It's amazing that we employ all of those people, and have a nearly unlimited budget, yet a guy who was being monitored by our government still managed to board a plane with explosive underpants. Our million-man State Security army didn't pick up on it. Fortunately the guy sitting next to him on the plane did.

On a Monday morning in December 2012, police in the United Kingdom arrested a dozen terror suspects in a sweep in England and Wales. At 4 P.M. that same day journalist Diane Sawyer asked James Clapper, director of national intelligence, "First of all, London. How serious is it? Any implication that it was coming here?"

Clapper, who looked like a deer caught in headlights, took a long pause and replied, "London?"

That a man in his position had absolutely no idea of major terror sweeps in London is incredible-and very telling. Everyone near a TV, radio, computer, smartphone, or newspaper knew about London! Everyone, apparently, except the guy at the helm of the national security leviathan we created.

This massive security operation sucks up tremendous amounts of information, yet can't even come close to processing it all. Hunting terrorists was already like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Now that haystack is the size of a small city.

THE WAR ON US.

You and I know how difficult it is to pry power out of the hands of the government once they've taken it. You and I also know that when you have a government complex that employs nearly a million individuals and has countless corporate interests, they will do what it takes to justify their existence-even to the detriment of the country they insist they want to protect.

That's why it's not at all insane to worry about the direction we're headed and harbor fears of a future Orwellian nightmare state. The technology to empower it already exists. The will to disregard the Constitution already exists. The "War on Terror" that the government uses to justify its power grab continues without any end in sight. And our track record of trading liberty for "security" has not been a positive one at all.

A massive governmental and corporate security apparatus now operates in the shadows, outside of the law and at tremendous expense to the United States taxpayer. The casual surveillance of innocent American citizens was once unthinkable. Now it's absolutely routine.

It's become so routine, in fact, that the police state mentality trickles down to the citizens: A Minnesota girl is suing her school district after administrators pressured her to give up her Facebook password so that they could access her account. Colleges and employers have asked applicants for their passwords as well. In one instance, job applicants at the Maryland Department of Corrections were asked to log into their Facebook accounts so that the interviewer could browse their wall posts, photos, and anything else of interest. Some colleges are requiring student-athletes to "friend" coaches or compliance officers so that their online behavior can be monitored.

The America we live in today is remarkably different than the America we lived in on the morning of September 11, 2001. I worry that the children we're now raising will grow up to think that having their emails monitored, phone calls intercepted, whereabouts tracked, bags searched, and bodies groped by "security" personnel is perfectly normal. That being detained indefinitely or assassinated without due process is somehow okay.

It's not normal. It's not okay.

We have to constantly remind ourselves of that. And we have to constantly remind ourselves of what has happened since that moment when we all looked up to see a plane fly into the World Trade Center. We've changed. A lot.

And that is the true legacy of Osama bin Laden: The birth of the American police state. When I say that "bin Laden won" I'm not being flippant. I'm being honest. Destruction of buildings and planes is shocking and horrific and can damage a country for years; but the destruction of our Constitution will damage us forever.

"You change society by changing the wind. Change the wind, transform the debate, recast the discussion, alter the context in which political discussions are being made, and you will change the outcomes. . . . You will be surprised at how fast the politicians adjust to the change in the wind."

-Jim Wallis IT'S AN AMAZING TIME to be an American. We are standing on the edge. To one side is a course that leads us back to maximum freedom and minimum government; and on the other is a path that virtually every other country in the history of the world has walked.

The battle over which way we fall is being fought in a lot of different places. Obviously there are the voting booths, but there are also our classrooms, our television sets, and, of course, our churches.

Our churches?

Unfortunately, yes. Many of us like to pretend it's not the case or, even if we do see it happening, that we are personally strong enough to ignore those parts of the sermon-but there is no doubt that our churches are now a battleground for political ideology.

In fact, it's been this way for quite some time. It's just that now those of us who understand both scripture and the Constitution are finally beginning to put our hands up to say, Hey, wait a second, those two things, both of which are sacred to us, are not mutually exclusive-in fact, it's just the opposite: they must be read together.

Entire books have been written about the role of faith and God in America's founding, and I don't intend to rehash it here, but suffice it to say that America's earliest settlers fled oppressive governments in Europe that dominated every aspect of civil society, including religion. As a result, most Americans since then have embraced a religious faith that demands personal liberty and limited government-the very principles that are reflected in our Constitution.

But there's a big problem with that kind of faith: it leaves no room for progressivism. How can the government grow and expand its power if, every Sunday, Americans are being reminded that their faith favors exactly the opposite?

The truth is that it can't-and so something had to change. But before we get to how the change happened, it's important to first understand why we got to this place and who's responsible. So, let's start with a quick refresher on religion in America and exactly why big-government progressives were left shopping for a new home.

THE LEFT FINDS RELIGION.

