Within a day of the U.S. election on November 2 the culture warriors began their assault. On the front page of the London Daily Mirror was the question, "How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?" Obviously those "dumb" people would disagree with the Mirror and the pseudo-intellectualism it presents. But the Mirror reveals a symptom of a disease that has infected the media and many people throughout the world.

Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Wills expresses his disgust more directly. To him, it is not Americans who are dumb, it is their Christianity. On November 4, the New York Times published Wills’s column "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out." He informs us by means of a rhetorical question that America has lost its enlightenment. He asks: "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an enlightened nation?"

Later, Wills explains how the American electorate has confused the world: "The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies." America has not become any more religious since the 1940s, but it is likely that modern Europe has become far less Christian. So now to secular people in Europe, Christianity is the anti-intellectual boogie man. The death of reason and enlightenment can now be traced to the Christian Right.

But anti-Christian bigots like Wills are not the only ones upset that the Christian Right came out and voted for their preferred candidate, George W. Bush. A number of Seventh-day Adventists find the vote of their fellow Christians disturbing. If the Christian Right can have an influence on an American election, surely the Sunday Laws cannot be far away.

According to national exit polling, 78 percent of white evangelical Christians supported Bush, and 22 percent John Kerry. Fifty-two percent of American Catholics supported Bush, and 48 percent Kerry. Among black Protestants, 83 percent went for Kerry and 16 percent for Bush. In each of these categories the more regular the church attendance the stronger the support for Bush.

Of course, these groups have been important in every election in the past forty years. Yet when the media gives credit to evangelical Christians for helping decide a close election, one segment of the Seventh-day Adventist Church sees only storm clouds. That segment also sees danger in a president who believes in God and gets spiritual comfort from the thought of people praying for him. Even when Bush espouses values similar to their own, the first thought of these Seventh-day Adventists is how the election will lead to the "time of trouble."

Our battle is not with the Christian Right; in fact, we are very much a part of it. In our effort to prove our church’s prediction correct we should not denigrate our Christian brothers and sisters for wrongs they have not done or intend to do.

The Christian battle is with the secular world, which defames God and his followers. As Gaylon Parker wrote on November 5 in the Mississippi Press: "the tripe I’ve had to choke down over the weeks and months preceding the election is going to be tough to wash out of my mouth. Bill Clinton’s former labor secretary, Robert Reich, said Christians pose a greater threat to America than terrorists; Richard Dreyfuss spews anti-religious hate speech on Larry King’s show; Bill Maher says prayer is moronic. You get the picture."

Indeed, it is Christian morals and values that are under attack in America. The attack is not from our fellow Christians, but from those who think that Christianity is the end of enlightenment. The attackers believe that Christians are foolish to believe in the Virgin Birth, that God could become incarnate and be born into this world, and that Christians are foolish if they don’t accept the idea that some amino acids formed into amoeba that changed over time into a humans and every other organic form of life on earth.

The battle that has begun is really all about God, at this time and in the United States it is about the Christian God. The battle is about a society and media that increasingly disparage God and Christian believers. More and more those forces, which claim diversity and tolerance as their credos, actually ridicule diversity if it means including and accepting Christianity. It seems that tolerance is only for those who think like the secular Europeans. If you don’t, you are just dumb and your opinions are irrelevant.

Although we as Christians understand that those without the Spirit of God in their lives will think us foolish (1 Cor. 2:14), we cannot ignore the fact that we are ambassadors to those same people. Christianity is not an illogical religion, nor is it meant to restrict man’s freedom of thought. It was Christianity that inspired the freedoms that have made the United States great.

Christianity is not the problem; rather, it is the solution. We Christians are the only ones who can defend it.

Click here for another Adventist perspective on the U.S. presidential election from Monte Sahlin, vice president of the Columbia Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE