Culture and Making America Christian Again

Culture and Making America Christian Again

Dec 11, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

When I started writing my latest book in early 2022, I knew it would be about the Great Awakening happening all around us, and along the way it also became about the re-founding of America. I didn’t realize until a little later into the journey, specifically after I embrace postmillennialism in August of 2022, that Making America Christian Again was the only way America could truly be RE-founded. The book is an historical analysis of how we got our post-Christian 21st century secular America from our founding as a deeply Christian enterprise with a ubiquitous Protestant Christian culture. Without Christianity again becoming the dominant ethos and plausibility structure of the nation, a re-founding will not happen. Which means without America rejecting secularism and embracing its Christian roots, it cannot be the constitutional republic conceived in liberty it once was.

I first heard Joshua Haymes of the Reformation Red Pill Podcast use the phrase, Make America Christian Again, and it perfectly encapsulated in a Trumpian way what I’d been hearing among my new post-mill compatriots. This gets into discussions of the divisive phrase, Christian nationalism, and the even more divisive concept of theonomy, or God’s law over the nation. But those are meaningless concepts and useless discussions without a Christian culture undergirding them. We must work on parallel tracks as we seek to rebuild a Christian America, studying and debating and thinking through exactly what this will look like, but developing a Christian culture is a prerequisite if a Christian America is to even be a possibility.

It’s All About Culture
Culture is a people’s religion externalized. However a people answer ultimate questions of life and death, purpose and meaning, will affect not only how they live, but how they perceive everything in the lives they live. American culture, and the West in general, is secular, God is persona non grata, unwelcome at the societal table. He may or may not exist, but either way He is an invisible, unimportant God, irrelevant to everyday life. This is the driving assumption underlying the secular worldview, and it’s doleful consequences are everywhere. In The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi puts this succinctly:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

The final source of authority in a secular culture is man and his reason, the poisonous fruit of Enlightenment rationalism. Unfortunately, Christianity played along with the rise of secularism in Western culture through the influence of Pietism, a German Lutheran movement in the 17th century, which was a not unreasonable response to a dry, scholastic theology coming out of the Reformation. It was also a perfect example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What made Pietism the ultimate disaster in the demise of Christendom was an over spiritualized Gnostic dualism it created in practice. All this means is that most Christians today effectively live in a two story reality (dualism). Upstairs is the important, spiritual stuff, like prayer, church, evangelism, Bible reading etc., while downstairs is every day mundane life, which is not as important, and above all, not “spiritual.”

The is a profoundly unbiblical and destructive take on Christianity, one that has allowed secularism to grow and dominate the culture, which is why I’ve argued that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin. Most Christians see the purpose of Christianity as being saved so when we die we go to heaven, and while on earth practice and grow in personal holiness. This is a terribly truncated, narrow, and distorted view of Christianity. Before we see why, let’s take a look at culture, what it is, and why it’s so important. As Christians, we must think about culture biblically, as opposed to sociologically or anthropologically. In other words, how do we as Christians define culture differently than non‑Christians. 

A Biblical Take on Culture
Christians start with the Bible, God’s story about his relationship with the human race, and not with something called culture somehow existing independently of His story. The Bible has no word for culture, thus, no definition of it, but we can say culture is the imprint human beings put on God’s creation. In the Genesis 1 and 2 creation account, we find something we now called the “cultural mandate.” Human beings are commanded to govern God’s creation:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

But it is the prior two verses that gives the cultural mandate its true power:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

The significance of the Imago Dei (the image of God in man) for the Christian worldview cannot be overstated. We are God’s visible representatives on earth! We reflect his likeness and attributes in every aspect of our human faculties, be it moral, intellectual, relational, practical, etc. All of these attributes contribute to creating culture. God commands Adam and Eve to act (be fruitful, fill, subdue, rule), and these commands define the essential purposes of human existence. Reformed theologian and philosopher John Frame had this to say in a lecture on Christianity and Culture:

Why did God give this command to Adam and Eve? Well, for the same reason, ultimately, he does everything else: for his own glory. God’s glory is that beautiful, intense light that shines out from him when he makes himself visible to human beings. [He] wanted Adam’s family to spread that glory through the whole world. Adam was not to rule merely for himself, but for God, glorifying God in all he did. So culture is based on a divine command. Adam must develop culture because that is God’s desire. Culture is for God’s sake. So it is subject to God’s commands, God’s desires, God’s norms, God’s values. 

I will add that this God orientation is the only way culture and the people in it can truly flourish.

I may create a beautiful piece of art or music, or build a magnificent building, or tell a moving story in words or film, or plant a garden, or do any number of mundane things, but all of these reflect the glory, greatness, power, and knowledge of the living God! All human creations ultimately point back to him. Obviously the efficient cause, i.e., me, deserves recognition, but the point is that every created thing, whether in the natural world or culture, reflects God himself. Nothing is trivial. It doesn’t matter if the person or people doing a thing are Christians or not, for they too are made in God’s image. Just because they are blind to his glory, try to suppress His knowledge and take the glory for themselves, doesn’t mean God is silenced.

There are significant apologetics implications (i.e., evidence for the veracity of Christianity being true) for a proper biblical understanding of culture which play a critical role in re-Christianizing the culture. The importance of cultural apologetics (culture is the evidence) cannot be overstated in its implications for re-Christianizing and refounding America on its foundational principles. There isn’t space to get into this in detail, but contrary to the doomers who bemoan the debauchery of the hostile secular culture, the culture is our best friend. In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I have a section with exactly that title, and show how I used our non-Christian secular culture to ground our children’s faith. The reason has to do with culture being a reflection of man made in God’s image, and the topic we turn to next. 

Culture and The Fall
Six times in Genesis 1 God says his work was good, and caps it off with a “very good.” When we engage culture, we aren’t simply making meaning, but responding to meaning woven into creation. We are taking that meaning‑filled creation and reshaping it in our hands, or responding to others who have, thus culture is fundamentally a religious pursuit. This means there is no neutral position relative to ultimate meaning as we interact with the culture. As I said above, culture is a people’s religion externalized. Because of the fall, man mars culture even as his distorted products of culture glorify God. This reflection of the disease of the human heart, i.e., sin, suffering, and death must be explained. As I’ve often said, if all we are is matter, merely lucky dirt, then life is basically a Woody Allen movie. His is always in a futile pursuit of meaning, hope, purpose, and fulfillment outside of Christ, and he expects the vacuum in his soul to be filled by created things rather than the Creator. All his movies end in resignation, and you can see this futile pursuit etched in his sad face.

