AsiAndy

The "third way" ministry strategy is foolish because it assumes both sides represent legitimate, good faith positions. It functions like a negotiation tactic. If one side is for horses and the other side is for unicorns, there is no third way because unicorns are fake. That's the problem with the "neither left nor right" approach. Have you noticed how the left's biggest concerns are vague? As it turns out, left leaning people have vilified people on the right for problems that turned out to be fake. The left's biggest complaints are narratives, -isms, and hard-to-define problems. They warned us about widespread sexual abuse in the SBC. That was fake. They warn us about "fundamentalism" or "legalism." That's fake. Those are notoriously hard to define words that evoke the necessary fear to push an agenda. They warn us about "climate change." The doomsday predictions about climate disaster are as reliable as predictions of the rapture. It's all fake. Scare tactics. They warn us about "systemic racism." That sounds plausible because we all know there are racist people out there. But then again, where is this systemic racism? Again, it's fake. It's a scary label that leverages fear to advance a leftist agenda. They tell us we need to fight for "social justice." But the phrase "social justice" is a left-coded weapon to advance Marxist policies. The real injustices we can see with our own two eyes are routinely ignored. Their cries of social justice are fake. They don't want real justice, they want fake justice that actually hurts real people. They tell us that Christians on the right have a problem with "tone." Our direct speech is not Christlike and it harms our public witness. That's fake. That's judging by a subjective standard that is used to silence the truth. Direct speech is always offensive to hard hearted unbelievers who want their sins to be affirmed instead of confronted. And yet, it is easy to demonstrate how often prominent evangelical leaders on the left use scorched earth rhetoric to mock and insult people on the right. This past weekend, leftists around the country participated in a "No Kings" protest. That's fake. Trump campaigned on a set of policies, he was elected by both popular vote and electoral college, winning every single swing state. It was a massive victory. Now he's doing exactly what he said he would do in the campaign. That's not being a "king," that's literally democracy, which people on the left claim to be protecting. That's what we need to understand about the leftist mindset. They are anxious people, afraid of boogeymen that don't exist. Since any of the above examples cannot be quantified with real data, they rely on isolated anecdotes and personal stories to give their pet issue the illusion of authenticity. An isolated story of sexual abuse or racism is used to paint a distorted picture of reality. The "third way" and "both sides" approach determines right and wrong by making comparisons. They find some leaked messages from a Republican group chat and present it to the public as though its the same thing as the overt, widespread, hate-filled, not-at-all-hidden calls for violence from political leaders. For all practical purposes, the third way approach puts two positions on equal footing, as though both are legitimate. When Christians on the right accept the "third way" framing, they are effectively neutering their own position. They are allowing fake concerns to get equal airtime to real concerns. Suppose an intruder is trying to break into your family's home. So you go into your children's room and tell them to hide in the closet. But the children say, "I can't! There's a monster in there!" What would you say? Clearly, there's a real threat and a fake threat. It's the responsibility of grownups to ignore the fake threat and confront the real threat. That's what conservatives are doing. What are these real threats? Here's a few... * 60 million dead babies and counting * Children being exposed to *ornography in schools, drag queen story hours, open debauchery of pride months, and the well documented effects of gender indoctrination on kids * Being locked down for months at a time, forced to wear masks that didn't help, people losing their jobs for not taking an experimental drug, and churches not allowed to gather for worship * Millions of illegal immigrants who don't share our way of life bringing literal idol worship into our country * Cities being overrun by crime with no accountability while judges let them go free time and time again Every one of the above examples are real life, well-documented, easy to demonstrate problems that affect real people, while most of the problems on the left are made up problems that may feel real but cannot be clearly identified, defined, and resolved. So that's why I reject the "third way" approach. It is foolish to say "for every mile of road there's two miles of ditch." That may sound wise but, again, it implies that both ditches are the same. For every "ditch" on the right, there's a bottomless abyss on the left.

This needs to be ended. Now. No one who voted for this administration wants this.

Just realized that this year marks the 20th anniversary of the Great Pumpkin!