The percentage of Americans who attend and belong to a church has remained constant for over seventy years. But predominantly liberal mainline Protestant denominations have lost members for almost fifty years-with no end in sight for their spiral. Their membership losses range from about 20 to 50 percent, even while the U.S. population has increased by 50 percent.

Why?

Know Your Mainline

The "seven sisters" of mainline Protestantism are the United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), Episcopal Church, American Baptist Church, United Church of Christ, and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

I don't think it's a coincidence that these once great denominations have been rotted from the inside out by their elites' rejection of traditional beliefs and embrace of the Social Gospel's notion of "social justice." And, not coincidentally, that shift leftward started right around the time the Progressive era was getting into full swing.

In 1907, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., among leading Methodists, including then U.S. vice president Charles Fairbanks, the Methodist Federation for Social Service (MFSS) arose. MFSS, led by Harry Ward (who would later gain infamy as a pro-Soviet apologist during the reign of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin), drafted a "Social Creed" focused on "equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life," protections from occupational hazards, abolition of child labor, safeguards for women, reduced working hours, and the highest "wage that each industry can afford." The initial version of the Creed was very modest, especially by modern-day standards.

The Original Social Network

Walter Rauschenbusch, a liberal Baptist minister from upstate New York, helped found the "Social Gospel" movement, which asserted that Christianity was not so much about personal redemption as social reform-especially combating poverty and militarism. The Protestant Social Gospel of the early twentieth century sometimes merged with much more mainstream nineteenth-century Roman Catholic notions about "social justice."

Original Catholic ideas about social justice affirmed their church's core teachings about God and salvation, but in the twentieth century, liberal Protestants and Catholics often joined together under the "social justice" banner to advocate big government while minimizing traditional Christian teachings about human sin that warn against centralized power.

In 1908, MFSS persuaded the Methodist Episcopal Church, then America's largest Protestant church, to adopt the Creed. It was the first time a major denomination had endorsed a social creed. The Methodists enthusiastically declared: "We believe that in the teachings of the New Testament will be found the ultimate solution of all the problems of our social order. . . . When the spirit of Christ shall pervade the hearts of individuals and when his law of love to God and man shall dominate human society, then the evils which vex our civilization shall disappear."

Full of confidence about the anticipated coming age of social justice, peace, and prosperity, the Methodists sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "America" at their convention. In 1908, Methodist bishops warned against trying to create utopia via class warfare, citing "reckless anarchists." They celebrated America's private philanthropy, noting that "nowhere in the world does wealth manifest its obligation to contribute to the public welfare as in the United States." They added that education, religion, and philanthropy all benefit from the "munificence" of "rich men of America."

Unfortunately, those warnings would soon be forgotten. Like all progressive policy, the first version is just a test balloon, something to make the public think you are reasonable, even mainstream. Only once people have decided that the policy is harmless do progressives begin to shift it toward their real agenda.

The Federal Council of Churches, encompassing thirty-two major denominations, soon endorsed an expanded version of Methodism's Social Creed, adding support for old-age pensions and the "abatement of poverty." As a result, nearly all of mainline Protestantism, which included most of America's most influential churches, was now tied to the Social Gospel and its emphasis on a perverted version of social justice. Other groups, like the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), also went on to endorse the creed, giving it even more mainstream appeal.

Given their success, Social Gospel's enthusiasts quickly became more ambitious in their goals and began to switch their focus from labor rights to assail the "profit motive," that is to say, capitalism. A few even provocatively praised the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. In the early 1920s, for example, Lewis O. Hartman, a prominent editor of a Methodist magazine, visited the Soviet Union. Upon his return to the United States he declared that Marxism was very similar to Christianity in "ideals of social justice and fair play." Having met Leon Trotsky and reviewed Soviet troops in Red Square, he announced: "The Soviet regime . . . is essentially a struggle for human freedom, and the Communist leaders with all their mistakes are sincere, honest men working for what they conceive to be the good of humanity."

In the 1920s, Social Gospel liberals solidified their control over mainline Protestantism's seminaries and agencies. Kirby Page, a prominent Disciples of Christ minister and activist, exulted, "Among all the trades, occupations, and professions in this country, few can produce as high a percentage of Socialists as can the ministry."

He was right. The Federal Council of Churches soon amended and expanded its Social Creed to urge "subordination for speculation and the profit motive to the creative and cooperative spirit." And it urged "social planning and control of the credit and monetary systems and the economic processes for the common good."

Many senior churchmen complained the New Deal did not go far enough. For example, in 1933 the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops insisted that "Christ demands a new order . . . which shall substitute the motive of service for the motive of gain." Episcopal bishop Edward Parsons went even further: "We are living in the twilight of the gods of capitalism."

