Long ago, in a Sunday School classroom in northeast Mississippi, 15 women sat looking at the papers and crayons in front of them.
Each week, they attended the Sunday morning class I taught. But that morning, they must have wondered if they’d accidentally entered a kindergarten room. Each paper held a coloring-book version of the American flag.
“Today I’d like for you to color the flag,” I said. The women selected crayons and went to work. When finished, each showed a flag with red and white stripes and white stars on a blue background.
“Why did you choose those colors?” I asked.
“Because they’re the colors of the American flag,” they answered, laughing.
“How do you know?” I asked.
Their faces said, “Obviously, because it’s what we’ve seen and been told all our lives.”
That star-spangled banner
Then, I wondered aloud:
But what if someone decided to alter the colors of the American flag ever so slightly? What if that someone were a person of influence and so, while a few folks protested, most didn’t even notice, and other persons of influence followed suit?
What if these influencers had substantial resources? Some owned flag-making companies. Some owned publishing companies. As they made flags and published books with flag pictures, they colluded – over time – to make more subtle changes in the flag’s colors.
They made these changes deliberately because of their bent toward other colors. They made the changes slowly to bring along a general populace known to have a short memory.
By the time they introduced the magenta, beige and turquoise flag, the influencers could silence the outcry of a few fanatics simply by saying, “All enlightened people know these are the correct and original colors of the American flag.”
By the time the flag flew black, pink and green, the masses were booing dissenters and the authorities, jailing them.
Then a few folks dared to search out actual documents from the flag creators. They found that the American flag was supposed to be red, white and blue, and they began to speak up. Few listened because everyone already had the latest version of the flag and no one wanted to fly a different one. Many never heard this startling news because it didn’t suit the influencers to broadcast it.
And so, in this pretend story, the American people continued to fly flags that bore less and less resemblance to the one that inspired the Pledge of Allegiance and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
A whole new light
I can still remember the little room – in a building that no longer houses a church – where I told that story maybe 40 years ago. I can still recall where I stood in the room as I told it.
What Scripture were we studying? I don’t know. But I do know the point I was trying to illustrate. Though I wouldn’t have said it this way back then, I was showing how deceit can work in our human systems, apart from God.
Two decades passed. In 2003, I included the story in my local newspaper column.
Two more decades passed. On the Fourth of July week 2024, the American flag story came to my mind for the first time in years. It seemed important, timely, so I found it, read it – and saw the parable I had told so many years ago, in a whole new light.
A deeply distressing light.
What I had not seen
As a young adult, I thought I knew how subtly and thoroughly deceit can mislead us. I tried to speak up to warn.
Yet as I read again the parable I myself had told back then, I realized how much I had not seen.
For one thing, my story shows ever deepening deception – that may cause concern, but does little real harm.
Now I know: Deceit does more than change the colors of things. Insidiously, it destroys. Hiding in plain sight, it connives its way into our lives. Working nonstop to overthrow truth, it blinds, warps, manipulates and goads people, until, seemingly overnight, it can morph us – or someone we care about – into someone we don’t know at all.
The longer deceit continues unchecked, the more ruthlessly, and boldly, it destroys.
What I did not dream
Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, I did not dream that, in my lifetime, leaders in the US church would convince so many to embrace such skewed views of God, Christianity and country.
I did not know it had happened before.
I did not know people of influence were already taking covert first steps toward making it happen again.
Key influencers in the nation had recognized a large voting bloc in “the silent majority.” In time, they had connected with key influencers in the conservative church – many of them self-seeking, as well.
Together, the duplicitous began using everyone else to pursue goals they carefully disguised. Seeking power over, they fooled us into believing they were pro-life. What’s more, they fooled us into accepting carefully constricted pro-life views.
Creating outrage, they presented their teachings and their rules as the only biblical and moral options. Creating panic, they presented themselves as the ones who had come to save.
In these ways and more, they promoted a false premise and a false promise: to help make America a Christian nation again. By political means, of course. They declared all who fell in with them, “the Moral Majority.” They gave the same name to their powerful political lobby.
And thus:
Conservative influencers of 40 years ago
started us on a path to wedding church and state.
Even back then, I would have told you, “The church is the Bride of Christ.” Yet part of me fell for the rhetoric, the fearmongering, the calls to action – not knowing where they were taking us step-by-step.
Thus, even as I warned others to be alert to deception, for decades I totally missed it.
How deceit works
Fast forward to today. Key influencers embedded in the church, or associating themselves with it, pursue power, status, power, wealth, power. Deceiving and being deceived, they cling to anyone or anything that promises what they seek.
Tirelessly, they’ve worked to form the church in their image – while still maintaining the illusion that their kingdoms belong to Christ.
Now, they openly seek to commingle the nation and the church. And they’ve begun to reveal their real goal: to rule, and to ensure that everyone bows before them.