So, an example like Woody Allen shows how all human works can be distorted by man’s disobedience to God. This is the tension that exists in all culture, but God doesn’t leave man in his sin. Immediately after the Fall, God promises redemption (Gen. 3:15). Adam and Eve realize they are naked, and they are ashamed. So taking things into their own hands, they try to sew fig leaves together to cover themselves. And when God comes calling “in the cool of the day,” what do they do? They hide. Their covering didn’t do the job. After they get through with all the excuse making, and God shares with them the promise that the woman’s offspring “will crush” the serpent’s head, we have what is possibly the first sacrifice in history. “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” From that moment on, all history is one long story of human beings furiously sewing fig leaves to try to cover themselves from God’s wrath and judgment, and earn his favor; it doesn’t work. Instead the Lord sacrifices himself because no other sacrifice will do the job! Human beings reflect this salvific drama in everything they do, including in the stories they tell, and in whatever they make.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal work Christ and Culture is a good overview of the ambivalence Christians have had with culture since Pentecost. He looks at certain Christians through the ages, and how they thought Christians should interact with culture. He divides them into five broad types or approaches:

  • Christ against Culture
  • Christ of Culture
  • Christ above Culture
  • Christ and Culture in Paradox
  • Christ Transforming Culture

Christians have negotiated their interaction with a fallen world in a variety of ways, and maybe all these approaches in some way at the same time. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, conservative Protestant Christianity in America, however, slowly came to embrace a version of the Christ against culture approach. With the rise of a truly biblical postmillennialism in the 21st century, in contrast to a secular progressive postmillennialism of the 19th and early 20th century, Christ transforming culture is again becoming the dominant view among Protestant, especially Reformed, Christians. If we are to make America Christian again, we must recapture the Reformation and Puritan vision of Christ the transformer of culture.   

Professions of Cultural Influence, Plausibility Structures, and MACA
If America is to become Christian again, that will be fundamentally a cultural change. As conservatives were finally starting to understand the primacy of culture, as the late great Andrew Breitbart famously said, politics is downstream from culture. Politics and the laws of a country in its own way creates culture, but the politics and laws of a country will never fundamentally contradict the dominant cultural ethos of the people. In 21st century America, that cultural ethos is thoroughly secular. Too many Christians either ignore this or don’t understand the power of it. Whatever that cultural ethos is, is that culture’s plausibility structure, and understanding this concept is critically important.

What is plausible is what seems true and real to us, and the societal structures we inhabit determine for us what is plausible or not. For those who uncritically navigate the culture, their perspective is assumed to be just the way things are. It is the fundamental plausibility structures of culture that must eventually be changed if we’re to ever redirect the massive ship of American culture to true north, i.e., Jesus, God’s word and Law. I will address two issues related to this, abortion and homosexuality. Both of these issues are accepted as normal in a secular culture, and rejected as sinful in a Christian one.

If we are ever to get there, we must understand professions of cultural influence. When I first became aware of the power and dominance of culture in 2007, conservatives were still obsessed with politics thinking somehow if we got the right people elected, the culture would become more conservative as well. It doesn’t work that way. It is a two way street, but fundamentally, culture drives a nation’s laws and how it is governed. So the question is, how do we change the culture? It will not come primarily from changing the laws, even as we attempt to change laws. This is why John Adams, no raging Evangelical, famously said,

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The Founders believed it was the Christian religion and Christian morality of a providentially ordaining God that made the American experiment possible. To them, a secular America would have been a contradiction in terms.

This brings us to professions of cultural influence, something conservatives have basically been clueless about. James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, argues that,

[T]he deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occur from the “top down.” In other words, the work of the world‑making and world‑changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well‑developed networks and powerful institutions.

These networks and institutions include, but are not limited to, education, Hollywood and entertainment, and the media. These three broad areas are the most powerful worldview and plausibility structure generators. As Hunter states further, cultural change, or influence for our purposes, “is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality.” Shaping reality happens primarily from the top down, not the bottom up, and as long as a secular worldview dominates the profession of cultural influence, Christians are spitting into the wind if the think the moral framework of our laws will change.

Too many Christians, unfortunately, seem to think spitting into the wind is a strategy. On Twitter I come across Christians often who declare that abortion is murder and women should be prosecuted as any other murderer would be. Or they declare sodomy should be illegal, some going further say homosexuals should be executed. Such sentiments in the real world are meaningless, not to mention unpersuasive to most people, because we live in a representative republic. That means we have to persuade our fellow citizens that Christianity and God’s law is the only source of true human flourishing, and then elect legislators who will pass laws that will be signed by the state’s or country’s chief executive.

If we truly want to make America Christian again, we need to understand it is a complex, multifaceted, difficult, and generational enterprise. It will only happen if we play the long game. As Christians we have something to learn from the history of cultural Marxism and the rise of woke in our day. Their “long march through the institutions” started in the early 1920s, and it took almost a hundred years for their perverted vision to dominate the culture. As we contemplate the future I say to my fellow Christians, we need to be as patient, persistent, diligent, and determined as the Marxists. We are building cathedrals we will never worship in, and planting trees the fruit of which we shall never eat. Thus we work as if it depends on us, and pray because it depends on God.

 

Evil and the Death of Secularism

Evil and the Death of Secularism

Oct 16, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

In a comment on Facebook recently I said, “Secularism is dead,” and I got this not unreasonable response:

Not sure why secularism is dead, but post-modern thinking and critical theory are alive and well.

Looked at as a snapshot of the current historical moment, of course the commenter is right. Secularism in the form of woke cultural Marxism is at the moment of its greatest triumph in Western culture, but this triumph reveals its inherent weakness. Secularism promised a religious free pluralistic Utopia where the strife and conflict caused by religion would disappear. Religion would be allowed to have its place inside a worship building or home, but it has no place in the public square, a neutral place where religious claims are unwelcome.

There are various versions of secularism where religion is allowed some relevance, but only as a competing force with no inherent authority. In its purest sense, God in secularism is persona non grata, unwelcome because the God claimed by Christians was supposedly responsible for the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. When Descartes declared in 1637, “Cogito Ero Sum,” I think therefore I am, full blown secularism was inevitable. The Enlightenment, so called, made man’s reason the ultimate source of knowledge, and God’s revelation in creation and Scripture eventually completely discredited. Man was now on his own, and in due course we would we see what he could accomplish without God.

As I argue in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, secularism has been weighed on the scales and found wanting. In America, for example, now a thoroughly secular society, some 50,000 people every year kill themselves, and over one and a half million every year try! Americans by the tens of millions take anti-anxiety and anti-depressant drugs. Divorce has decimated the family to the degree that most children grow up in broken families. Fetal genocide has butchered over 60 million babies in their mothers’ wombs, and it is actively encouraged as a moral good by one of our political parties, while the other party treats it as a secondary issue, at best. America’s biggest cities are practically unlivable, with death and violence a common occurrence. One could go on, but secularism clearly hasn’t delivered.

Thus I come to Evil. No, not that evil, the unpleasant reality we encounter in the world as the opposite of good, but a television series with that name. My wife and I recently watched all four seasons on Paramount+. The series first premiered on CBS in September 2019 but later moved to Paramount+ for its subsequent seasons. Unfortunately, that means the F-word started showing up, but that seems to be a requirement for streaming TV shows nowadays. What Evil represented to me was evidence for the failure of secularism as an explanation for the world we actually inhabit. Secularism, remember, is an explanation for reality that doesn’t require God, or any kind of spiritual reality. Charles Taylor in his magisterial work, A Secular Age, explores how reality in the modern world has been “disenchanted,” flattened out, immanentized. That flattened out world is what Evil wrestles with, and I think quite effectively.

