“You cannot have one nation under God and have a socialist regime,” radio host Todd Starnes declared on The 700 Club while promoting his new book, “Culture Jihad.”
Starnes, the president of Starnes Media Group, made the comment in reference to leftist attacks on religious liberty in light of recent comments by Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke during a CNN town hall where he declared that any church that didn’t approve of same-sex marriage should lose its tax exempt status.
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The author and speaker pointed out that religious liberty is the primary target of left wing and secular groups, because “if you can take away religious liberty, every one of our rights begins to crumble.”
“[The left’s] ultimate goal is what President Obama wanted, and promised to do, to fundamentally transform America,” Starnes told CBN’s Pat Robertson. “They want to usher in socialism into the United States of America, and I believe that’s why they are especially targeting religious liberty.”
But Starnes said the biggest challenge facing American values of liberty and prosperity is not the militant leftists and secularists, but rather the American churches that have abandoned their role as the moral conscience of the nation’s people.
“We provide surveys and statistics that show many American pastors just do not want to engage the culture. They do not want to talk about these issues from the pulpit because they don’t want to offend people. We’ve got to engage, we’re supposed to be salt and light, unfortunately many of our churches in America are on a sodium free diet these days,” Starnes said.
Starnes continued by telling a story contained in his book about Oliver Hart, a pastor in South Carolina during the days of the Revolutionary War, and Pastor Hart constantly preached about “politics, freedom and liberty,” and he was eventually asked by the founding fathers to help round up an American army to fight the British for independence.
The American church today, Starnes said, can learn something from Pastor Hart and the colonial revolutionaries.
“I’m from the Deep South originally,” Starnes said, “and we have something called a hellfire and brimstone sermon at revival time, that’s what this book is to the American church. We got to wake up and take a stand.”