The following year, northern Presbyterians urged "new motives besides those of money-making and self-interest" to create an "economic system more consistent with Christian ideals." They also denounced "competition" as the "major controlling principle of our economic life" and instead urged "secure rational planning." And, in 1935, New York Methodist clergy opined that the New Deal failed its own "high-sounding prophecies of the economic temple cleansers" and instead "blindly" upheld capitalism's "exploitation."

Those views continued to deepen over the ensuing decades. By the 1960s, Liberation Theology, which claimed that the church's role was not to preach salvation, but to help overthrow unjust (that is, capitalist) economic and political systems (even aligning with violent revolution if necessary), began to gain notoriety. It began among Latin American leftist Catholics like Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez, who credited Marxism for focusing on a "transformation of the world." By the 1980s, mainline Protestant officials in the United States were impressed enough to launch pilgrimages to the Sandinista promised land to learn more. One Methodist bishop denounced attacks on Liberation Theology as "an act of blasphemy."

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, before the Soviet bloc fell, mainline Protestant officials, along with their missions and lobby agencies and groups like the National and World Councils of Churches, enthusiastically supported communist revolutions around the world. Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega preached from a Methodist pulpit in New York to a gushing congregation, which hailed him as "Brother Ortega." And officials from the National Council of Churches, along with clergy from sixteen Protestant denominations and two Catholic orders, enthusiastically met with Fidel Castro at the Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York in 1995.

By the end of the twentieth century, mainline churches had become sidelined. Liberal politics and theology, which deemphasized personal faith and evangelism, fueled a membership exodus that is now in its sixth decade. In the early 1960s, one in five Americans belonged to one of the seven largest mainline Protestant churches.

By 2012, it was less than one in fifteen.

Even worse, the Religious Left may have captured the imaginations of mainline Protestant church bureaucracies and elites, but they never fully captured the hearts or minds of most church members. In spite of their efforts, the rank-and-file Protestants who remained still tended to vote Republican.

THE RISE OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT.

While the mainline denominations were fading, another group was growing rapidly: evangelicals.

Evangelical churches began to surge in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the mainline churches were turning to the Social Gospel. The 2001 World Christian Encyclopedia estimated that U.S. evangelicals numbered about 45 million in 1970, comprising about 22 percent of the U.S. population. By 2000, the number had exploded to nearly 100 million, or 35 percent of the population. Southern Baptists surged beyond once dominant United Methodists. The Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination, swept past the once prestigious Episcopal Church.

Evangelicals are now the country's largest religious demographic. And they are overwhelmingly conservative.

Like America's founders, evangelicals tend to believe in liberty, limited government, and entrepreneurship. A majority of the Tea Party is evangelical. Small business owners also are disproportionately evangelical. Evangelicals were central to Republican electoral victories in 2004 and 2010.

Sensing the shifting tides, the mainstream media stopped putting political pronouncements from groups like the National Council of Churches on their front pages and instead focused-not always happily-on the rise of the Religious Right, embodied by groups such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and later, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. Policy makers followed suit (don't they always?) and began to ignore pronouncements from the old Religious Left.

But if you thought progressives would sit back and allow this to happen, you don't know them very well. Smart leftist philanthropies, including those run by George Soros, knew that electoral victories required evangelical votes. And once strident street radicals like longtime Religious Left activist Jim Wallis recognized that the old techniques of angry protest no longer worked, they needed a new strategy, something that could be used to co-opt suburban evangelicals and show the media and policy makers that they were still relevant.

And, with that, the Evangelical Left was born.

Targeting evangelicals with their causes like environmentalism, welfare expansion, disarming America, and ending our special relationship with Israel, leftist activists and philanthropies have, especially since the 2004 election, attempted to shift evangelicals away from their concerns about abortion and traditional marriage.

Meanwhile, the Left's social gospel advocates have been working to capture evangelical elites, especially academics, students, ministry workers, and some larger church pastors who aspire for approval from urban secular elites. Strategists understand that peeling even a small minority of evangelical voters away could dramatically change things in their favor. And, just as important for anyone trying to influence the political system: winning over evangelical elites who claim to speak for large evangelical institutions can provide powerful images and sound bites for the media.

But, despite these campaigns, rank-and-file evangelicals remain strongly conservative-over 70 percent voted Republican in the 2010 midterm elections. Does that mean the Evangelical Left has failed? Unfortunately, no; just the opposite: it means they are just getting started.

But, if that's the case, then this cause, this relentless push by the Evangelical Left toward, essentially, socialism in the name of Jesus, needs a leader; someone with enough street cred and experience to take a radical approach and make it look mainstream. Someone who might even have access to the president himself.

America, I'd like to introduce you to the evangelical pastor Jim Wallis.

WHAT WOULD JESUS CUT?.

Organized religion is a funny thing. People can claim to "speak for" large swaths of followers when, in reality, they have absolutely no standing to do so. I guess in that way it's a lot like politics. A politician can go on a Sunday morning talk show and pretend to speak for an entire party even though the actual voters in that party may have very different ideas.