Evil and the Poverty of Secularism-No Such Thing as Unbelief
The show has a trio of protagonists, actors you wouldn’t know, but as the series progresses you come to love. The Catholic Church, which we all know, plays a staring roll in the series as the backdrop for the demonic and spiritual war human beings experience whether they acknowledge that or not, and two of the main characters refuse to acknowledge it. One is a scientist, Ben Shakir, a confirmed atheist from a Muslim background, and the other, Kristen Bouchard, a psychologist who goes between atheism and agnosticism. The third of the trio becomes a Catholic priest, Father David Acosta. The dynamic between the three is fun and fascinating to watch.

Evil is often campy, as in the definition of the word, absurdly exaggerated, artificial, or affected in a usually humorous way, but never to make fun of or demean the idea of a spiritual reality we can’t comprehend. On the contrary, the dynamic of the trio plays off of the battle each has to believe in a reality they can only possibly see if they believe in it, and even then not clearly. Oh, did I mention, their day jobs are working for the Catholic church as “Assessors,” to see if cases of apparent demonic possession are really demonic and don’t have some other “natural” explanation. Ben and Kristin use everything they can in their scientific and psychological tool kit to explain away the supernatural, but Father Acosta and the other Catholic characters treat the demonic as a reality that must be dealt with.

The writers do a good job of balancing skepticism with belief, two sides of the coin of belief, but they have a sly way of making the skepticism grow increasingly absurd as the series progresses. I use the coin analogy because there is no such thing as unbelief, and each character struggles with what they believe, be it in the supernatural, like David, or the other two who struggle with their materialistic assumptions. Faith is required for either view. The series, however, leaves no doubt as to which is real, and it isn’t the latter. The demons, in fact, are the chief protagonists in the series, and although they are portrayed as utterly bizarre figures (played all by one actor, amazingly), they are never less than evil. The most evil figure, ironically, turns out to be fully human, played wonderfully by Michael Emerson as Leland Townsand.

As we continued to watch Evil develop, I couldn’t help feeling that the writers were making fun of the secular worldview, showing how shallow it can be as any kind of ultimate explanation of reality. Ben and Kristin end up having an ongoing crisis of faith as much as David does, but David’s faith seems more grounded in what is real because the spiritual realm is real. The writers do a good job of showing everyone does in fact live by faith. There could have been a Christian in the writers’ room who knows something about apologetics, but that’s asking far too much of the current Hollywood. I have an idea. Why don’t we have a discipleship program for screenwriters, and then help them develop their careers writing screenplays that reflect a solid Christian worldview. The current younger generations gets this, while my boomer generation most certainly did not, but I digress.

James K.A. Smith wrote a little book about Taylor’s massive book called, How (not) to be Secular, and in it he explains how “the conditions of belief” have shifted over the centuries. What was once a spiritual taken for granted reality, has become a disenchanted secular reality. This quotation gets to the heart of the struggle we see explored in Evil:

It is a mainstay of secularization theory that modernity “disenchants” the world—evacuates it of spirits and various ghosts in the machine. Diseases are not demonic, mental illness is no longer possession, the body is no longer ensouled. . . . the magical “spiritual” world is dissolved and we are left with the machinations of matter. . . . this is primarily a shift in the location of meaning, moving it from “the world” into “the mind.” Significance no longer inheres in things; rather, meaning and significance are a property of minds who perceive meaning internally. . . . meaning is now located in agents.

This is exactly what Ben and Kristen attempt to do at every encounter of something that they think they can explain from their naturalistic assumptions. As the series progresses, that becomes increasingly pathetic.

The Secular Crisis of Faith and the Great Awakening
Claiming secularism is having a crisis of faith has a strange ring to most people because secularism is so ingrained as our ultimate plausibility structure, religious or not, Christian or not. It affects all of us. As I argued, everyone lives by faith, and all people are “believers,” the question being what they believe in. After 300 years as an experiment of trying to run a society without God, secularism as a worldview is sucking air, showing its age, and I believe on life support. The evidence is everywhere; Evil is just one entertaining piece adding to the beyond a reasonable doubt conviction to come.

Billionaire savior of Twitter and free speech, Elon Musk, has been going through his own red pill experience in real time on Twitter, or X, take your pick. Recently, Musk posted something that tells us his red pill journey is taking a distinctly religious turn. Below is that post, as well as my comment on it on my re-post:

Here is Musk:

 

This is what a Great Awakening looks like in a secular age and post-Christian culture. It won’t look like the First and Second Awakening in what were thoroughly Christian cultures. The plausibility structures are slowly shifting away from a default secularism because it’s a poverty stricken worldview that promises everything and delivers nothing but misery and despair. Elon is on my heathen prayer list, and we will pray he makes it all the way to Jesus.

The premise of my book is that God used Donald J. Trump, the most unlikely of unlikely men, to trigger a 21st century Great Awakening. It isn’t Trump himself, mind you, but the utterly irrational reaction to Trump. Nothing like it has ever happened in American history. I would argue the reaction to Lincoln was as intense and obsessive, but it wasn’t irrational. The tyranny Lincoln exercised in the pursuit of the Union was real, whether justified or not is the eternal question. Trump, supposedly the second coming of Hitler, doesn’t have a tyrannical bone in his body, and we had four years of him as President proving that. It was this irrational response to Trump that opened my mind to him in the first place because I was no fan, to say the least. I thought nobody could be that evil, and decided to give him a real listen. The irrationality has only seemed to have gotten worse, which is opening even more people’s eyes to the truth.

This reaction began a red pill experience for tens of millions of Americans all over the political, religious, and cultural spectrum, including me. Covid was the red pill neutron bomb that for many rational people was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The lies in the service of tyranny, and for our good, remember, were just too much, and a huge number of people will never see government or “experts” the same ever again. This is directly related to the secular crisis of faith.

Secular, flattened reality, the perception that the material is all there is, or at least all that matters, is also coming increasingly into question for millions of people. It was the materialism myth born out of the Enlightenment that gave us the hubris of science and the rule of “experts” in the 20th century. This questioning includes some very famous people like Tucker Carlson, and Christian newbie, Russell Brand. Very different people from very different worlds, God broke through the flattened secular delusions of the post-modern world, and both have embraced the only faith that makes sense of everything, including fake pandemics.

You can watch any number of Tucker Carleson interviews and you will see the Great Awakening happening in real time. One is Tucker interviewing Russel Brand, and they pretty much talk about Jesus and faith the entire time. At the end of the interview, Tucker asks Brand to pray, and he gets up and kneels down in front of his chair to pray. This doesn’t happen before the Great Awakening. In another interview, I can’t remember which one, Tucker says how he grew up thoroughly secular, lived in DC for 30 years in a thoroughly secular environment, and God was never a topic of conversation. Now, he said, he’s having these conversations all the time which would never have happened five years ago.

The End of Secularism
One could multiply Great Awakening stories endlessly because secularism has played itself out and has nowhere else to go. There will be no more 19th and 20th centuries where mankind thought their hubris justified. Imagine, for example, going to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and what your reaction would be when they turned on the lights, something that had never happened in the history of the world. Everything was illuminated, instantly! You might be justified in thinking, is there anything with science and technology man cannot do? One would think the disasters of the 20th century made it abundantly clear that infinite progress and building Utopia on earth wasn’t in the cards, but secularism (life without God) hadn’t fully played itself out yet. That would only become apparent in the third decade of the 21st century.

