Talmage Charles Robert "Tal" Bachman is the son of Canadian rocker Randy Bachman, who is famous for having been in “The Guess Who” and having founded the band, “Bachman-Turner Overdrive.” Tal Bachman is an excellent musician in his own right, and had a smash hit in 1998, “She’s So High,” which reached No. 1 in Canada. The song was a Top 10 hit in the United States and internationally, earning music awards such as BMI's "Song of the Year" award, and much media exposure, including appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
With that sort of background, you would not expect Tal Bachman to be a serious Christian thinker and writer (or at least I wouldn’t), but you (and I) would be wrong. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science, and he studied himself out of Mormonism, concluding that Joseph Smith had invented the story about the Angel Moroni and the golden plates. This is clearly a guy with some intellectual seriousness.
But if anyone had any doubts about that, let her check out Tal’s latest column, “Christians, Come Back”:
As the years roll by, contemporary Christian churches increasingly abnegate their scripturally-prescribed role as fortified beacons of divine truth, and instead transform themselves into vehicles for a social justice pseudo-gospel completely incompatible with Christian (or Jewish, for that matter) scriptural teachings.
This has been going on for decades, of course, but its most striking manifestation of late has been the near-total failure of the Christian church to expose and reject the destructive fraud that is Black Lives Matter.
That kind of failure requires extraordinary ignorance, extraordinary cowardice, or both. After all, it's not like the veil hasn't come off Black Lives Matter, if it was ever there in the first place. Its founders openly profess their allegiance to Marxism, history's most genocidal ideology. Its members repeatedly encourage violence, destruction, and even murder. Its website calls for the "disruption of the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure", the end of accepting heterosexuality as normal, and the avoidance of "environments in which men are centered".
At least two of its leading lights—Patrisse Cullors and Malina Abdullah—practice a Yoruban zombie religion in which they may, or may not, sacrifice animals to invite the spirits of the dead to possess their bodies during their nightly riot activities. (Abdullah says she's become very friendly with the spirits of the dead, and has had a lot of laughs with one named "Wakeesha").
Oh, my. That is on the nose. Perhaps too much so.
These aren't the only Black Lives Matter lies, of course. It's a lie that there's an epidemic of racist police shootings. It's a lie that defunding the police will help black communities (it does just the opposite, and has already directly enabled the murder of hundreds more black people, including children).
It's even a lie that black lives matter to the members of Black Lives Matter. In reality, the only lives that matter to the Black Lives Matter crew are lives useful to advancing Marxism...which is why you've never seen, and never will see, any Black Lives Matter protests over the 250,000 blacks murdered by other blacks during the past 45 years, or the 19 million black babies aborted since Roe vs. Wade (the combined population of Ireland, Switzerland, Costa Rica, and Fiji), or the black police officers, active or retired, killed.
Those were all black lives, but Black Lives Matter didn't care about any of them. And they didn't care about them, because they weren't useful to the cause of advancing Marxism. The whole thing is a destructive fraud built on lies - and if you're a Christian, you know, or should know, where those came from.
Ouch! Too true. Then again, it is nothing that we haven’t been saying here for the past three months, although perhaps not so colorfully.
But wait, there’s more. He criticizes “utterly vacuous ‘praise songs’ which all sound like U2 album rejects from 1986,” and calls Pope Francis “a social justice twerp.” Okay, now I have a serious man crush.
More importantly and more incisively, Bachman connects the Christian church’s lack of spiritual discernment regarding Black Lives Matter with the feminization of the church:
In the estrogen-soaked La La Land that is the contemporary Christian church, this rotten, anti-black, anti-God, anti-American, anti-human organization is now being promoted on church billboards; its talking points are being trumpeted from pulpits; and pathetic caucasian "Christians" who have never committed a single act of racial discrimination in their entire lives are publicly confessing sins they've never committed, and never would. They're even tacitly accepting the Marxist, anti-Christian designation of race as an insuperable constraint on identity by apologizing for the color of their skin, on grounds their ancestors of the same color might have once done something racist. In sum, Christian America is in such a bad state, it can't even summon the strength or clarity to see through, let alone reject, the patently deceptive and patently destructive Black Lives Matter.
And...it's not the first time something like this has happened.
When the feminists showed up, Christians began pretending I Corinthians 14: 34-35, and Ephesians 5: 23-24 no longer existed.
When out-of-wedlock sex became more socially acceptable, Christians began pretending 1 Corinthians 6:9 no longer existed.
When divorce laws loosened, Christians began pretending Matthew 19:9 no longer existed.
When gay guys showed up demanding to be married in church, Christians began pretending 1 Timothy 1: 9-10 and Romans 1: 26-27 no longer existed.
And now, when an organization shows up actively trying to subvert the forthcoming election, cheering on murders, beating people up, falsely accusing people, inviting demonic possession so as to more effectively impose the Satanic ideology of Marxism, and browbeating the very religion which started the abolitionist and civil rights movements in the first place...again, Christians cave, and accommodate, and seek approval, and do everything except stick to their own principles, if they can even remember what those are supposed to be. Every time the culture advances, the church shrinks in response. Always.
He’s saying everything I’m thinking, only saying it more pointedly and succinctly than I could. Clearly, I should have been a rock star in my younger days; apparently it would have made me a better writer.
Tal has some advice for the Christian Church: stop retreating and re-learn your scriptural principles. Oh, and stop messing around with feminism:
Stop retreating. For one thing, you're losing members like crazy, and one big reason is that you don't stand for anything anymore; there's no reason for anyone to stick around. More to the practical point: that your faith is in perpetual retreat is bad for the country. America needs a strong, principled, action-oriented Christianity now more than ever.
Next, politely thank the female pastors for their service - but then - how to put this? - empower the guys again. You need a testosterone injection. I realize it sounds rude, but it's the only way. The denominations growing fastest are the more conservative, more patriarchal denominations, so there's that, plus you have your own actual scriptures which prescribe male pastoring, but proscribe female pastoring. So just do it so Islam doesn't pass you this century—especially when you had a 600 year head start. How embarrassing would that be?
He also recommends that churches get more serious about church discipline, and he’s also read Alexis de Toqueville:
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville described Christianity as the social, and even political, backbone of the fledgling republic. It bound American communities together. It supported American political ideas like equality under the law, separation of religious and political authority, tolerance for religious minorities, and cosmopolitanism. It was exactly the sort of civil religion—a republican Christianity—which Rousseau had earlier suggested could never exist.
Many do not understand the connection between Protestantism and the ability to maintain a Republican form of government. It looks like Tal Bachman gets it. So did Ellen White, who, of the Lamb-like beast of Revelation 13, wrote:
Here is a striking figure of the rise and growth of our own nation. And the lamb-like horns, emblems of innocence and gentleness, well represent the character of our government, as expressed in its two fundamental principles, Republicanism and Protestantism.
The Lord has done more for the United States than for any other country upon which the sun shines. Here He provided an asylum for His people, where they could worship Him according to the dictates of conscience. Here Christianity has progressed in its purity. The life-giving doctrine of the one Mediator between God and man has been freely taught. God designed that this country should ever remain free for all people to worship Him in accordance with the dictates of conscience. He designed that its civil institutions, in their expansive productions, should represent the freedom of gospel privileges. 4 Spirit of Prophecy 277
Protestantism and functioning representative self-government go hand in hand. If you want to understand why our republic seems to be faltering, look no further than than collapse of mainline Protestantism in America.
I look forward to reading more from Tal Bachman.
“For the LORD gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” Prov. 2:5