The election of President Trump, as well as rightward movements in Europe, are prompting US conservatives to speak of the death of socialism. This is abject blindness. It is socialists that are being rejected, not socialism.

America has already embraced socialism in the forms of public education, social security, and even healthcare, where we choose between the socialism of Obamacare on the Left and the socialism-lite of Trumpcare on the faux-Right. Our President is a pragmatic populist, not a principled conservative. Hence, when he ran for office he named conservatives to his cabinet because his base wanted them, but once in office has embraced socialism in healthcare because the electorate at large wants it. As for the philosophical differences between the two, they don’t matter to a self-styled dealmaker-in-chief.

Our nation’s political choices mirror the people’s mood, not their convictions. That’s because mood has replaced conviction, just as celebrities have replaced heroes. Our worldviews—and Christians have been lambs to the slaughter in this regard—are shaped, not by books and reading, but by videos, short social posts and the like. In turn, this enables demagogues, from Trump to Sanders, to disrupt our elections, if not our entire culture.

A sleeping man never sets his own alarm, hence cold-water posts like this one. American Christians had better awaken quickly. Facebook prayer requests accompanied by pictures of Jesus’ arms wrapped around President Trump are the Velvet Elvis of evangelicalism. They’re not merely corny—they’re offensive, because they portray both bad theology and bad taste. Did we post such requests for President Obama? Nope. But why? Was it latent racism? Contrary to the sincere beliefs of many African America Christians, (whose worldviews, as sloppily formed as those of their white brothers, but by different forces) the answer is another Nope. It wasn’t brown skin but the pink politics of Barack Obama that offended the intuitive, blind sensibilities of politically conservative Christians, whereas President Trump merely dulls those sensibilities. But Novocain is never a good subsitute for an alarm clock.

Want to hear the alarm? Ring, ring: it was Bernie Sanders’ popularity amongst the young, not Trump’s election by aging Boomers, that portends America’s future. And American Christians had better start putting a sharp scriptural lens to politics, economics and a host of other subjects if we want to avoid the paradise that used to be the Soviet Union and is now Venezuela.

It’s time to put the flag back in its stand and pick up a Bible.

There’s no point in hinting around. Studying the Bible isn’t optional, but most Christians find it taxing to establish a routine. Consequently, they either restrict their time in God’s Word to some little promise book, or they just put it off altogether. Naturally, the promise book is good, but it no more substitutes for serious reading than a donut and coffee take the place of a balanced meal. How can the Holy Spirit guide us into “all truth” if we just consider truth a snack food?

We’re a generation that has grown up on websites, magazines, tv, movies and 12-minute YouTube shows, so we find it difficult to read more than a chapter or two in a sitting … or a week … or a month. Frankly, a lot of us just won’t read anything unless it’s published twelve times a year in color or easy to find on Google. But don’t be depressed. There are understandable reasons why you don’t read your Bible like you should. If you’re the typical Christian:

• You read the Scriptures for “spiritual guidance” rather than practical instruction.
• No matter how much you read, you just don’t understand a lot of it.
• You have no idea how much Bible knowledge is “enough,” so you’re defeated right out of the gate.

The important thing is to get into Scripture as a manual for living, not just to find “proof-texts” for defending your faith. So, to that end here are six rules—I don’t really like the word “rules,” but we’ll use it—that will help you to see the Scriptures as the practical guide it was meant to be.

Rule Number One: Read the Bible like today’s news

The Bible is intended to give you practical information that concerns the real world. Quit looking to achieve some inner glow; this is news you can use! For example, the Fifth Commandment says to “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12). You can meditate all day long on that verse, searching for warm fuzzies of enlightenment and inspiration. But it is actually an important, practical commandment, with a wonderful promise attached for those who obey it, and a cold, hard warning implied for those who don’t. Read it again. It simply shows that a long and blessed life begins with honoring those who gave you life. Enjoying the future begins with respect for the past. It could just as easilyhave been phrased, “Do unto your parents as you someday would have your children do unto you.” The flip-side? The man who fails to honor his parents will likely also fail to teach his children to do the same. That’s just misery on a lay-away plan.

Rule Number Two: Read the Bible by the authors’ division points

Forget the chapter and verse partitions the translators later added. These scholars often started or ended passages in odd places. For example, Ephesians 5:22 through 6:9 is a complete section about families, which easily could be considered its own chapter. Read it that way, and you’ll see what I mean. Several newer editions of the Bible have dealt with this problem by grouping verses into naturally flowing paragraphs. Get one.

Rule Number Three: Look for Jesus in every book

Always be open to the big picture—life in Christ—when you read God’s Word. Don’t let yourself get lost in Exodus or numbed by Numbers. They were written to reveal to you His character, and to establish you in His ways. The overarching theme of the Bible is God’s covenantal relationship with man. This means that even those musty old laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy ultimately were written as practical instruction on Christian living. The apostle Paul was confident enough of this fact to claim that a passage about oxen was really a lesson to Christians about proper payment for services rendered.

