NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
I have been a Republican for most of my life, and when I made the decision over ten years ago to go public, I received death threats and my family went into hiding. My church had over $8,000 stolen from a donation box that was meant for the needy. I lost three-quarters of my congregation. The pressure to resign from the Republican Party was immense, but I stuck to my decision.
People often ask me what led me to decide to register as a Republican, something that is rarely seen on Chicago's South Side. I usually refer to the culture of dependency that liberalism has imposed on my community for the last 70 years or so. I refer to the fact that my community owns very little of its own community's infrastructure. 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 lately, and what really drove me, at a young age, to choose the Republican Party over the Democratic Party was the victim mentality. Too many people in my community, all of them Democrats, have that self-defeating mentality.
WHY I ADMIRED SEN TIM SCOTT AND WHY YOU SHOULD TOO
When I challenged them to be better, told them I thought they could be better, I could see in their eyes the lack of faith in themselves. Then they would blame the system or the man. The strangest thing was how alive they became when they blamed others for their faults and misfortunes. They showed none of that life when it came to their own will and agency.
I'm a preacher and after about ten years of living on the South Side I began to realize that what I was seeing was the work of the devil. This victim mentality I saw in too many people was not the work of the Lord but of the devil. You see, it's always the devil that makes us not believe in ourselves, in our abilities.
The devil first tempts us to believe that we need him to get by and then makes us believe that we cannot survive without him.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS REVIEWS
We have come to believe in the devil more than we believe in ourselves, and too many of us have come to believe in our victimhood beyond our capabilities.
If this is not the work of the devil, then what is?
I know politics is politics, but my real reason for choosing the Republican Party was to show others in my community that I was free to choose where I wanted to go; this victim mentality had no hold on me. Most of all, I wanted to show my neighbors that politics could not replace religion or any higher spiritual realm.
What attracted me to the Republican Party was precisely its rejection of this victim mentality. 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 affect change by leading by example. That’s what I’ve done by building my $40 million Community Leadership and Economics Center.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
I have seen the changes in my neighborhood. When the little kids see the community center being built, I tell them that they can go there and become someone.
I tell them that this will be a safe and violence-free place so that they can concentrate on their studies. I tell them that this will be a place where territorial alliances between gangs will be broken and they can be friends with that kid from a neighborhood of rival gangs. When I tell them all these things, I can see the light come up in their eyes and when that happens, there is no place for the devil.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM PASTOR COREY BROOKS