Such leaders still use guile, as needed. But these days, they’ve largely abandoned subtlety. Now, they can publicly do and say what defies Christ – and still keep their motives and agenda hidden, from themselves, and from other leaders and followers who believe them to be great men and women of God.
That’s how deceit works. Stealthily, it leads us farther and farther from the truth. By the time it shows its real colors, we can be hurtling the wrong way on a busy highway in a very dense fog – oblivious to the chaos, the danger, the destruction that escalates as we go.
God’s cries to us
The One who died and rose again in our behalf knows better than anyone:
Evil can deceive us
far more subtly
and far more thoroughly
than we have believed possible.
Seeing it happening, the Lord Jesus cries to his own:
My kingdom is not of this world.
(John 18:36)
Or, put another way:
My kingship does not derive its authority from this world’s order of things. (CJB)
The Spirit of Christ points us to the night he uttered that cry. Roman soldiers and Jewish temple guards had stormed into Gethsemane to arrest him. Followers who expected their Messiah to rule a certain land as an earthly king wanted to fight to keep him free. But Jesus would not let them.
He reminds us now:
I’m not that kind of king,
not the world’s kind of king.
(MSG)
Oh my people!
Scripture indicates Jesus will come again one day to rule. No matter what anyone tells you: We do not know how that will look. But we can know:
Jesus will never rule
like the world’s kind of king.
And we can never make his kingdom come.
Not by our own efforts.
Not in our chosen time frame.
Not to gain our own ends.
When our leaders try to usher in Christ’s kingdom with political maneuvering, coercion and force, the Lord cries out to warn:
O My people!
Your leaders lead you astray
And confuse (destroy, swallow up)
the direction of your paths.
(Isa. 3:12 AMP)
The Lord proclaims:
Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter. (Isa 5:20)
I am your God
The Lord urges us not to follow such leaders into a pit, and reproves us when we do.
Through Paul:
I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ.
For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough. (2 Cor. 11:3-4)
Through Jeremiah:
A horrible and shocking thing
has happened in the land:
The prophets prophesy lies,
the priests rule by their own authority,
and my people love it this way.
But what will you do in the end? (Jer. 5:30-31)
In the Psalms:
Listen, my people, and I will speak;
I will testify against you:
I am God, your God.
What right have you to recite my laws
or take my covenant on your lips?
You hate my instruction
and cast my words behind you.
When you see a thief, you join with him;
you throw in your lot with adulterers.
You use your mouth for evil
and harness your tongue to deceit.
You sit and testify against your brother
and slander your own mother’s son.
When you did these things and I kept silent,
you thought I was exactly like you.
But I now arraign you
and set my accusations before you. (Ps. 50:7, 16-21)
And again:
Listen to me, O my people, while I give you stern warnings.
If you would only listen to me! (Ps. 71:8 NLT)
He gives greater grace
Insidiously, incrementally, key leaders in the US evangelical/charismatic church world have led millions to bow before another Jesus, and in his name to adopt attitudes behaviors, plans and goals that the true Lord Jesus hates.
If you cannot see that, the Lord can show you. He longs to show you. But you will have to let him in, past all the deceptions, reasonings and fears calling light darkness and darkness light.
Because I’ve been there – profoundly misled by deception, utterly unable to see – I can testify:
Through HIM: We find courage to ask, “Show me what I cannot see but desperately need to see.” We wait and watch for his answer – and we begin to see through the fog.
Through HIM, who confronts in order to restore, we humble ourselves, and own our blindness. As he enlightens us, patiently but firmly over time, we admit each wrong motive, word and deed that his searchlight reveals. Stopping, turning, we go the other way.
If you have seen deception overtaking much of the US church, you may have felt utterly bewildered, deeply grieved, very alone. You may have been pummeled, or shunned, or both, for trying to share your viewpoint with people you love.
I’ve been there, too. Please know: It is good and right to press in to see the truth, to speak it and to live from it. Whenever we do the opposite – no matter how we may excuse it – we unleash the opposite of light and life.
Know also: When evil seems invincible (and invisible to those who most need to see it), it is good and right to grieve. As we do, we discover the blessing of mourning – and we increase our capacity to conduct amazing grace into that very place.
My cry for us
Lord, our Lord,
We are your people, called by your name. Yet deceit has worked in our midst so successfully for so long …
We have no collective memory
of a church wed to Jesus alone.
Grant us grace to see how profoundly deception has misled us and how cruelly it destroys.
Teach us to recognize what is not you, but masquerades as you – to renounce it and to turn from it. Teach us to know you, listen to you, follow you.
Father, Son, Spirit, restore to us what the deceiver has so treacherously stolen from us. For the sake of your holy name, restore your people to yourself.
See also
- The world in church clothing
- The great righteousness-justice divide
- Journey to a divided heart
- Humble your soul, release your spirit
- The blessing of mourning
- The truth will set you free
- When evil seems invincible: Two surprising sources of hope
Discover more from Key Truths
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