Tim Wildmon
AFA president
May 2016 – I don’t watch the daytime television talk show The View, but I do see clips every so often. It is a roundtable talk show featuring women who discuss current events and people in the news. It’s usually made up of three or four liberals and one token conservative.
Recently, on one episode, they were discussing presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz and the National Enquirer’s story suggesting he has had multiple extramarital affairs. Of course, it went viral immediately.
Both women named in the story and Sen. Cruz adamantly denied there was any truth to these claims, but with tabloids like this, truth doesn’t matter. They sell magazines based on rumors, innuendo, and flat-out lies.
In this instance, I was stunned by the comments of Michelle Collins, one of The View’s co-hosts. Here is what she said about the National Enquirer story: “He (Cruz) is such a guy about family values, you know, and he lives by this kind of crazy moral code. So I like to watch people like that fall.”
It was left for the lone conservative, Candace Cameron-Bure, to offer a response to Collins’s vitriolic comments. Cameron-Bure said, “Crazy moral code? Michelle, crazy moral code? He lives by Christian values from what he says he does, and that’s a crazy moral code?”
Collins went on to say she likes to see people who attempt to live up to a moral standard “ruined” when they fail to succeed at it.
What? Regardless of your political views, why would you hope someone fails in an attempt to live a moral life? What generates that kind of hatred in a person?
In the gospel of John chapters 14-17, almost all the words are in red letters, indicating that they are the words of Jesus Christ. In John 15:18-21, Jesus says this to His followers: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (ESV).
The world hates Christians who stand for biblical morality. We experience this here at American Family Association. We take public stands for godly values, and the secular left reacts with anger, name-calling, and bitter denouncement. Groups such as Right Wing Watch, Freedom From Religion, and the Human Rights Campaign (LGBT) constantly fight against whatever AFA and other conservative or Christian groups stand for.
In the case of Cruz and Collins, it doesn’t make any sense, because people like Collins demand tolerance and declare they want people to be free to live as they please. Yet it infuriates them when Christians choose a lifestyle guided by a moral code. Why does this inflame them so? I believe it’s a fulfillment of the verses I quoted earlier from Jesus.
Christians in America today are targets of the secular left because we believe in a fixed moral code given to us by God. We believe in absolute truth, e.g., the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. We know sin is real, so we believe in the need for repentance before God. We believe in salvation coming only through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We believe in striving to live righteous lives.
Satan hates these things. And people who live in spiritual darkness likewise refuse to tolerate Christians who openly advocate a moral code or cite Jesus’s requirement for holiness because it forces them to look at their own lives. In other words, sin loves company.
The Bible teaches that we are to strive for right living before God. It also teaches that when we fail to meet that standard, there is forgiveness for those who come to Christ in true faith and repentance. In His grace, Christ exchanges His own righteousness for our sin, and promises to supply all we need to live a life that more and more resembles His.
May the Lord help us all in this lifelong endeavor. 