It’s odd that God used Donald Trump, as I argue in my book, or more specifically the reaction to him, to jump start the awakening. I would not have had that on my bingo card. For some reason he broke the left, and the entire Uniparty establishment. He perfectly fits the bill of the bull in the China shop, and he wasn’t afraid to touch third rails like immigration, endless foreign wars, and the globalist elite decimating American industry. What’s even more ironic, is that God used this billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star to spiritually open the eyes of millions of people. This is where secularism comes in. The theme of the last nine plus years is lies. To the left, Trump was and is such an existential threat to their plans that lying was and is justified to accomplish their goal of ridding him as a political thorn in their side. Secularism is also built on lies, specifically that God is unnecessary for building a flourishing society.

The reason I say secularism has played itself out is because there is nothing secular on the other side of secularism. We can date the beginning of the secular experiment to Rene Descartes writing in 1637 “Cogito Ergo Sum,” I think therefore I am, and thus the began rationalism. Instead of God, man and his reason became the starting point of knowing, and over time among Western elites God became increasingly unnecessary, an unwelcome presence in society. It took until the mid-20th century for secularism to completely banish God from Western culture and by the 21st century secularism reigned supreme. Unfortunately for humanity, since secularism is a lie, there has been misery, suffering, and death. And what do our globalist elites tell us? Like the great Saturday Night Live skit, they proclaim, More cowbell! Yes, we need more secularism! That’ll do it! We’ll figure it all out without God getting in the way.

This claim has lost all its credibility, which is why an increasing number of people are turning to God, and specifically to the God in Christ of the Old and New Testaments. Keep in mind we’re almost 400 years into this experiment with secular societal organization, so rolling it back will take time, maybe a long time, but for an increasing number of people Christianity is now the only credible answer, and it’s time for Christians to step up. That means doing the hard work of thinking through and building what Christendom 2.0, as Doug Wilson calls it, will look like, and how it will all be implemented. We have a lot of work to do, but as I always say, work like it depends on us, but pray because it in fact depends on God.

Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Aug 7, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

Since I became active on Twitter earlier this year, mainly to promote my new book and work, I’ve noticed that Christians can be narrow minded and dogmatic. And lest you think I’m bagging on my fellow Christians, these less than appealing traits come naturally to sinners regardless of what they believe. Such myopia, the inability to see beyond their own certitude, is why I often see people saying that Peterson is not an orthodox Bible-believing Christian, therefore he’s either dangerous or not worth listening to. I could not disagree more. I believe God is using him as an important piece of the puzzle to re-Christianize America and the West. I believe this, strongly, because of a concept most Christians have never heard of; plausibility structures. This post will be a short primer on the importance of this concept for our specific time in history, living in what Aaron Renn calls “negative world,” and the importance of Jordan Peterson.

In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I explore plausibility structures in some detail, which is the idea of the reality generating mechanism of a culture. The term was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his books, The Social Construction of Realty (with Thomas Luckman) and The Sacred Canopy. As a sociological construct (i.e., what it means to live with and among human beings and the culture and meanings they create), it simply means what seems true to us, and the social structures that contribute to that seeming.

A simple example is that for secular people God seems no more real than Santa Clause. Whether God is real, is not the point; what seems real is. Society creates the plausibility structures that contribute to God being plausible to us, or not. These structures are built into our educational systems, media, entertainment, etc. They are the secular air we breathe, and they affect us in ways big and small without our being aware of it. Christians are not immune to it either. In the West, God is persona non‑grata; if he exists at all he is merely a personal preference. I am convinced most people reject Christianity or never entertain it, because it just doesn’t seem real to them. For most, whether it is true or not is beside the point.

The sociology of knowledge is the study of how a life lived among persons in society affects their perception of reality, the “seemingness” of it. Reality isn’t just there; in some sense it is socially constructed, and the plausibility of our faith to us is directly related to the idea of a socially constructed reality. Christians affirm objective reality, that meaning inheres in things apart from our perceptions or experiences of them. Reality, however, is mediated to us in a variety of ways, through our senses, our psychology, our upbringing, interactions with other people, and society itself. This mediation means that although we affirm that objective reality exists, it must be interpreted by us, to us, and for us. Pure human objectivity does not, and cannot exist. Yet most human beings take reality for granted, as if their view of it was perfectly objective, no interpretation needed. All the while they are ignorant that interpretation is not an option; it is going on all the time whether they acknowledge it or not.

Secularism: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Western post-Christian secular culture no longer shares our Christian presuppositions. God, it is asserted and assumed, is not part of reality in any objective sense. He is wholly subjective, likely a projection of our wishful thinking, a purely personal phenomenon, and as such His existence has no bearing on society.  This perspective, however, starts with the secular world’s understanding of faith.

Secular cultural messaging denies that irreligious people need faith because faith is defined as something required only by religious people. Secular, non‑religious people, however, don’t embrace something called unbelief, but rather some other faith. All people live by faith, but we live in a culture that defines objectivity in a way that prejudices it against religious belief. Scientists and those who live by its light, we are told, can be purely objective, while religious folks by definition can’t be. This “objectivity double standard” allows the culture to define objective reality against us because in this view religious people can’t be objective. Secular people technically may not be “religious” in that they don’t go to church, but they still have a worldview based on faith commitments, which is why there is no such thing as an unbeliever. Finite creatures of limited knowledge can only exist by faith, by trusting the knowledge or expertise or insights or authority of others.

Secular irreligious people don’t know this, and many Christians unfortunately don’t know it either. To the secular, the Christian faith is less believable, less credible, than the secular faith they embrace which seems more credible, more plausible. This faith takes many forms, be it agnosticism, atheism, or an indifference to the claims of Christ, but it is faith, a trust in something, nonetheless. It seems more plausible to such people that God is either not worth pursuing, or even if He’s there it doesn’t much matter, or that any meaning to be had is in this life alone. None of this is merely rational or logical, and I would argue it rarely is. What they believe has more to do with what seems real to them than what is actually real. Society and culture in many ways determine this.

The Social Construction of Reality
In order to work under the rubric of “science,” sociologists have to bracket questions of truth or ultimate meaning. So when they say that reality is a social construction, they are not saying that it is only a social construction. What they are saying is that human beings interpret reality, give meaning to it, in social settings, and that social settings in turn affect that meaning. In the words of Berger and Luckmann:

Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. As sociologists we take this reality as the object of our analysis.

The key phrase here is “reality interpreted.” Reality isn’t self‑interpreting. Looking at the world through our eyes is not unlike how we experience a movie or TV show. The director constructs a reality, i.e., meaning, for us through various mechanisms at his or her disposal, and they are all deliberately, painstakingly used. After laying out an extensive list of what goes into making these virtual fictional worlds meaningful for us, Ted Turnau in his book Poplogetics says:

Each of these techniques adds meaning and texture for the imaginative landscape projected by the film, a world that the filmmaker constructs for our imagination.

