Don't Pray For A Leader; Pray For Readers

From American Vision:

Don’t Pray for a Leader, Pray for Readers!


By Bojidar Marinov
Published: June 16, 2010

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The other day, a dear friend of mine shared his frustration with the Conservative awakening. With all these people on the streets, active, educated, self-conscious about returning America to her roots, “we still don’t have a Conservative leader to lead them to victory.” There are many leaders on a local level, and they are brilliant and competent and young and they are willing to lay their life for the cause; but there isn’t one central leader to organize it all. Nothing like Ronald Reagan.



“I am praying for that leader to emerge,” he said.



My reply was, “I bet you the Left is praying for the same thing. They are certainly praying for that one central Conservative figure to emerge. They need him desperately. Once he emerges, the Left wins.”



The personality cult, the One Great Leader Who Leads the Masses has never been a Conservative value. It certainly has never been a Christian value. The very idea of Conservatism—and especially the American type Christian Conservatism—has always been suspicious toward a system where one person focuses the hopes and the expectations of the movement and leads them according to his will or goals. Christianity has always been firm that there is only one legitimate Leader—Jesus Christ—and He leads through His Holy Spirit. All human leaders are by default imperfect, fallible, and all of them need to be under close scrutiny and healthy criticism by the very people they lead into battle.



It is by no coincidence that we in America don’t have One Great Founding Father. Although we honor George Washington somewhat above the others, we talk about our Founding Fathers, many Fathers. It wasn’t one person that organized and led the First American Revolution, it was a constellation of local leaders who inspired, taught, encouraged their countrymen to fight against tyranny. They all contributed their share, and even though they weren’t always in agreement with each other, or sometimes even disliked one another personally, they were able to work together for the common cause, and they worked and fought like one man, with only Jesus Christ being their Leader and Captain. Compared to other revolutions in other nations, America did not have its Napoleon, nor its Bismark, nor its Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Atatürk, or Hussein. It was a collective effort of free individuals, each one educated and competent and committed, and willing to contribute their talents and effort to the victory over tyranny.



Even more than that, while we talk today about those political leaders as our Founding Fathers, in reality the real leadership was in the hands of the multitude of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Congregationalist preachers and ministers in the small villages and the coastal cities of the colonies. George Washington’s army did not almost freeze to death at Valley Forge for the sheer fear or worship of him as a military hero—he was still to prove as one. The peasant boys and young craftsmen’s apprentices were motivated by a call to a higher purpose in life; and such a call could come only from their pastors, for no politician can ever promise higher purpose in life. It was the “black regiment” of preachers who made it possible, and today we don’t even remember most of the names of those preachers who made America possible.



No, there wasn’t one person, One Leader who did it all. There was a generation of leaders with one purpose and one vision.



And just like then, today we don’t need One Great Leader to lead us.



If anything, the Left would like us to have one. The Left is running short of resources. They have never had too many educated and committed people anyway. The very doctrine of liberalism excludes the possibility of many independently thinking individuals. These days the Left is running out of manpower and of brainpower. Their best leader has proven incompetent and unable to lead—and even the leftist media are beginning to notice it. There is no resource in the Left; and there is no hope of getting resource. They are forced to rely on central leadership and blind, uneducated obedience by the unenlightened masses. And with the obsession with power that the Left has, power is the only factor for unity; there can’t be two alpha-males in the same Leftist pack, one must eat the other, or one must submit to the other.



The Left would like us to have One Leader. Their task will become easier. They will be able to focus their fire on him/her and try to push him/her out of balance. With the limited resources the Left has, that would be a dream situation for them. For the last year or so the Leftist media and political activists have been trying to locate that One single Leader that they believed would be the best target. They tried desperately to vilify or neutralize Ron Paul, or Rand Paul, or Jim DeMint, or Sarah Palin, or Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh, or Kevin Jackson, or others. But there is a problem. While all these names are acknowledged as authorities by one or another part of the new Conservative revival, the political fall of any one of them will signal the end of that revival. The current enthusiasm of the Conservative movement won’t recede even if all of these leaders suddenly drop out of the movement. It is not the leaders that energize the movement; it is the idea of liberty that does. In fact, if anything, a large part of the Conservative movement—especially the Tea Party—calls for the fall of quite a few of the established leadership in the Republican Party, and really does something about it.Such a situation has been unheard of in politics before.



It is a nightmare for the Left: Given the usual tactics of the Left, their resources are simply not enough to deal with such a mass pressure on the liberal establishment. No wonder Zbigniew Brzezinsky fears a “global awakening.” The Leftist elite have very little resource left. The Bible gives us the standard for the success of Christianity in history:



“Behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD. “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the LORD, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. “They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the LORD, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:31–34)



In this amazing prophecy and promise of the New Covenant, God declares that His New Covenant will be manifested in history by increased knowledge among all people. The need for a special class of leaders or teachers will diminish, exactly because all of God’s people will know Him and will know His will for their life and their society. It is the mark of a Christian society that common people won’t need to blindly follow and obey someone’s promises for “hope” and “change,” but they will be knowledgeable and enlightened and know where and how to achieve that change for the better.



While this promise was made specifically for the people of God, it still contains the principle for the success in history of any movement: mass awakening, increased knowledge and awareness of the goals and the causes of the movement. A movement that has the goal of producing one great leader is a movement that is destined to failure; praying for such a leader to emerge is praying for failure. In the long term, the Left cannot produce a successful movement because the very ideology of the Left is based on the blind unconscious obedience of the masses; the Conservative movement must be based on the opposite, on mass education and spreading of knowledge, on building a whole generation of leaders, who just like the Founding Fathers, will work together to achieve the goal. The more “little,” local leaders we have, the more Founding Fathers we have, the better.



The success of the Second American Revolution will be based on the same factor on which the success of the First was based. It is not the emergence of One Great Leader; it will be the ability of the many local leaders to persuade and energize the majority of Americans to read and learn and understand what America stands for. We need readers more than we need leaders. The First Revolution was produced in the printing presses in the colonies; the principle of producing Christian revolutions hasn’t changed since. It is still the same.



Therefore, my friend, don’t pray for that one leader; pray for many readers. It is a Satanic culture that is lead by one leader; a Godly society is based on the reading skills and reading discipline of its members.