For it is written in the Law of Moses: “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn’t he Yes, this was written for us, because when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest. (1 Corinthians 9:9-10; see also 1 Timothy 5:17-18 regarding Paul’s claim that good pastors deserve bigger salaries.)

Never forget what Paul knew so well: The Old Testament is all about the New Covenant.

Rule Number Four: Don’t “claim” every scripture you read

Don’t individualize every scripture you read. The Bible was written to a people, not a person. So many Christians get tripped up trying to individually appropriate promises that were written to God’s people as a community. For example, Joe Christian sees God’s promise in Deuteronomy 28:13 to make His people “the head, not the tail,” and takes it as God’s will that a promotion is inevitable at work. Then, after he’s been laid off, he’s not only worried about his financial future, but he’s also plagued with accusations that his faith must be defective.

In truth, that Scripture, like so many others, was written as a promise of corporate blessing for corporate obedience to God’s commandments. In other words, when faithfulness becomes a social trend, blessing multiplies. Likewise, when disobedience is the cultural rule of thumb, widespread suffering is sure to follow (often even afflicting the few good people who may live among the wicked majority). Psalm 150 says to praise God with stringed instruments, flute, and trumpet, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to take lessons. It simply means somebody should.

As you study, keep in mind that you’re one member in a whole body. You’ll never understand every word, any more than you can fulfill every prophecy or claim every blessing. Which leads us to our last rule …

Rule Number Five: Don’t try to walk in light you haven’t seen

Don’t worry about what you don’t know. Just be confident in what you do know, and honest when you don’t. Don’t be afraid to say, “I’m stumped,” when you’re stumped. And keep reading.

Remember, only God knows how much knowledge is “enough,” because the answer is always changing as you grow. The “path of the just” is getting brighter and brighter like the rising sun, as the Holy Spirit transforms us day by day. Sure, the world could use a few more good theologians. But a mail clerk who can intelligently comment on the Ten Commandments is as valuable to the cause of Christ as any wise man hunched over a Hebrew manuscript in some light-deprived library.

Rule Number Six: Who you know is more important than what you know

None of the first five rules count if you don’t grasp this one: Who you know is ultimately more important than what you know. Abraham’s rock-solid faith was stated this way: “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able…” It wasn’t what Abraham believed but whom he believed.

Ditto Mary and Martha. The last few verses of Luke 10 show Jesus and his disciples arriving unannounced at the home of Mary, Martha and his good friend, Lazarus. Naturally, Martha wanted to be a good hostess, so she got up and started busying herself with serving Jesus (the most fitting use of that term ever). Meanwhile, Mary just sat at his feet listening to him talk.

Martha accused her sister of being lazy, and I have to admit, the first time I read that passage I took Martha’s side. There was work to be done, and Mary just wanted to start a “bless me” club. Of course, I quickly realized that this position put me on the opposite side of Jesus—never a good thing when you’re in professional ministry.

Then it hit me: Martha was so busy serving Jesus that she didn’t have time for him. And neither I.

Bottom line: Don’t be so busy being a student of the word that you forget to enjoy being a child of God.

(A post in which James toots his own horn, and thereby blows it)

Polar opposites in virtually every way except their common consecration to God and his Word, Mark Nauroth and James Gilbert, aka The Worldview Guys, are as unlikely a combination as waffles and fried chicken. In other words, bring these two together and things just work, especially when they’re writing, podcasting or hosting their brand new venture, The Worldview Course.

Ask the young millennial from California and the…uh, “older gentleman” from Florida why they’ve joined forces to become the “Guys” and you’ll get a single answer: “We’re out to win the culture, not the culture war.”

“The Worldview Course is a 13-session video series we wrote and cohosted for a target audience that includes both small groups and families,” explains Mark. We purposely staged it like a giant Apple commercial, and gave the whole project a fun and slightly irreverent tone.”

The course includes both DVD and online video, a sleek 145-page study guide with wide margins for journaling, online testing and more. “We’re both communicators: a writer and a web designer,” says James, “and we share a passion to connect the dots between God’s word and John Q. Public’s world.”

“Most biblical worldview teaching is long on philosophy and short on application,” adds Mark. “In The Worldview Course we concentrate on the latter, showing how the Bible applies to five key categories of everyday life: politics, economics, education, religion and social issues.”

Mark and James were first introduced by Dan Smithwick, founder of Nehemiah Institute, whose acclaimed worldview assessment tool, The PEERS Test, drew the interest of both men. James, an author and Christian missions statesman with extensive experience in cross-cultural communication and worldview studies, was quickly becoming Nehemiah Institute’s go-to instructor in educational settings. Mark, a successful “entreprenerd” whose expertise in Internet programming and design is rivaled only by his knowledge of church history and Koine Greek, had come to Smithwick with a plan to transfer The PEERS Test from its 20th-Century paper format to a 21st-Century home online. The result? PEERS is now an integral part of The Worldview Course.

