The Culture War: Part 2

Part 2 in a lecture series I delivered for a Baptist church.

Introduction

            In last week's lecture, you learned about the history of the culture war. It started when the Deists, in reaction to the religious wars, sought to undermine belief in the Christian worldview. Due to the intellectual weakening brought about by the Great Awakening revivals, Americans were unprepared to face the challenges to the Christian worldview brought about by European secularists. Today, opposition to the Christian worldview is being fueled primarily by proponents of sexual liberation. Sexual liberation is a movement which seeks to separate sex, marriage, and reproduction into three distinct, independent decisions. Moral relativism is almost wholly sexual. No one defends nuclear war, oil spills, dumping pollutants into a reservoir, insider trading, or even smoking on the idea of moral relativism. But if it has to do with sexual liberation, it is justified, sanctified, and glorified in that name.

            This is why people spend so much time and money trying to undermine the Christian worldview.  Before there was Christianity in Europe, sexual ethics were very loose. I am not going to go into detailed descriptions, but let's just say that for all the stuff that the sexual liberation movement wants, pre-Christian Europe had that and more. Abortion and infanticide were also permitted, as they were a sort of backup birth control. The secularists in America and Europe want to turn the clock back to the pre-Christian days. The question is: can we stop them, and if so, how?

What We Can Do

            The first thing we need to recognize is that we have had more than enough resources to do this. We still do. Evangelicals are 20% of the American population, and give $10 billion last year to ECFA-accredited organizations. We have the numbers and we have the money.

            We also need to understand that activity is not the same as productivity, and that evangelism is not the same as culture shaping. Billy Graham noted this when he admitted that his crusades, despite winning enormous numbers of converts, did little to affect the state of American culture. This is because evangelism and culture shaping do different things. Asking whether we should do one or the other is like asking whether you should shower or brush your teeth. It’s not an either/or decision.

            Culture shaping is different because the way it is practiced is different. For example, being a good person is quite helpful for evangelism, but not generally for culture shaping. The Nazis in Germany, the Communists in the Soviet Union, even the advocates for transgenderism and same sex marriage in the United States are not known as nice or good people, and yet they have all wielded tremendous cultural influence. Culture shaping deals with the question: from what sources do we get our information about the world? The vast majority of the public get their information from the public schools, secular universities, news media, and entertainment television. We the Evangelicals will not begin to wield significant cultural influence until        we have substantial representation in all four of these fields.

Get Informed

            The next question people will ask is: How can I make any difference at all? Recognize that you are not special. All those children's books and TV shows and movies that say "if you keep dreaming you will one day become that astronaut or rock star or whatever" are lying to you. Of course, this also means that no one else is special, either. Dr. Craig did not become the world's leading debate apologist because there is anything special about him. People tend to think that individuals like him, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, and Stephen Hawking are uniquely talented and therefore it was inevitable that they would become successful. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Talent has little to do with their success. Dr. Craig simply put more time and more effort and more sacrifice into developing his skills than anyone else did. Nine hours per day of research for a couple of decades and you too could wield Dr. Craig’s level of influence. There are enough young people in this room to completely change the course of American history. The question is: how badly do you want to make a difference and what are you willing to give up to do it?

            Before you do anything, you need to get connected with a small group. This is a prerequisite to any sort of world-changing endeavor. The counter-cult apologist James White noted that every single apologetics disaster he has ever encountered was the result of someone trying to engage skeptics without first being a member of a local church and an accountability group. The reason is that you are very vulnerable to peer pressure, even when you do not realize it. When I studied under the rabbis at the kollel, they would sometimes bring up these arguments against Christianity. On Sunday, I would attend church and occasionally mention one of these arguments to my peers. Even as the words left my mouth that same argument which seemed so devastating when I heard it seemed so trivial and weak, I wondered why I had even brought it up. The environment in which I heard the objection made all the difference as to how plausible I found it.

            The first step is really simple. Get informed. Just subscribe to a blog like Wintery Knight, who is an apologist that analyzes the news. Read an article every few days, and then politely bring his talking points when you are having conversations about the topics he discusses.

            To get even more informed, Lee Strobel's books are a great introduction to apologetics topics. The best thing is that you don't even need to read the books. All of them are available on audiobook format. Even better, if you get a library card, you can borrow these audiobooks for free, listen to them when you're driving, and then return them. Strobel goes through all the popular-level objections, so simply by reading or listening to his books, you will have an answer to almost every objection you will encounter.

            To get more informed, get the audio lectures for Biola's Apologetics Certificate program. You don't need to take the tests. just get the lectures on CD, and there are a lot of them. The idea here is that the Certificate program gives a very broad introduction to all the major areas of apologetics. Complete the lectures, and according to Craig Hazen, you will know more about religion than 90% of the public.

            Let's say that is not enough for you. You don't want to be in the top 10 percent. You want to get in the upper 1 percent. No problem. Go to the website Apologetics 315, go to the Ultimate Audio page, and download the lectures by Phil Fernandes. There are a whole lot of them. Dr. Fernandes is an articulate speaker and can get you up to speed rapidly on all sorts of apologetics issues.

            A video series you might want to check out is from the group called The Fuel Project. They outline the culture war, going through the entire history. The first video series is called Know Your Enemy. The current series in the works is called Stay Free.

