Scott Pruitt is a Christian. Why do evangelical Christians support Scott Pruitt even though he is in hot water? What does Genesis 1 mean? What does it look like when we subdue the earth? In this, the first episode of Season 2, we take a look at Scott Pruitt’s public history with the Christian faith. We also interview reporters from the NPR story, Joe Wertz (@JoeWertz) and Tom Dreisbach (@TomDreisbach).
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Links:
Data from the Environmental Working Group
Story from StateImpact Oklahoma
Congressional Hearing of Scott Pruitt via C-SPAN
Full audio and video of faith summit from the podcast episode via C-SPAN
Full CBN story featured in the episode
After listening to the Scott Pruit piece I’m left wondering how Christians should respond to the onslaught of threats from our liberal government? Do we keep our mouths shut and watch as Rome burns? Should we be involved in politics at all, which seems to be the elephant in the room here. The left continues to push their agenda that we all conform to their wokeness, pick your gender, share your bathroom, tolerate what God calls sin, worship the creation rather than the Creator, kill the unborn. NPR is one of their greatest mouthpieces and has been funded with taxpayer money since 1971.
It’s funny that you bring up the idea of watching Rome burn because the early church didn’t fight Roman culture. Instead, they prayed and shared the gospel, lived righteous lives, shared what they had, and were persecuted mercilessly by Nero and others like him. That is our example. Not “winners”, not people who “took back the country”, but people who were willing to die for their faith if need be. Not die to defend their people, but die to prove that they were committed to Jesus. By doing so, they changed the world.
We absolutely have precedent in the Bible to keep pure doctine and expel immoral Christians from our churches. But when it comes to the world, we don’t see Jesus expelling the Romans or the disciples fighting persecution.
Here is what we are told to do for “those people” in the world:
* Pray
* Serve
* Bless
* Give
Here is what we do to “our people”:
* Disciple
* Hold to the Bible’s standards of righteousness
* Prepare them to share their faith
* Encourage them as servants
* Forgive them when they mess up
* Humbly ask for forgiveness when we mess up
* Send them to the world
Also, it’s worth noting that the US government is not purely liberal. There are lots of politically and ideologically conservative people in the government even today. Even when President Trump was in charge there were still these concerns, and when we’ve had a majority conservative government we’ve seen big moral questions. If conservatives want to gain political ground their best bet is to follow Reagan’s lead in his second presidential election and seek “Morning in America” instead of trading on fear. Some of the recent excesses in “wokeness” are only issues because conservatives can’t seem to shake racism and their fear of universal health care. If they could shake those hang ups, they would be way more effective. Since they can’t, the opposition will get louder and more extreme. The conservative movement needs to learn how to serve, take care of people, and come up with ideas on how to improve government instead of just crossing their arms and digging in their heels.
Finally, NPR is far from perfect. But this story they did about Pruitt was enlightening. They receive only a small amount of funding from public funds: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances
We can talk about public funding another time 🙂 I’d happily argue that professional sports teams and the NFL get way more preferential treatment.