Christianity

After years of Obama-era State Department obfuscations and Orwellian redactions, it was heartening to hear Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lay the blame for the ‘horrific wave’ of bombings at international hotels and Catholic churches across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday where it belongs: at the feet of ‘Islamic radical terror.’ Pompeo stated at a press conference Monday that ‘radical Islamic terror remains a threat’ and that the US, along with international partners, is working against the ‘evil’ of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other radical Islamist groups. That’s a far cry from the antics of the State Department under Obama.

Religious faith may be declining in America but it is still a cultural force to be reckoned with, looming large in any general election cycle. Courting religious voters remains a factor in the calculus of any prospective presidential candidate, especially as neither party seems a natural home for many of them. Americans are actually losing their religion rather faster than their faith. A recent poll showed that ‘nones’ – those without a religious affiliation –  are now the country’s largest group for the first time: Americans are increasingly defining their own faith, and not asking a church to do it for them. In this landscape, what a ‘Christian’ believes as a core value is suddenly malleable and open to influences from all sides.

For over half a century, we’ve been misunderstanding Martin Luther King. Our secular minds are programmed to see him as a civil rights activist, but as another MLK Day comes and goes, it is time to see King as he saw himself: as a priest and a prophet. Today, we tend to understand prophecy as focused on prediction. The nature of biblical prophecy and the word’s classical origins have been forgotten. Pro, the prefix of the Greek word prophetes means ‘fore’, but also ‘forth’. To be a prophet is to ‘fore-tell’ but equally to ‘forth-tell’ – to be a divinely-inspired forecaster or to preach moral, spiritual and political messages. King saw his role as the latter.