Our world, however, is inundated with far more meaning than any film; it’s a veritable Niagara Falls of significance. And it doesn’t take a director to manipulate sound, light, or camera angles; we just have to wake up in the morning. The meaning exists out there, and we hunger for it as we hunger for stories told to entertain us.

Reality, however, isn’t merely something socially determined for us. The idea of the realness of reality, if you will, its objective nature, is both biblical and classical. In the Bible this is assumed from beginning to end, and Plato and Aristotle believed and argued that things have meaning in and of themselves apart from our subjective experience of them. The only other view of meaning, the default of most in the West, is that we are sovereign meaning creators because reality is what we make of it. Ernst Becker, a cultural anthropologist writing in the 60s and 70s, in his book the Structure of Evil writes that there was a “problem of creating meaning,” and that man is “the meaning creating animal.” His fundamental assumption about the nature of reality was that “man maximizes his Being by creating rich, deep, and original human meanings.” Even though in some sense we do create meaning, the difference for the Christian is that meaning is primarily there to be discovered. Our attempt to interpret it is to get as close as we can to the thing that is actually there, but as finite limited creatures we will always be one step away.

Whose Interpretation?
Even though as Christians we affirm objective reality, our everyday existence in the world is a constant encounter with a plethora of circumstances and experiences that must be, in one way or another, interpreted and attached with meaning. Berger and Luckman use the term, “Subjectively meaningful.” This reality is meaningful to us, and as such it must form some kind of “coherent world”; it must be comprehensible, it must make sense to us.

Everything, however, turns on the interpretation, which is “the action of explaining the meaning of something.” Interpretation, then, is where the true battle for the soul of Western civilization lies. Who gets to interpret reality? It is either God in Christ in Scripture, or secularism by default. The biggest challenge for the rise of a new Christendom is secular culture. As Berger points out in The Sacred Canopy:

One of the most obvious ways in which secularization has affected the man in the street is as a “crisis of credibility” in religion. Put differently, secularization has resulted in a widespread collapse of the plausibility of traditional religious definitions of reality.

And he wrote that in 1967! It wasn’t too many years prior that a universe without God would have been inconceivable for average Americans. Among Western society’s cultural elites after the Enlightenment it was totally conceivable, and it only broke out into the wider culture with a bang in the 1960s. Sociology helps us to understand how wider social currents, like secularization, get internalized into individuals.

The interpretation process and how human beings derive meaning from the world is interactive. Berger and Luckman:

It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity.

They call it a paradox that human beings construct a world that they “then experience as something other than a human product.” At first blush, concepts like “humanly produced, constructed objectivity” may appear arcane, but it is important for this discussion and Christianity’s influence in our secular world. This “seeming” process happens because all of us interact socially. In producing a world in our perceptions we externalize it, then interacting with it we objectify it, and finally we internalize it as “reality.” In effect our perceptions become reality for us, whether they reflect objective reality or not. You might want to read that sentence again, and think about it a bit. As Christians it is a good idea in our knowing and what we think we know to exercise some epistemological humility (I Cor. 8:2). I have written about that in detail previously.

Christians Should Not Take “Reality” for Granted: Says Who?
What does all of this have to do with Jordan Peterson? Everything! Reality and how people perceive it is in some way always socially defined. The dialectic process of a world becoming “real” to us is never ending. Christians can never take “reality” for granted because the question is always, “Says who?” That is, who serves as the definers of reality, secular culture or God. In The Sacred Canopy, Berger puts it this way: “The fundamental coerciveness of society lies not in its machineries of social control, but in its power to constitute and impose itself as reality.” The power of this imposition occurs when reality becomes taken for granted. We should never let reality be “taken for granted,” never assume reality is there to be seen for just the way people instinctively think it is. This is where Peterson comes in as a powerful question mark on this secular-taken-for-granted reality people inhabit in the 21st century.

Our Job as Christians battling secularism is to be consistently defining reality biblically. If we don’t, the hostile secular culture will always do the defining, and Christianity will lack a compelling plausibility to most people. The cultural air breathed throughout the West is plausibly secular. It is much easier for most people to believe in an irrelevant God (few are philosophical atheists) than the providential God of Scripture who ordains and defines all things. The challenge for Christians and Christianity at this moment in history, in “negative world,” is that we don’t have any cultural credibility. In fact, as Renn’s phrase implies, the dominant secular culture sees Christianity as positively harmful and dangerous. In this environment it is, practically speaking, extremely difficult to gain cultural traction. Most of us have little culture defining power, except in the very narrow pocket of our personal lives. Then, in God’s providence steps Jordan Peterson, himself a secular, Canadian liberal academic psychologist, and a most unlikely driver of a new Christian cultural consensus.

Too many myopic Christians focus on Peterson’s lack of historical Christian orthodoxy, as if that really matters for the cultural job God has called him to. It doesn’t. It’s almost a sport now, parsing Peterson’s words to see when he’ll finally take the plunge and declare with his mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in his “heart that God raised him from the dead,” so that he will finally be saved (Rom. 10:9). And being a man of many words, it’s a robust sport! It seems The Hound of Heaven is after him, though, given his wife is a convert to Catholicism, and his daughter an outspoken born-again Christian. Not to mention how many people challenge him on his conception of Christianity. But at this point, whatever the form and nature of this conception, his job is much bigger than his own salvation. I know that’s not a very Evangelical thing to say, but it’s true.

 

 

The reason Peterson is so important is because the “conceptual machinery” that elites in a society impose on the masses must be unmasked so that the underlying assumptions are always questioned. The secular culture like a machine grinds its notions, or concepts, into our plausibility field, so to speak, to make reality seem a certain way. This seeming must be questioned. As the popular bumper sticker in the olden days demanded, we must “Question Authority.” We as Christians in a culture hostile to our Faith must always question the authority of the definers: “Says who?” That is Jordan Peterson, and God has given him a huge platform to do that. This short video is a good example of how effectively he does that.

He also has credibility among cultural elites who are not leftists. Not being a run of the mill conservative Evangelical has helped him gain an impressive traction among people who would otherwise not find Christianity plausible at all. I’ve heard quite a few stories of people who have come to Christ because of him, so his lack of orthodoxy hasn’t kept people from being influenced by him to embraced Christ as Lord and Savior. The battlefield in our secular age is immense, and much of it happens, as Burger and Luckman say, on a “pretheoretical level,” that is prior to people even thinking. What Peterson is doing so well is again making the Christian worldview a player on the secular world’s stage, making it plausible for an increasing number of people. That means they will take it more seriously as a possible answer for the crying needs of our time. Secularism is not working, an experiment birthed in the Enlightenment that has proved wanting at every level. Let’s pray for Jordan that he makes it all the way to the only one who can save him from sin and death.

Secularism and Pietism: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Secularism and Pietism: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Apr 10, 2024 | Culture, Eschatology

As I’ve been thinking and reading about Christ’s reign being extended throughout the world and God’s kingdom advancing, I’ve realized that secularism and Pietism are two sides of the same coin. That might seem strange given the former is completely anti-religion and the latter is passionately religious, but both lead to the same thing: a secular society devoid of Christian influence. The realization I’ve had, and learned from others who’ve thought through these things for a lot longer than I have, is that because of the influence of Pietism, secularism triumphed as Christianity became primarily inward and personal.