The two men are odd bookends. Mark, a Millennial, quotes the early church Fathers with ease, while James, a preacher’s son born in the 1950s, is quicker to draw from today’s news, a Star Trek rerun or his latest mission to Cuba or Iraq. Together, these two form a sum greater than its parts. And they’re just getting started.

Early in the fight for America’s soul, rationalists emerged from within the ranks of the Congregationalist churches in New England where, in no small part as a reaction to the stirrings of what would become America’s Second Great Awakening, they began to propound “Unitarianism,” a heresy as old as the Reformation itself. Unitarians saw man as inherently good, Jesus as strictly human, Satan as non-existent and God as a hands-off Creator. Evil was attributable to a lack of education and opportunity (sound familiar?) thus rendering sin the playing out of ignorance and repression. Give a man enough information, their reasoning went, and his natural inclination must be to better himself and his world around him.

Information plus opportunity equals paradise. It was an idea as old as the seduction of Eve, and it proved as powerful, especially around Boston. By the early nineteenth century the new world’s first Congregational church had bitten the apple to become America’s first Unitarian church.

While the evangelists of both Awakenings had drawn thousands to arbors and altars where tears of repentance were emphasized, these humanist forebears quietly set their sights on key areas of society like economics, civil government, and especially education.

Harvard College had been founded in 1636 by the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the purpose of training young men for Christian ministry. But by 1800 Unitarianism, the intellectual vogue throughout New England, had gained a foothold there. Finally in 1805, upon gaining the school’s professorship of divinity, the Unitarians captured Harvard’s soul as well. They immediately purged the institution of its Calvinist members, and with them their orthodox Christianity.

The “new and improved” Harvard University would provide its students with a superior “humanist” education. But the school’s secular saviors now faced their second challenge: Where would they find a steady stream of intelligent, non-religious secondary school graduates capable of passing Harvard’s stringent entrance examinations? Such  youngsters would be ideally suited, they thought, for their “enlightened” approach. The obvious agent for such a school, or system of schools, would be the civil government, which itself was increasingly being accepted as a secular, religiously neutral institution. Moreover, there was no need to create such a system when an existing one could be transformed to meet the need.

Nearby the city of Boston had a diverse network of educational institutions—church schools, charity schools for the poor, home tutors, private schools, trade schools—as well as a system of “common schools.” These were public secondary schools, originally established by Massachusetts’ constitutional law as a feeder system for Harvard’s seminary, so as to ensure that the Holy Commonwealth would always have an adequate supply of ministers. These public schools had become the stronghold of Boston’s affluent Unitarian community, whose children comprised the largest percentage of their students. But then, as today, public schools were not as efficiently or economically administrated as their private counterparts. They were, in fact, slowly drying up at a time when Harvard’s messianic vision required fresh faces.

The private schools were overwhelmingly Christian in their orientation and curricula. Most of them also maintained well-funded scholarship programs for children whose families were otherwise too poor to pay tuition costs. Nonetheless a small percentage of the city’s children remained out of school, mostly due to parental choice rather than a lack of opportunity or funds. Harvard seized upon this statistic and, joined by Boston’s Unitarian elite, began a propaganda campaign calling for an expanded system of public schools, primary and secondary, with free education for all of the city’s children. Most of their rationale was lifted from an essay entitled “A New View of Society,” a virtual socialist manifesto, written by England’s Robert Owen, the father of modern socialism.

The campaign succeeded beyond their wildest rationalist dreams. In 1837 the Massachusetts Board of Education was established, with avid humanist lawyer Horace Mann as Secretary. By 1850 a law authorizing the establishment of free schools had been passed in New York. Within a few years public education would become the national norm, as Americans accepted the idea of free schools almost as quickly as their taxes rose.

Private schools, financially unable to compete, shrank both in size and influence. Harvard had lost its soul and gained a whole nation. Fully approved and subsidized by a tax-paying, predominantly Christian populace, public education was adopted from border to border, under the benign administration of a religiously “neutral” civil government. In years to come this same stance of neutrality would be adopted by public education’s most avid proponent and self-appointed guardian, the National Education Association. Of course, the ensuing century-and-a-three-quarters have seen the humanist elite in American education constantly redefine the concept of neutrality, from an originally assumed meaning of denominationally neutral Christian, to non-evangelistic Christian, to “values free,” to today’s prevalent and increasingly overt anti-Christian hegemony.

And here we are. Today, the overwhelming majority of Christian parents across America routinely send their children to a nearby public school, the one institution in town where they are guaranteed never to be instructed in God’s word, and where they are likely as not to be taught thirty hours per week by teachers whom, in many cases, they would reject for one hour per week in Sunday School.

But hey, it’s free.