            For those who want to go off the deep end in being informed, there are plenty of graduate degrees available. Biola has a Master's degree in apologetics. It takes two years, and almost all of it can be done remotely. Students of the MA in apologetics only need to travel to Biola for two weeks the first summer and two weeks the next summer. Many apologists got their start with Biola's program. Mary Jo Sharp is a famous apologist and her formal apologetics education is Biola's MA program.

            And what we need ultimately is for more young Evangelicals to dedicate their lives toward winning this culture war. This means getting advanced degrees at secular universities and then teaching worldview-oriented subjects, such as philosophy, literature, history, economics, and sociology at secular universities. The ultimate achievement is if some Evangelical who is also a diehard creationist would get a doctorate from a secular university in evolutionary biology. The Darwinists are scared to death of something like this happening. In fact, their main line of argumentation against creationists is "you do not have a respectable degree in evolutionary biology, so you don't know what you are talking about." A creationist with an evolutionary biology degree would completely undercut that argument.

Get Involved

            Get involved. And let me tell you how simple this is. The Discovery Institute is one of the chief enemies of the sexual liberation movement. They are making inroads into mainstream science that no creationist group has done in recent history. Their entire budget is only about $4 million. If every Evangelical donated $20 to the Discovery Institute, they would have an influx of 1.2 BILLION dollars. That's not $20 a month, or $20 a year. That's $20 one time in your life.

            There are other ways of getting invovled. One way is to take a group through The Truth Project. The Truth Project is a production by Focus on the Family that deals with the big questions of life. According to the Barna Research Group, only 9 percent of professing Christians have what they call a "biblical" worldview. Because of this, today's believers live similarly to non-believers. The Truth Project helps us to see how a biblical worldview would address topics like the universe, the mind, evolution, art, law, truth, and ethics. If you can get your teens to go through it, the Truth Project will help them to understand the biblical worldview so that they can discern truth from error when going off to college.

            You can also get involved in pulpit freedom Sunday. In 1954, Lyndon Johnson proposed an amendment to the tax code to clamp down on the ability of pastors to influence our nation’s politics. The order says that churches are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for elective public office. The Alliance Defending Freedom has a once-a-year event where they challenge pastors to give sermons on political issues and even on candidates. If your church gets targeted by the IRS, the ADF will mobilize its army of lawyers to fight for your church free of charge.

            Another way that people persuade others is through political campaigning. You will notice in election years, candidates will plan out their campaign so that they can maximize their impact on the important battleground states. They know that more time and more visits and more speeches will result in more influence and more persuasion. But if this is good for candidates during election years, why do we not do this for issues during non-election years?

            Note as well that we are campaigning for issues, not for political parties and not for candidates. I cannot tell you how many Christians get sidetracked into campaigning for their pet candidate rather than trying to shape the national worldview. There is a saying that great minds discuss ideas. Ordinary minds discuss situations. Lesser minds discuss people. This means that most political campaigning is for lesser minds. We need to rise above this and become great minds. This is not some sterile ideal, but has real-world implications. Campaigns around issues can have an impact on many elections, both in the present and in the future. Campaigns around candidates affect one or two elections, and that’s about it. No matter how badly a campaign is able to blow away support for John McCain or John Kerry, or Howard Dean, the effects simply do not carry over to later elections. However, changing public opinion on the issues affects everyone’s campaign. Politicians do a good job of shifting with the political winds. This is why while many candidates may hate homeschooling, nobody at this time will push to outlaw homeschooling. Twenty years ago, very few political candidates would support same-sex marriage. Today, many Republican candidates are now supporting it. If public opinion shifts on an issue, both parties will accommodate it. That is why we support issues, rather than parties.

Conclusion

            In conclusion, then, there are many things we can do in order to win back the culture. The most important thing you need to know is that everyone can make some level of difference. Everyone can do something to help us out. What’s really awesome is that because we have such large numbers, it takes very little effort for each Christian to pull his or her weight. Just donate a small amount to culture-shaping causes, read the basic apologetics books by Strobel, and be willing to engage unbelievers in polite conversation, and we can win this.

            We are already seeing the consequences of what will happen should we lose this culture war. In California, public school restrooms are now transgender. This means that any boy who declares himself to be of the female gender can use a woman’s restroom, and vice versa. Christians are already facing fines and even jail time for refusal to provide services to same sex weddings. Activists for the sexual liberation movement are trying to get traditional Christian views on sexuality to be declared as hate speech and therefore subject to legal censorship. The church will still exist. Evangelicalism in some form will still exist, except that it will fall to syncretism, which is where the church mixes Christian culture with the secular worldview. You can see this in people like Rob Bell, or even John Shelby Spong. If we lose this culture war, nearly all the churches will be culturally Christian but secularist in all the areas that affect politics, and any church that says otherwise will be viewed by the public the same way we view the Westboro Baptist Church.

            Of course, not everyone will pull his or her weight, so some of us will have to do a little more. Turn your driving time into learning time. In the next ten years, you will likely spend as much time in your car as someone spends earning a four year degree. Are you going to waste that time listening to music, the radio, sermons and the like? Or are you going to invest that time in increasing your knowledge?

            The outcome of the culture war has not yet been decided. It could go either way. The fate of American Christianity is in your hands. Don’t blame the darkness for being dark. Blame the light for not being light enough.