Secularists love Christianity as long as it stays inside the four walls of the church or home, in the proverbial closet. Religion cannot be allowed to mar the sacred secular public space. I use the word sacred purposefully and ironically because secularism is a religion, another form of paganism whose gods just look different. The problem is that Christians who effectively embrace Pietism, as do most Evangelical Christians in our day, believe their faith belongs within those four walls and not in public. Therefore, secularism has free reign to dominate society and culture just as it has since World Word II in the once Christian West.

I’ve been thinking along these lines since my “conversion” to postmillennialism. The critical component of this optimistic eschatology is that it teaches us from Scripture, not speculation, that Christ did not come only to save our souls so when we die we go to heaven, nor to add personal holiness to that. His mission was far more expansive and far reaching. Specifically, he came to address the curse of sin for his fallen people, and the effects of sin on, in, and through us. For me, that latter preposition was what I didn’t get or discounted my entire Christian life until my “conversion” a year and a half ago. I heard a young Christian Twitter friend of mine, Joshua Haymes, say becoming postmillennial was like a drop of ink in a clear glass of water. It looks pretty cool and psychedelic for a bit, then in due course it colors every drop of water. Postmillennialism is like that; it colors everything I see because Christ came to win, here, now, in this life in this fallen world.

Christ’s Victory Over the Devil
Just as he frustrated the devil in the wilderness (Matt. 4), Jesus has been frustrating him for 2,000 years through His people whom he came to save (Matt. 1:21). I never knew that Isaac Watts’ Christmas hymn, Joy to the World was postmillennial:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
far as the curse is found,
far as the curse is found,
far as, far as the curse is found.

There is a lot of wonderful theology in those words! Just as the curse is ubiquitous, so are the blessings that flow through us to overcome the effects of the curse. Every square inch of reality is Christ’s, and he has commissioned us to take it back from the devil.

We sell Jesus’ victory over Satan and evil short when we think it is solely for the consummated state when he comes again to judge the living and the dead. I used to believe Satan and evil had the upper hand down here in this fallen world. I thought, isn’t it obvious? But it’s not obvious at all for those with eyes to see beyond the obvious. I use that word three times to highlight how easily we interpret reality by what we see and feel, rather than by the word of God. For example, we’re told Jesus came to reign and rule until he has put all his enemies under his feet (I Cor. 15:25), the last enemy being death which will happen at the resurrection. Who and what are his enemies prior to the resurrection? Anything that is contrary to the law-word of God. That’s happening whether you think you can see it or not, and in due course it will become obvious too. We’re playing the long game here, pushing back the curse not just for now, but for generations to come.

Unfortunately, we give far too much credit to sin and the devil. God told us in Genesis 3 that the seed of the woman would strike or bruise the serpent’s head. We may think the devil is a formidable foe, but every scheme he can conjure up in that head of his will fail. Jesus (through his church, us) is in fact frustrating him; he cannot frustrate Jesus. And no matter where the curse is found Jesus is conquering it, pushing it back, transforming what the devil intends for evil into good. If we think this process of conquering evil is only for the church, or only to be done inside the church or our houses, we are missing the mission of God in Christ, why he came: to redeem and restore all creation by the nations being discipled. That indeed is a Great Commission!

I recently relistened to the James White sermon that initially cracked open my closed mind to postmillennialism in August of 2022. In it he said there are far more professing Christians alive today than people living on earth in the first century. Could anyone alive then have imagined such a thing? Now we need to help more of these Christians escape from the clutches of Pietism and bring King Jesus to every area of their lives to disciple their own nations.

Why Pietism Came to Dominate the Modern Church
As with any movement among peoples and cultures there are a variety of complex factors that cannot be neatly packaged as a cause. The same is true with these two isms, and it is important to realize how they grew symbiotically together as a poisonous weed in Christian Western culture.

Initially, Pietism was a response to a type of dry scholasticism that grew out of the Middle Ages tending to make faith a merely intellectual exercise. The early Reformers were products of that scholastic culture, and as such were profoundly intellectual. The Reformation was built on those intellectual efforts, but over time some saw those efforts as tending toward a dry formalism. Pietists were specifically looking for a more dynamic, experiential faith, and built a contrasting, non-intellectual version of Christianity. This developed initially among German Lutherans in the early 17th century. In due course through some strains of Puritanism and the First and Second Great Awakenings, it made its way into American fundamentalism, and became the default faith of modern Evangelicalism.

Needless to say, God made us in his image, therefore our intellect is not in any way opposed to or contrary to our feelings or emotions. God made us so our emotions primarily flow from our thinking, and our thinking not dominated by our emotions. This orientation of the rightly ordered man started to change in Western culture as the two isms made their way into the modern world. An excellent explanation of what this means is in C.S. Lewis’s classic book, The Abolition of Man. He starts with a withering assessment of a book intended for, “boys and girls in the upper forms of schools.” Keep in mind the book was written in 1943, some three hundred years after the two isms had come to dominance in Western culture, but not enough to dominate. That would come in what we affectionally call, “The ‘60s.” The authors of the textbook are addressing a work by English poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The authors address a depiction of two tourists discussing a waterfall. Lewis quotes from the textbook:

“When the man said, That is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. . . . Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word ‘Sublime,’ or shortly, I have sublime feelings.’ Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: “This confusion is continually present in language as we appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our feelings.”

Lewis then shreds this perversion of thinking in his own indomitable way, but it doesn’t take having the towering intellect of C.S Lewis to realize what a disaster this shift entails. Here’s my take: Feelings are what count, what is important, and sublimity or beauty doesn’t exist objectively in God’s created world. The saying, beauty is in the eye of the beholder became absolute. As the 20th century showed us, ugliness could now be proclaimed beautiful.

Lewis called such people, “men without chests.” That is the title Lewis gives to the third section of his little book. In the classical understanding of anthropology, human beings are made up of three parts, the head, the chest, and the bowels. The head is the seat of the rational, the bowels the emotional, and the chest negotiates between the two. If the head through knowledge and faith doesn’t train the chest to manage the bowels, you get, well, the modern world, which is a feminized world where feelings and emotions through empathy dominate rather than rational calculations of the tradeoffs necessary to living in a fallen world more common to men. God created man, male and female he created them, that their two natures would compliment each other toward true human flourishing, or in biblical terms, blessing.

How do We Escape the Two Isms?
This is the question confronting every Christian in our time. It’s not difficult to convince Christians they need to escape secularism, but if you tell them they need to escape Pietism, they’ll wonder what you’ve been drinking. Unfortunately, most Christians are as ignorant of history as most Americans, so they will think Pietism just means being pious. They need to be educated about the 17th century German Lutheran movement of the name, and its influence on how they live out their faith in the modern world.

The fundamental fact Christians must learn is that Pietism has made their faith irrelevant to the culture in which they live. The church effectively has zero impact on Western culture, and that must change because it is that to which we have been called. The Great Commission and the Lord’s Prayer make it abundantly clear the “culture wars” are not an option. Some Christian leaders think they are, and worse, are a distraction. I’ve heard more than one say, being involved in the “culture wars” is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And we wonder why American culture is such a hell hole.

