There are a lot of red cards flying around nowadays and most people are scared to death of them. “Oh my God! I’m a what?! No! No, I am not!” Somebody just red-carded you. It’s a tremendous way to control others and 99% of us will back down and draw back instantly if anyone throws a red card at us.

What am I talking about? I have to be careful with this since it’s no laughing matter. So I’m trying to find some example to use which won’t immediate get me in hot water with many people or even have a law suit filed against me, Facebook ban me and “the cancel culture” mark me for extinction.

Let’s try this one. Let’s say you make some kind of light hearted, spontaneous, off-hand joke about your mother or wife, your sister or girl friend. Someone immediately frowns vehemently and, shaking their finger at you, says forebodingly, “That’s sexist!” You’ve been red carded.

Your only appropriate reaction at that moment which stands any change of getting you out of this is to immediately apologize abjectly, with approbation and utter remorse, with the hope that further prosecution and censure will not come from your accuser. “Sexist” is one of many red cards that are bandied about in our times. And most people know they better not mess with them or it may be their doom and end.

You get the idea? Are maybe now other “red cards” coming to mind for you that are similar to “sexist”? (And I really better add this part as it’s really important.) No, I certainly don’t mean to belittle the mistake/crime/sin/wrongdoing that is genuine sexist behavior or language. I’m old enough to remember actual commercials where they were selling something on TV and they literally said, “So simple, even mother can use it!” And they meant it. If anyone sees that now, they cringe at how blatantly sexist and demeaning it was of women.

Same with “racist”. John Wayne movies from when I was a kid had white cowboys galloping through Native American villages, firing their rifles indiscriminately as indigenous women and children were seen running from the mounted white men. But the white men were depicted as the good guys. The TV of my youth is now recognized as, at times, overtly sickeningly racist. If you want to read about my racist past, you can read “Raised Racist” And “Raised Racist part 2”. So there certainly is racism, there is sexism too along with a bunch of other things that there are powerful, fearful red cards fly about now a days.

The only thing is, those wielding the red cards have tapped into the power in their hands and have been able to use them to do some very successful social engineering themselves. Folks, this stuff is so potent that I hesitate to even mention some of the more powerful red cards that are the most feared in our times. Seriously, you don’t even mention these things except with the utmost respect and utter reverence.

Dare I? Dare I go any further with this? I will tip-toe. I lived in Eastern Europe off and on for years as a missionary. In some of those countries (God bless ‘em, I love them), the recognized state religion of the country is not one of the main ones in the USA, although they are Christian. And anyone who was not a part of the main religion of the state and country was considered to be in a …uhh…umm…cult. So when I was living there in the 90’s, the then President of the United States was deemed to be a cult member, a Baptist, as were many millions of American Christians. So it sort of gets complicated.

It’s like another fearsome, powerful red card word, not the most powerful but certainly up there in rank: terrorist. Having lived in over 50 countries, I’ve come to experience how a “terrorist” as seen in one country is a “freedom fighter” in another. And I’m not talking about the views of some rogue state. I’m talking about the difference between how people in the USA look at things compared to our closest allies in Europe.

Friends, I’m treading lightly. But hopefully you get the idea. Some words in our times have come to take on an extremely powerful aura of social censure. Everyone has been conditioned to an instant, knee-jerk, Pavlovian reaction if you are red carded with those words, so you’ll willingly fall in line with the socialization that’s imposed on all of us through the use of the red cards.

Is it good? Well, first, the  genuine, germane reality of sexism, racism, terrorism, cults [and a few other similar red cards that I am myself too fearful of to even mention] are in their real sense bad, things which should be opposed. But the frivolous use of red cards to herd us all into submission to current agendas of the extremely right or left, transgenderism, foreign powers or main stream banality should be opposed somehow, no matter how powerfully they have become. And they have become powerful indeed, both in the fear and dread they strike in almost every soul, as well as often the legal framework they have backing them up which, as the Bible says, “makes a man an offender for a word.” (Isaiah 29:21)

It’s just really gone too far. Try to recognize the red cards of our times for what they are. One of the signs of the final days are “false accusers in the last days” (II Tim. 3:3). They devil is “the accuser of the saints” (Rev. 12:10) and wants to try to accuse you of things you are not guilty of in order to keep you in submission to his agenda. Don’t let it happen to you. “I will walk at liberty, because I seek Your commandments.” (Psalms 119:145)