Nothing succeeds in America like success, they say. We like winners and brush aside losers. Let me throw out some names for you: Alfred Landon, James Cox, John Davis, Charles Hughes, Alton Parker. Sound familiar? Probably not. Yet every one of them was so important and well thought of that at some point in the twentieth century each was a nominee for President of the United States. Millions voted for them, for a while their names were plastered all over the place. But then each one lost, of course, and in America, that's that.

We are a people in love with power and success, and this surely is one area among many that the gospel needs to address in our particular cultura…