Few people understand the culture is simply a people’s religion externalized. Because secularism is the dominant religion of the West, we have a secularized culture that treats Christianity as a threat to societal order. Aaron Renn says we are now in “negative world.” In an influential January 2022 article in First Things called, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” Renn argues that we’ve come to negative world through positive and neutral world. Prior to the 1990s, Christianity was seen in American culture as a positive thing. In the 1990s that changed, and the culture treated Christianity as neutral, neither good nor bad. Now, our cultural elites see Christianity as a threat to all that is decent and good, like abortion, homosexual “marriage,” and transgenderism.

I believe the issue is theological, specifically eschatological. What we think about how things will end determines what we see as our mission as Christians today. That is, we are his body to bring everything in submission to his kingship, including the nations. From the very beginning, God’s covenant promises of salvation were to the nations, a word used well over 600 times in the Bible. In the Old Testament, it is clear he blesses nations as nations who honor and obey him, and curses, even destroys, those that don’t. America was blessed because as founded its leaders and most of its people believed their success as a nation depended on honoring God as a people, as a nation. And Jesus said plainly, nations are to be discipled. I will end with a verse, 2 Chronicles 7:14, that applies to every nation on earth:

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

The context is the dedication of the temple by Solomon and the people of Israel. God’s people now inhabit every nation on earth, and we are called to pray for God to heal our lands. The temple no longer resides in Israel and belongs to one people, but Jesus is now the living temple of God as we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. This promise of God healing our land if we pray, seek him, and walk in his ways, is to us! It is why I pray most mornings for our land, America, what I call “the four R’s”: for Revival that will lead to Renewal to Restoration and finally Reformation. The goal isn’t just saved souls, but transformed people who will transform everything they put their hands to.

 

Third Wayism is Dead

Third Wayism is Dead

Mar 27, 2024 | Culture

We live in clarifying times where we are forced to choose sides. If we choose not to do decide, as Geddy Lee of Rush sings in the song Free Will, we still have made a choice.

Those who know me know I was deeply influenced by the late Tim Killer, both for his gospel teaching and apologetics. Some even know he was my wife and I’s premarital counselor at Westminster Seminary in 1987. He always seemed to lean left, as in uncritically using the phrase “social justice,” but I was shocked by who he became after Trump. Something happened to what has come to be known as “Big Eva,” or the Evangelical establishment. Basically they lost their collective minds.

This establishment is represented by what used to be respected orthodox Christianity, like Wheaton College, Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, and others. Their move to the left didn’t come in the typical theological fashion as in the liberal Christianity of the early 20th century, but in response to secular political and cultural pressure. The culprit is what is known as “third wayism.”

Third Wayism and the Deceit of Moral Equivalence
Third wayism is a kind of moral equivalence between left and right, a third way, and Keller believed it. I will use a quote from a World Magazine article he wrote from early 2022 titled, “Handling a hostile culture: Assessing how the Church is responding to shifting cultural pressures”:

[T]he culture is definitely more polarized than it ever has been, and I’ve never seen the kind of conflicts in churches in the past that we see today. In virtually every church there is a smaller or larger body of Christians who have been radicalized to the Left or to the Right by extremely effective and completely immersive internet and social media loops, newsfeeds, and communities. People are bombarded 12 hours a day with pieces that present a particular political point of view, and the main way it seeks to persuade is not through argument but through outrage. People are being formed by this immersive form of public discourse—far more than they are being formed by the Church.

It is extremely disappointing that he really believed this. The phrase, “radicalized to the Left or to the Right,” is not only unjustified, but a distortion of our political and cultural moment. There is simply no comparison between the two because there is no “radical right.” It all turns on how one defines “radical,” and Keller never bothers to do that. In the summer of 2020, the truly “radical” left in the form of BLM and Antifa, with the tacit encouragement of Democrats and their media allies, rioted in cities throughout the country and the media called them “mostly peaceful protests.” There were billions of dollars of damage, and many lives lost. There is nothing comparable on the right. The so-called “insurrection” of January 6, 2021, was an FBI setup meant to demonize and silence Trump supporters and the entire MAGA movement.

Further, his point about what are in effect political feedback loops is nonsense. The secular left dominates all the organs of cultural influence, has the biggest megaphones, and their messaging cannot be escaped. They own all major media, practically all education, entertainment, and social media. People don’t have to do anything to be programmed in leftist groupthink. On the contrary, if you want alternative conservative views you have to search for them.

Andrew T. Walker had this to say about this Evangelical threading the needle:

Third-wayism in politics is a form of political Gnosticism as it assumes that there is a platonic ideal to politics that does not require engaging the kingdoms of the world as what they fundamentally are: worldly, temporal, & creational ordinances designed for proximate justice.

To think anyone can be apolitical in our day, least of all ministers of the gospel, is naïve at best, and delusional at worst. I’ve heard it said, you may not be into politics, but politics is into you, as the last several years make very clear. For the woke left, there is nothing beyond politics, which is why politics cannot be ignored or avoided. The very existence of America bearing any relationship to our founding is on the line. Politicians and ministers who don’t get the nature of the war we’re engaged in, and it is a spiritual war between good and evil, do not understand, in Jesus’ words, “the signs of the times.” As third wayism suggests, plenty of Christians don’t recognize the signs of the times in which we live.

The Curious Case of Alistair Begg
Begg, if you don’t know him, is a Scottish Born Reformed minister who has been a well-respected pastor of an Ohio church for decades. He also has a huge radio ministry, and thus wide influence among Christians. By now, many of us have heard about this curious case.

A grandmother had sent him a letter seeking pastoral counseling. She was conflicted about her transgender grandson, and an invitation to go to his transgender wedding. Begg decided to air his interaction with her on his radio program. His approach was third wayism at its finest, although prior to this moment I would never have pegged Begg as being capable of such a thing. He basically said, she should express her disagreement with the lifestyle, but by all means go, and even bring a gift. This went viral and all kinds of Evangelical “stuff” hit the fan. I am sure Begg has never come close to experiencing anything like this in all of his long years of public ministry.

Because of the blow back, Begg decided to preach a sermon explaining himself, and instead of pulling it back even a little, decided to double, and triple down. In fact, he went so far as to accuse his critics of the most base and evil motives. It was truly shameful. Begg and others like him just don’t get “the signs of the times.” I’m going to link to three episodes of the Ezra Institute podcast that is an excellent discussion from three men who get “the signs of the times.”

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

 

 

The Other Not So Curious Case of Foot Washing During the Super Bowl
If you watched the Super Bowl, (I didn’t; I know virtue signaling), you probably saw an ad promoted by Big Eva called, “He Gets Us.” It was, as the youngsters say nowadays, cringe. It’s hard to watch. I’m not going to say much about it here because there has been copious ink spilled elsewhere, but to the left is a video by the Contra Mundum guys that captures the feeble nature of Big Eva to disciple the culture. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? Disciple the nations, Great Commission?

