Lucas Miles, Pastor and Host of “The Lucas Miles Show” on Faithwire, says a new “worship” song blasting Trump supporters and calling their Christianity into question is another sign of progressive politics infiltrating the church.
The song, titled “Hymn for the 81%” is a reference to the “white evangelicals” who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. “Worship music teaches and shapes us, so what we sing about really matters,” the writer of the song said. “There are a ton of great songs that help us praise and thank God, but worship music should also help us lament, reflect, confess, celebrate, challenge and push us outside the walls of the church to be the hands and feet of Christ.”
See Lucas’ full comments on Faithwire’s YouTube channel (and subscribe for free to get more news from a distinctly Christian perspective). Scroll below the video to read Miles’ comments.
“What we’re seeing is an example of leftist thought that is infiltrating the church,” Miles began. “I’m hearing a lack of education about politics,” he added, a reference to the song’s discussion about America’s immigration policies.
“This is an Obama policy that first started separating children at the border,” Miles points out. “He goes on later to talk about weaponizing religion and that’s the first thing I hear is, we’re weaponizing religion to divide people instead of bringing people together.”
Miles adds that while he disagrees with a lot of what the progressive Christian movement teaches, there are some positives we can learn from them. “I want to applaud left-leaning Christians. I think in many ways, their propensity to develop compassion within their heart is greater at times, maybe, than just the average Christian that’s out there,” he said.
“They really have a love for people, they want to see ideas of equality and justice and those are good things,” Miles explained. “The problem, though, is we have struggled to define love the way in which Jesus did. Love according to Jesus, according to the Gospel, is always about grace and truth.”
“The Bible says Jesus came in the fullness of grace and truth. When you elevate truth over grace you end up in legalism and bigotry, we certainly see examples of that in far-right political groups or religious groups. When you elevate grace at the expense of truth or excluding truth, what you end up with is essentially this permissivism this licentiousness this focus on acceptance and tolerance and truth no longer becomes a part of that conversation,” he concluded.
“Love is always in the context of ‘I can simultaneously have 100% grace for you through Christ while still being able to stand upon what is true’ and this idea of what the Bible calls righteousness that we see presented in the Gospel.”
Miles sees the growing divide in the church and wanted to point people back to the thing that’s supposed to unite us in the first place: God’s word.
“It’s a concerning thing for the church because we are seeing a divide that’s greater than ever before. There is this thing in Christianity that’s called orthodoxy. That’s a word that’s not used very often within evangelical circles,” Miles says. “I believe what orthodoxy is, if you think about it like a buoy that’s floating out in the ocean and that buoy is floating there and it’s able to float around in this circle because it’s connected with a chain that goes down to the bedrock of the ocean floor and has a big weight that centers it. As long as that buoy is connected to the chain it can float in this path. If we think about doctrine like this, everything within this circle is I believe what we call orthodoxy and it’s connected to the Word. The moment when we disconnect ourselves from the Word, what happens is doctrinal drift.”
The solution, Miles says, is to once again tether ourselves to God’s word.
“We start disconnecting ourselves from the Bible and slowly and progressively we see people drift outside of this orthodox circle — and I believe there’s room for a lot of different opinion within what is called orthodoxy. We don’t have to see things exactly alike. But anytime we completely sever ourselves from the Word or from particular scriptures, because Jesus is the word of God we’re actually cutting ourselves off from him and we’re going to have a tendency to drift into extremism on one side or another.”
If we focus on our feelings alone, Miles warns, it could lead to some trouble.
“Out of their feelings, they’re drifting into some really dangerous ground.”
Pray for the church, that we might cling to the truth of God’s word!