Member Spotlight: David Madeira is a missionary to politics

Like many missionaries, the David Madeira family is called to a dark spiritual place: politics.

But they’re striving to bring the light of Christ to it in a variety of ways, bringing more of the “light of the world,” Christians, into the public arena.

After spending 20 years as a doctor of chiropractic, David became a political consultant in 2007. He ran for Pennsylvania state senator in 2006 and for Congress in 2010. Although he didn’t win election in either of those races, he and his family honed their knowledge of the political process and presentation of Biblical values in the public sphere. The result is that David now hosts a three-hour weekday morning radio show on 94.3 FM, The Talker, a northeast Pennsylvania station, that allows him to expound on political and cultural issues. Joining him in the effort are his daughter, Hannah Madeira, who serves as talent coordinator for the show and hosts a weekly history segment; and his son, D.J. Madeira, 16, who runs the show’s website and screens calls.

Each of them, including David’s wife, Melanie, feel called to share God’s truth through and in the political process, and also to teach about the nation’s foundation.

“I have a passionate desire to see people understand our form of government and how it’s built on God’s principles,” David says. “It’s been my passion for a long time to get people to understand that it’s God’s design for us to be healthy and prosperous. Almost every social ill we face can be traced back to some rejection of God’s design. We certainly have been rejecting it wholesale for some time.”

The trend can be turned around, though.

“This election, and every election, is not about what the candidates do, it’s about what the people do,” David says. “It’s not a question of whether Mitt Romney will win or Barack Obama will win. It’s a question about whether people who know what’s going on are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to protect liberty. If they do that, it doesn’t really matter who the politician is, because ultimately it’s up to the voters. You can be far more effective than CNN in persuading people, if you make a conscious effort to do so.”

David provides tools to help you make a difference: his website and Facebook page provide links to podcasts of his show, to videos related to topics he has discussed, and to suggestions of how to talk to people about various issues.

Running for office was the best way for him to try to make an impact, David says. But he was involved in politics way before 2006. At age 13, he worked the polls on Election Day 1980 for Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.

“I remember being so inspired by his view of the world and his optimism,” David says.

He worked for Reagan’s re-election in 1984 although, at 17, he still couldn’t vote for him. David went on to become a chiropractor but continued to be active in politics, serving in roles as varied as chairman, finance chairman, and strategist in several campaigns.

In 2006, David took the advice of friends and ran for state Senate against a pro-abortion candidate in the Republican primary. The only problem was that he and three other pro-life candidates split the pro-life vote. But David’s second-place finish “surprised everybody.” His wife, Melanie, got involved, as well, running the campaign. Their home-schooled children helped out, too.

After running a Republican congressional candidate’s unsuccessful campaign in 2008, a bad year for the GOP in general, David decided to run for that same 10th District seat in 2010. However, thanks in part to a mass-mailing foul-up due to a communications breakdown between FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service, he ended up in second place out of three candidates in the primary. Along the way, though, he did a lot of radio interviews and some executives at a radio group noticed he was a natural on the air. The group signed him up for a one-hour weekend talk show to have some local input. David also started recording daily two-minute commentaries called “Under the Liberty Tree,” named after a tree in Boston under which the Sons of Liberty would meet in pre-Revolutionary days. David would share his political philosophy through “the lens of the news” in those bits.

The show and spot became popular, but David dropped his radio appearances in December 2011 after his job status with Infinity Concepts, a professional marketing agency that specializes in helping Christians, changed. But he wasn’t away for long. Listeners started complaining that David wasn’t on the air anymore. The station eventually contacted him, offering him a 6 to 9 a.m. weekday spot in place of Don Imus’ national show.

“I said, ‘Let me think about that—yes,’” David remembers.

He had enjoyed the radio experience and couldn’t pass up a three-hour-per-day, five-day-per-week platform to share his views on politics and culture, especially considering how flexible his Infinity Concepts employers are by allowing him to work remotely now.

The show is a mixture of the serious and the lighthearted, such as a segment on a man who fishes by detonating grenades in a lake.

“Listeners don’t want to be lectured to, they want to be entertained,” David says. “But we also try to draw very serious connections and illustrate a point. What I’m constantly trying to do when I’m looking at a news story is say, ‘How does the Word of God speak to this.’”

Since it’s secular radio, though, David can’t simply start preaching, but he’s able to somehow work God’s ways into the conversation.

“My wife is always telling me, ‘Honey, just be yourself,’” David says. “I try to follow that. When the mic turns on, I just start talking. I’m constantly asking, ‘God, give me wisdom to explain this.’

“I want to talk to the people who are not going to church, who don’t believe the Bible, and I want to say to them, ‘Here’s why it’s rational. Here’s why it’s right. Here’s why it makes sense to follow God’s ways.’”

He says he tries to envision himself explaining to his children why a certain policy or practice is wrong. For instance, as a way to expose the nonsense and legal ramifications of same-sex marriage, he pointed out stories about a woman who married herself, and a woman who married a building she didn’t want to see destroyed.

“From those two stories, I illustrated how by changing the definition of marriage we don’t just accommodate a gay couple, we accommodate all sorts of weird things that don’t make any sense,” David says. “Then I finished with, ‘Or we could follow God’s design. That has sort of worked for all of humanity for all of time.’”

Hannah Madeira expressed her father’s worldview and his goals best.

“His viewpoint on the world is that America is something worth saving,” she says. “If he just turns one person’s mind around and helps them see the truth of where current politics are taking us, where bad policies and loads of debt and abortion are taking us, then he feels like he’s done something worthwhile.”