Of course, the media doesn't care. Trot out someone with a fancy title and they're more than happy to give that person a microphone. The Left knows how to play this game very well.

For example, remember the recent crisis over the statutory limit on our national debt? Congress was deadlocked over tax increases and spending limits on welfare and entitlement and it was all serving to put President Obama between a rock and a hard place. How, given America's exploding national debt, could he possibly be seen as reckless enough to allow the spending party to continue? But, on the other side, he had another election to worry about. Caving to Republicans would put him in a terrible spot. How could he get out of this mess?

Enter longtime Religious Left activist Jim Wallis.

Wallis led an ecumenical delegation into the White House to offer their spiritual solidarity with the president. Claiming to speak for most of America's Christians, Wallis's spiritual photo op with President Obama included representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches, the Salvation Army, and the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. The group's rhetorical appeal to the country was "What Would Jesus Cut?" as they announced that they would stand as a "Circle of Protection" around federal antipoverty programs.

"If you're going to come after the poor, you have to go through us first."

These religious elites collectively represented over 120 million American church members-at least on paper. In reality? Who knows. And, honestly, if you're the media, who cares? The photo op and sound bites (like this one from Wallis: "If you're going to come after the poor, you have to go through us first") were all the Left needed. Ultimately Congress and the president agreed to theoretical "cuts" of perhaps $2.5 trillion over ten years. "It appears that the voice of the faith community was at least heard and made some difference in the outcome of the default debate," Wallis announced, commending the White House for having "protected low-income entitlement programs" and Medicaid. He complained that the deal's "most glaring problem" was no tax increases. But, whether the deal met his approval or not, Wallis had made himself the most prominent face in the Circle of Protection's coalition.

And, with that, Jim Wallis, a man who'd spent his life toiling in obscurity and craving mainstream appeal, had become the face of the Evangelical Left.

OBAMA'S LEFT-HAND MAN Pastor Wallis is an interesting choice for a leader. Raised in a small evangelical church called the Plymouth Brethren, Wallis himself has rarely, if ever, publicly detailed his own personal faith beliefs. He typically defines himself as "evangelical," though he represents no church, except for a small circle of leftist activists who sometimes meet for prayer in his Washington, D.C., office. He has also led a liberal activist group called "Sojourners" for over thirty years and publishes a magazine by the same name.

Hanoi Jim?

Sojourners is the successor to Wallis's journal that he originally founded in 1971, titled the Post American, which celebrated the ostensible end of American dominance. "To be Christian in this time is to be post-American," it rejoiced, while trumpeting Wallis's anti-American opinions and siding with global Marxist revolutionary "liberation" movements throughout the 1970s. "I don't know how else to express the quiet emotion that rushed through me when the news reports showed that the United States had finally been defeated in Vietnam," Wallis characteristically gushed after North Vietnamese tanks rolled into conquered South Vietnam, solidifying police state communism over Indochina. "There was an overwhelming sense of relief and thankfulness that the American intruders had finally been thrown out and that the desire of the U.S. government to control the destiny of Indochina had been thwarted."

Over the years, Wallis has turned into one of America's most politically prominent religious voices, representing the new, more polished brand of Religious Leftists who now appeal not to post-Woodstock hippies in Volkswagen vans, but to minivan-driving suburbanites who worship at megachurches. The pinnacle of his mainstream success came in 2009 when he was tapped by President Obama to be part of a handful of spiritual advisers who, according to the New York Times, he would consult with "for private prayer sessions on the telephone and for discussions on the role of religion in politics."

If you were concerned that Wallis and the other advisers might be radical Leftists who would try to push Obama even more toward Marxism, you can relax. It turns out that Obama doesn't need the push: "These are all centrist, social justice guys," said the Reverend Eugene F. Rivers about the group of advisers. "Obama genuinely comes out of the social justice wing of the church. That's real. The community organizing stuff is real."

Jim Wallis might not have been mainstream enough for the White House had he not experienced success four years earlier with the release of his bestselling (and presumptuously titled) book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. The book audaciously aligned Christianity with big-government liberalism, even as Wallis himself professed nonpartisanship.

Wallis's orchestrated political theater at the White House may have been his greatest public stunt, but it wasn't his only one. Earlier that year he deftly exploited the Christian season of Lent, which is traditionally focused on quiet self-denial, by embarking on a very public Lenten fast to protest "cuts" in the 2011 federal budget by sinister congressional Republicans.

He was joined by over two dozen spiritually awakened U.S. House Democrats, along with the radical left group MoveOn.org, which is not typically known for its religious devotion. MoveOn's executive director, Justin Ruben, solemnly announced that he and other "progressive" groups were joining religious leaders to "protest the brutal and unjust budget cuts being debated in Washington."