I have been a Republican for most of my life and when I made the decision over ten years ago to make that public knowledge, I faced death threats and my family had to go into hiding. My church was robbed of over $8,000 from a collection box that was to serve the needy. I lost three-fourths of my congregation. The pressure renounce the Republican Party was immense. But I was resolute in my decision.
People often ask me what made me decide to register as a Republican, something you rarely see on the South Side of Chicago. I usually refer to the culture of dependency that liberalism has saddled my community with for the last 70 years or so. I refer to the fact that my community owns very little of the infrastructure of their own community. I also refer to the fact that none of these liberal policies encourage independence and self-sufficiency.
But I’ve been thinking about this issue of late and what really drove me, at a young age, to choose the Republican Party over the Democrat Party was the victimhood mindset. Far too many people in my community, all of them Democrats, have that self-defeating mindset.
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When I would challenge them to be better, tell them I believed they could be better, I would feel the lack of belief in themselves in their eyes. They would then blame the system or the man. The strangest thing was how alive they became when they blamed others for their shortcomings and misfortunes. They showed none of that life when it came to their own will and agency.
I’m a preacher and after ten years or so of living on the South Side I began to realize that what I was seeing was the work of the devil. This victimhood mindset that I saw in far too many people was not the work of the Lord but the devil. See, it is always the devil that makes us disbelieve in us, in our abilities.
The devil first tempts us into believing that we need him to get on by or to get ahead. Then he lulls us into believing that we cannot survive without him.
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We come to believe in the devil more than we believe in ourselves. And far too many of us have come to believe in our victimhood over our abilities.
If that isn’t the work of the devil, then what is it?
I know politics is politics, but my true reason for choosing the Republican Party was to show others in my community that I was free to choose wherever I wanted to go — this victimhood mentality had no control over me. Most of all, I wanted to show my neighbors that politics was no substitution for religion or some higher spiritual realm.
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What attracted me to the Republican Party was precisely its rejection of this victimhood mindset. The Republicans are far from perfect. They lack a significant presence in communities like mine. But what I love about the Republican Party is that I have the freedom to influence change through leading by example. That is what I have done in the building of my $40 million Leadership and Economic Community Center.
I have seen the changes in my neighborhood. When young kids see the construction on the community center, I tell them that this is where they will be able to go and develop themselves into somebodies.
I tell them this will be a place safe from violence so they can focus on their studies. I tell them that this will be a place where gang territorial alliances will be broken and they can be friends with that kid from a rival gang block. When I tell them all these things, I can see the light emerge in their eyes and when that happens there is no room for the devil.
