Conviction must be organized - Truth must be transmitted.

... if the Democratic Socialists of America want socialism, anti-Israel politics, abolishing ICE, and defunding the police as their official declaration of beliefs, priorities, and policy goals, then let them build their own party instead of hijacking the Democratic Party..."

Backed by New York City’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani and numerous far-Left organizations, Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates swept three congressional primaries in New York City last week, scoring major wins and sending a seismic warning through the Democratic establishment.

Even the irrepressible reviler James Carville [born 1944] has had it: “Let’s negotiate [the] terms of a schism here. Maybe we can part under some kind of advantageous terms for both of us, but I’m done.”

Meaning, if the Democratic Socialists of America want socialism, anti-Israel politics, abolishing ICE, and defunding the police as their official declaration of beliefs, priorities, and policy goals, then let them build their own party instead of hijacking the Democratic Party.

The socialist bucket list is plain enough: Medicare for All, college for all, housing for all, a Green New Deal, taxing the rich, ‘Free Palestine’, ending the ‘U.S. war machine’, open borders under the banner of ‘freedom of movement’, and neutering the reach and power of the U.S. Supreme Court.

This is not run-of-the-mill, garden-variety liberalism. It is an organized, hard-Left effort to kill the Democratic Party and replace it with a socialist one. As for socialism and communism, they are first cousins: socialists want to redistribute wealth through the system; communists want to seize and remake the system itself.

It is also not merely another battle between Democrats and Republicans, nor even a clash between conservatives and liberals. It is, as Os Guinness [born 1941] argues, a war between two revolutions: the first, 1776, rooted in ordered liberty under God; the second, 1789, unleashed in the French Revolution, severing freedom from faith, virtue, and restraint.

Guinness raises the question now standing before America: Can a nation born of ordered liberty sustain that liberty after cutting itself off from the very roots from which liberty grew?

M. Stanton Evans [1934-2015] understood that freedom is not a roadside weed; it is a cultivated orchid. It does not spring up unaided from any soil. Liberty requires a moral climate, constitutional safeguards, and a people formed in virtue.

Ignore those conditions, and the garden does not produce ordered liberty; it produces weeds. And the weeds of lawlessness, license, and tyranny now sprouting from the seeds of secularism are far more dangerous than anything growing in the fields of yesteryear.

Which brings us back to the Big Apple, and Margaret Thatcher’s warning that “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.” And, as the line attributed to Mark Twain puts it, “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” New York City’s wanton flirtation with socialism will soon provide such a lesson.

However, we evangelicals have our own problems.

The modern Church model of the last 75 years has been tried and found wanting. It has too often measured success by bodies in the pews, buildings on the campus, and fundraising prowess, while neglecting the harder work of forming citizens, transmitting Biblical conviction, and organizing for public responsibility.

Having watched secularism bankrupt American culture, we are hopefully nearing the end of the learning curve. We seem to be on the verge of understanding that podiums and pulpits within the four walls of the building do not equal dominion at the headwaters of culture.

Speaking opportunities and raucous applause lines do not equal organizational proficiency. And conviction without the machinery to place Biblical conservatives in local office will never answer Missouri Pastor Joe Nicola’s penetrating question: “Is my city or region looking more like the Kingdom of Heaven or the domain of darkness?”

It is an unfortunate confession, but the modern Church often knows more about who is tithing than who is registered to vote. We have built systems to measure giving, attendance, buildings, and budgets, but few mechanisms to move Biblical conviction from inside the building into civic responsibility and public action - the very arena where Jesus declared that “the gates of hell shall not prevail.”

This brings us to the practical fault line. The Left organizes its byzantine worldview precinct by precinct, school board by school board, legislative district by legislative district, and candidate pipeline by candidate pipeline. Too much of the evangelical Right turns conviction into conferences, banquets, and speaking engagements, and then calls it mobilization. One builds power. The other builds applause. New York City is: x.com/libsoftiktok/status/2071335319631188252?s=42

The Left does not merely preach its worldview. It organizes it. It recruits candidates, files them for office, builds pipelines, wins primaries, pressures incumbents, and turns ideology into political machinery.

The Church did not lose the culture merely by losing political fights; the Church lost the culture by retreating inside the building.

Over the last 75 years, we acquiesced to the steady drumbeat that Biblical faith is a privatized faith, satisfied with personal piety, while surrendering the public square to those living in rebellion against God. We were told politics is dirty and no place for believers.

Thankfully, the American Founders did not believe that. The Black Robe Regiment did not believe that. The pastors who preached from their pulpits the principles of the American Founding - “for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith,” as the Mayflower Compact put it - did not believe that.

They understood the covenantal responsibility of the ekklesia: the governing assembly entrusted with obligations extending to the whole of civic life. Matthew 16:18 was not about church architecture. It was a promise that the “gates” - the place of civic authority and power - “of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Gates do not attack. The Church was designed and commissioned to do so.

Cultural renewal will require removing Christian children from secular incubation centers masquerading as public education. It will require of us what it required of Nehemiah: pastors and spiritual leaders willing to leave the safety of private faith and build the wall in open sight, with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other.

That is the lesson for the Church. Biblical conviction without organization does not become public consequence. Truth must be transmitted. Conviction must be organized. And the Church must once again learn how to move from the pew to the precinct, from the pulpit to the public square, and from applause to actual power.

This is not as such a political problem. It is a spiritual problem in the Church.

Gideons and Rehabs have begun to stand.

David Lane

American Renewal Project