’t get aborting mothers without the selfish ambition of abortion doctors and lustful men who refuse to be fathers. Is pornography less demonic than abortion? Are they in no causal relationship at a social level? What about no-fault divorce, first signed into law by the darling of the right, Ronald Reagan? Isn’t that the most explicitly anti-Christ political doctrine in America: “Husbands, divorce your wives as Christ divorced the Church for irreconcilable differences?!” Anathema! It was not so from the beginning. Where is the evangelical outrage about that? Where are the spines when it comes to calling out the sins of the right that reinforce the sins of the left.

But who’s going to say that? Who’s going to tell the truth and lose fans and sychophants on both sides? God’s Word offends our moral “Judeo-Christian” sensibilities. But that is because Judeo-Christian sensibilities are neither Jewish nor Christian.

This is just the problem. I will readily decry the injustice codified in democratic policy, but I will also readily point out that free market capitalism in our secular republic is nothing like the economic policy of God’s Law, much less the commands of our Lord by which we will be judged—and any evangelical who affirms the doctrine of original sin and not the inevitability of corporate corruption and social destructiveness (such as the recent announcement of the forthcoming release of interactive AI porn) is willfully ignorant, at best. I will also readily point out that saying God has given every man the unalienable right to pursue happiness is blasphemous and only promotes demonic selfish ambition above what James calls true religion that inconveniences itself with orphans and widows. I’ll also point out that “all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy (or bitter jealousy) of his neighbor” (Eccles. 4:4). It’s all demonic.

But who’s willing to say that? Who’s willing to stop scratching itching ears and offend everyone’s moral sensibilities with the News that leads to true repentance that shuts every mouth and humbles every heart—so that Christ alone is our righteousness and the Church alone is his light in the world:

“We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 Jn. 5:19).

—

But that’s not how I would typically speak in (digital) public discourse, because I don’t think it’s helpful. I think it buries the lead. I think people are utterly confused and emotively charged because of the onslaught of accusations that echo the voice of the enemy, the accuser, and people need to hear there is hope in Jesus. They need to hear Jesus’ headline to a world headed for hell and desperate for hope: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Jesus’ first words in the Sermon on the Mount).

Anything that makes people more prideful, smug, and self-assured in their disgust of the poor in spirit, however, is surely demonic.

God, forgive us. Christ, forgive me.