Gary Hamrick is pastor of Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia, established with 18 charter members in 1991. He also serves as the Chief Chaplain for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and can be heard during weekdays on the radio across 27 states and the District of Columbia.
Pastor Hamrick’s Election Day 2024 sermon last Sunday, titled Church, Unite for the Soul of America, followed the concept established by the American Founders, beginning in the 1630s. He used for his sermon the two-volume collection of 55 sermons published in 1998 under the title Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730 to 1805.1
“These are sermons the pastors preached over many decades before and after the Revolutionary War, because they understood their duty to stand in the pulpit and to take God’s Word as the lens through which we evaluate everything. The pastors would speak out about the day’s issues, policies of the day, politicians of the day, and even candidates running for office. They were unashamed in their pulpits.
“That two-volume set records many of those sermons, and yes, even during the Colonial period, there was voting in America. We have the privilege of living here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the Virginia General Assembly is the oldest continuous law-making body in the Western Hemisphere, established on July 30, 1619.
“So, we have a great heritage here in Virginia of voting, and in other states, of pastors proclaiming God’s Word as the standard by which we evaluate all the issues of the day. And so the church has always played, historically, at least in our country, a critical role in speaking out about faith and politics, and how faith should shape our politics.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAAWC_UROoA
Election Day sermons in the 17th and 18th centuries placed American Christianity squarely in the center of the public arena. William McKane [1921-2004], the Scottish biblical scholar, pointed to Solomon for the scriptural admonition from Proverbs 8.
Wisdom, McKane said, does not recoil from the rough and tumble of the marketplace with its busyness and noise. She operates where the competition is fiercest. She picks a place where the human traffic is heaviest, the busiest, and the most public places in the town, where they gather for social intercourse and business transactions.
This, of course, is not where contemporary Christendom can be found. It is instead largely hidden under the bushel inside the four walls of the church building, with no mechanism to transfer the Gospel dunamis power to the culture.
Three significant institutions shaped the life of the Jewish people: the Temple, the synagogue, and the Ekklesia, notes Ed Silvoso. The first two were religious. The third was secular. Jesus did not state, ‘I will build My temple’ or ‘I will build My synagogue,’ the two most prominent Jewish religious institutions at the time. Instead, He chose a secular entity first developed by the Greeks when He said, “I will build my Ekklesia” [Gr. Ekklesia – the called-out ones] “and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against [them].” [Matthew 16:18]
As for the Tale of Two Americas, Early America aimed at imbuing America’s youth with knowledge, integrity, and moral character explicitly laid out in Scripture, in sharp contrast to the goals of contemporary public education. The 20th-century Warren Court [1953-1959], Burger Court [1969-1986], Rehnquist Court [1986-2005], and the 21st-century Roberts Court [2005-present] – all products of public education – all exalted and normalized vice:
• Removal of prayer [Engel v. Vitale; 1962].
• Banning of the Bible from public education [Abington School District v. Schempp; 1963].
• Heralding the slaughter of pre- and post-born babies [Roe v. Wade; 1973].
• Consecrating sodomy [Lawrence v. Texas; 2003].
• Commending and lionizing same-sex marriage [Obergefell v. Hodges; 2015].
• Conferring ‘special rights’ to homosexuals and transgenders [Bostock v. Clayton County; 2020].
In terms of counteracting the ongoing secularization of American culture, the North Carolina Renewal Project will have hosted by the end of October 2024, 40 NC pastors’ luncheons statewide since 2020. As a result of our 2022 effort, 50 NC pastors and spiritual leaders ran for local offices across the state – city council, school board, county commissioner, state representative, etc.2
Twenty-five won the primary, and 10 won the general election. Three of the 13 newly elected NC State House Members in 2022 were pastors.3
During the 2020-2024 period, 17 cities hosted NC Renewal Project events: Raleigh [5], Henderson [2], Greenville [3], Willow Spring [1], White Lake [2], Jacksonville [1], Statesville [4], Hendersonville [1], Asheville [1], Kannapolis [2], Metrolina [3], Asheboro [4], Pinehurst [1], Jamestown [4], Winston-Salem [2], Greensboro [2], and Monroe [2].
Host pastors included Matt McCarthy, Jamestown; David Frye, Raleigh; Todd Marlow, Metrolina; Boyd Byerly, Asheboro; Brent Tysinger, Asheboro; Greg Sloop, Kannapolis; Brad Kelley, Monroe; Mike Burner, Statesville; Ricky Rueda, Jacksonville; Cameron McGill, Lake Church; Chad Harvey, Raleigh; Gary Blalock, Greensboro; Cletis Titus, Winston-Salem; Tim Butler, Greenville; Josh Brown, Willow Spring; Abidan Shah, Henderson; Russell Rowland, Pinehurst; Steve Morrison, Hendersonville; Ronnie Pittman, Asheville; Dennis Willis, Greensboro.
Host churches included Calvary Chapel [2], Assembly of God [1], Church of God [4], SBC [7], IFBC [3], Pentecostal Holiness [1], and Independent Charismatic [2].
Four thousand four hundred and seven [4,407] NC pastors and spiritual leaders attended these events, including Free Will Baptists, conservative Baptists, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Nazarenes, United Methodists, Southern Methodists, Wesleyans, and Cowboy Churches.
With that said, we come to the crux of the problem in America; anyone who thinks that what is happening in America has to do with Democrats versus Republicans has been disconnected from reality. In actual fact, the battle is between God Jehovah and the false god of secularism.
If Christians stay home from the voting booth on Tuesday, November 5, then those who hate God will elect their representatives, who then draft and pass legislation and codify into law their blasphemous values.
The tragedy is that 40 million Evangelicals will not vote on Election Day, thereby maintaining contemporary culture as the uncontested public manifestation of the false religion dominating America. vimeo.com/1005930020
Yet, as America’s fortunes have sunk to a low spiritual ebb, men and women of Issachar “who know the times and know what to do” are entering America’s public square. A cloud the size of a man’s hand is just over the horizon as Jehovah is raising His representatives.
In God’s unending order, something more than natural courage and daring is “required in the one whom the Lord would employ – he must be a humble man of God, that the glory might rebound unto Him alone. [To do that] the instrument had first to be prepared for the tasks to be performed – the servant fitted for the service he must do.
“‘God must first do His work with Gideon before Gideon could do his work for God. To accomplish this, God makes the wine press of Joash to be to Gideon what He made the backside of the desert to be to Moses [E.W.B.].’ The servant of God must first be made to feel his weakness before [being] taught that all-sufficient strength is available in the Lord. Thus it was with Gideon; thus it is still.”4
As such, Gideons and Rahabs are entering America’s public square. Let’s pray that every State will replicate the North Carolina model.
David Lane
American Renewal Project
1. www.amazon.com/Political-Sermons-American-Founding-1730-1805/dp/0865971811
2. www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/pushing-evangelicals-into-politics-to-create-a-biblically-based-culture/2022/05/17/716053a5-3d89-4d7a-b768-22a26150a037_video.html
3. www.westernjournal.com/floyd-brown-vote-delivery-machine-rescued-north-carolina-dems-save-country/
4. A.W. Pink, An Exposition of Hebrews.
