Hey, Tim Walz isn’t so bad. In an age when leftists compete with one another in how much they can repudiate and mock traditional values, it is surprising and refreshing to discover that the Democrats’ shiny new vice-presidential candidate, America’s dad, is a regular churchgoer. Walz’s Christian piety, however, is not exactly the sort of thing that would put you in mind of Augustine, Aquinas, Martin Luther, Mother Theresa, or any other prominent Christian you’d care to name. In fact, it’s just the sort of thing you’d expect: the far left at prayer.
The Daily Caller reported Wednesday that Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz attends a church, all right, but you will not be surprised to learn that it’s not exactly a bastion of Christianity as it has been known up until these enlightened days. Walz attends Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minn., where the worship is as woke as it can be. If it weren’t for the folks walking around in robes and the occasional prayers, Walz might sometimes get confused and think that he is at a Democrat party meeting, for Pilgrim Lutheran is little more than the Democrat platform in ecclesiastical trappings.
Pilgrim Lutheran’s stances on everything are tediously predictable, and 100% in line with the latest far-left wisdom. The Caller notes that “materials published by Pilgrim Lutheran Church instruct parishioners not to refer to God using male pronouns, push congregants to support reparation funds, encourage them to celebrate Ramadan and include a modified gender-neutral version of the Lord’s Prayer, among other liberal practices.” Of course. Anything else would be racist, bigoted, sexist, and “Islamophobic.” Pilgrim Lutheran’s leadership would no doubt rather be burned at the stake rather than be accused of any of those beyond-mortal sins.
Walz’s church is, of course, not singular to his corner of the Minnesota Soviet Socialist Republic. Woke churches have spread all over our fair land, and are full of the blue-haired, gender-confused, and heavily tattooed whenever they feel the need to give the appearance that God or Gaia or Almighty Whoever heartily approves of their activities.
Pilgrim Lutheran itself is an outpost of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), which ditched traditional Protestant Christianity quite some time ago in order to chase after the left’s latest cultural fads and imbue them with a patina of sanctity. And so it is no surprise once again that the ELCA not only has female bishops but lesbian bishops, as well as female bishops who are really men but have demanded that everyone around them pretend that they’re women.
Unchanging dogma? Inspired scripture? Come on, man! Pilgrim Lutheran Church is far too up-to-date for that. In 2015, it adopted “Commitments and Guidelines for Language in Worship” that call for “recognition that a patriarchal culture gave birth to the writing of scripture and the selection of the canon. Unless the language is adjusted as we use scripture in the more inclusive culture of the 21st century, the worship service can be an alienating rather than a welcoming and evangelizing experience.”
All right. It’s reasonable in principle to try to communicate with the people you’re trying to reach in their own language, but when Pilgrim Lutheran speaks of “evangelizing,” it’s not at all clear which gospel it is exactly that they’re trying to spread. The guidelines direct people at Pilgrim Lutheran to “choose non-anthropomorphic language for God (examples: Eagle, baker, hen, bread), being careful not to limit these by following them with male or female pronouns.”
Okay, so God is an eagle, God is a baker, God is a hen, but never fear, God is still also Father, sort of. The guidelines say that people at Pilgrim Lutheran should “choose titles that suggest the activity of God but do not imply gender. (Examples: Advocate, Healer, Refuge, Sustainer, Creator).” However, they also use an ersatz Lord’s Prayer that ditches “Our Father who art in heaven” for the trendier “Our Guardian, Our Mother, Our Father in heaven.” At least they got “Father” in there, but the way things are going, He may soon lose his place to Our Trans God.
No aspect of traditional Christianity is spared. The Incarnate God of traditional Christianity became a male, but the guidelines try to help churchgoers gloss over that embarrassing detail: “Keep in mind that although Jesus was male, his humanity is more significant to our faith than his gender. Consider using terms like Christ, Teacher, Emmanuel, Savior, Redeemer, Word in addition to or as substitute for Lord or other exclusively male descriptors.”
Related: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre: ‘Trans People Are Sacred. We Are the Divine.’
Despite all this, Walz’s church calls itself Lutheran, which implies that it’s still Christian in some way, but if old Martin Luther himself were to walk into it, he would scarcely recognize it as having anything to do with what he preached. And of course, most of the focus is not on anything religious at all, but on aspects of the far-left’s agenda.
The church issued a statement recently that read: “We white citizens and congregants have been complicit in the systematic exclusion of Black, Indigenous, Immigrant and other People of Color from full participation in and benefit from the common good. We lament the suffering caused by our racism. We endeavor to live more fully a Gospel commitment to love our neighbors as ourselves by listening well, changing our hearts, and partnering with our neighbors in building an antiracist community of justice where all may thrive.” In other words, press that blue lever in November.
Pilgrim Lutheran is hardly Christian, and as Chesterton said, when men discard Christianity, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything. At Walz’s church, that includes Islam: Pilgrim Lutheran encouraged its people to “attend meals celebrating the Muslim holy day of Ramadan and by providing them signs to paste in their windows wishing those around them a ‘Blessed Ramadan.’” Got to be inclusive, doncha know. Never mind that one can become so very inclusive as to have no principles of one’s own, and that’s where Pilgrim Lutheran and Tim Walz are. If the Democrats ever change their stance on an issue, so will Pilgrim Lutheran Church. It’s a leftist mouthpiece posing as a church, just as Walz himself is a leftist mouthpiece posing as a patriot.
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