This is perfect example of what I’ll call Alistair Begg syndrome, trying to be winsome to a culture that hates us so our judgmentalism won’t stand in the way of the gospel. That is basically Begg’s argument in his triple down sermon. In fact, being “winsome” means standing for righteousness and God’s law, forcefully, in a culture that calls evil good, and good evil. While I’ve never been confronted with being invited to a homosexual “wedding,” I have family members who have, and I was firm in voicing my opinion that I would never go to a wedding celebrating such a thing.

Why Third Wayism is On It’s Last Legs
In the end, and as we move there, all that stands in the way of advancing God’s kingdom will be exposed for what it is. That has been happening to third wayism, and like other things being exposed in our time of Great Awakening, it is fully committed to its perversion of truth. This dynamic is most obvious in the woke, Marxist left, and the Democrat-media complex supporting it. No matter what they accomplish, or what disasters it creates, they always double down. It is just this doubling-down that has finally woken up tens of millions of people all over the world. The left no longer tries to hide it or fake it. They are in your face 24/7. Begg and Big Eva have unfortunately done this as well.

The slow demise of the left and all associated with it, including the Evangelical Establishment, began as most things in these tumultuous times have, with Donald Trump coming down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his run for the presidency. He broke the left. Their reaction to him was unhinged, and only gets worse the longer he remains politically viable. It was the unhinged reaction to Trump that opened my mind to him in the first place. As much as I despised him and everything he stood for, and thinking his presidential campaign was a joke, I thought, nobody can be that bad. He had decently well-adjusted children who grew into solid adults who love and respect their dad, and narcissistic psychopaths don’t pull that off. Plus others I respected started to take his ideas seriously, so I decided I would as well.

Looking back I realize Trump was a trigger God has used to expose the lies and rot at the core of American culture, included Evangelical culture. There are men I once respected who I no longer recognize. It’s also happened to what I now call Con Inc., or the conservative establishment. In fact, one of these men, David French, recently wrote an editorial in the New York Times encouraging Nikki Halley supporters to vote for Joe Biden, which would have been shocking, but nothing David French does can now possibly shock. I once respected this man and read everything he wrote, especially in the run up to the left redefining marriage. Now he’s a leftist.

This process for me began one day in February 2016 when I got my copy of National Review in the mail. This has become known as the Never Trump Issue. The title on the cover, “Against Trump.” I read some of the pieces and it was spurious garbage. Mind you, I had been a subscriber since the early 1980s. Bill Buckley, who founded the magazine in 1955, was a hero of mine, but he was long dead. Now those who carried on the legacy went into Trump derangement lunacy. Looking back at the last red pill nine years, I’ve realized this is how it all had to happen. I call this a Great Revealing, and this revealing convinces me we are in the midst of another Great Awakening. Eyes are being opened to truth and to He who is the Truth like no time in modern history.

Until Trump most of us were living the somnambulant life, going on our merry way as if the people in charge knew what they were doing and would lead us to the promised land. This applies to establishments in literally every area of existence, from the most obvious in government, but also in medicine, food and agriculture, public health, media, entertainment, education, and even as we’re seeing, the Evangelical establishment. God used Donald J. Trump to trigger it all, proving he is infinitely wise and powerful, and is also hilarious!

 

 

 

 

 

The Guardians of “The Narrative” vs. Truth

The Guardians of “The Narrative” vs. Truth

Feb 7, 2024 | America, Culture

I take this title from a piece by the great and erudite Roger Kimball where he asks if these Guardians will win. Before I discuss the Guardians, let me preface my comments by a brief history of where this idea of narrative comes from. The concept goes back to the 16th century, and it means, “a tale, a story, a connected account of the particulars of an event or series of incidents.” As such it was applied primarily to fiction, like the plays of Shakespeare, but it can apply to the ark of any story line. It’s the big picture, if you will, that helps define the meaning of the details of the picture. It’s most powerfully, and deleteriously, used in our time to push political and cultural agendas. We have Friedrich Nietzsche to thank for the initial idea that was then developed by postmodernist scholars in the 1970s and 80s when postmodernism became “a thing.”

Very simply, modernism given to us by the Enlightenment believed finding truth was attainable solely by reason. The romantic movement started pushing back against this in the late 18th century, and by the late 19th century Nietzsche pushed it off a cliff. That’s where the postmodernists (after modernism) come into the picture. They took his ideas and argued truth per se doesn’t exist, contrary to Nietzsche who believed strongly in truth. All that does exist is the meta-narrative (a culture’s big picture) and we derive our meaning of what is “true” or not from that. Basically we’re all living a novel, and whoever the societal author is (or in a culture’s case, the authors are) determines how we interpret the story. There is obviously some truth to that, but postmodernists literally believe truth doesn’t exist or even if it does it is irrelevant. These ideas were catnip for leftists, who not only do not believe in truth, but believe narratives are to be used to establish their political power.

 

This is a short video by two black liberal scholars who today are likely viewed as right wing radicals by the left. It is an excellent overview of these two poles of the metanarrative idea (they just used the word narrative). John McWhorter (on the right) says because of the way it’s misused, he hates the word narrative. Then Glenn Loury counters, explaining how narratives work and can be used in positive ways to help people interpret their past and present as a people. He acknowledges they can also be misused in ways that harm people. The black victim narrative is one such way that has created untold misery and suffering. It’s well worth a six minute and thirty second listen.

Narratives and the Will to Power
Nietzsche argued that because God was dead and Christianity no longer offered a metanarrative (he never used the word) that could hold Western civilization together, man must develop his own moral framework to accomplish that. He believed that could only be accomplished by great men he called Übermensch, often translated as Superman or Overman. He never fully defined exactly what such a man was, but he developed a complimentary idea in the will to power. I don’t know enough about Nietzsche to know how he developed all this, but the idea certainly originated with him, and fit his worldview. The attempts to interpret Nietzsche are numerous, and there seem to be as many interpretations as scholars doing the interpreting. In essence his worldview was the result of his desire to fulfill Satan’s temptation to Eve, that he could be like God knowing good and evil. In a universe without God that is kind of the only choice. You have to be your own god, and he knew that. Therefore, if you are going to mold reality to your will, you must have the “will to power,” must impose that will on matter, including human beings. It was another idea he never fully worked out.

Fast forward to today, and the modern left epitomizes the “will to power” in the use of narrative. The left and the Guardians of the narrative (the media) have completely taken over Western culture, using their influence for political power, defined as legalized coercion. Governments have the monopoly on the use of force, which makes politics a very important business. The Democrat Party and legacy media shamelessly use the “will to power” in pursuit of their ideological agenda. Their hypocrisy is so in your face it’s almost impressive. Controlling or directing the narrative has always been important and a fact of existence in politics and government, but it is critically important in the information age. The left controls the narrative, however, specifically to mold and shape opinion regardless of truth. The only “truth” they care about is what serves their ideological interests and political power. This has become more egregious since Obama became president as we learn from “the paper of record,” the New York Times.

In the Spring 2020 journal Academic Questions, Dr. David Rozado did a word frequency usage study on New York Times articles written between 1970 and the end of 2018. He was looking for progressive/Marxist buzzwords used by groups with an ideological agenda. He discovered in 2010 and the years following such words and phrases had exploded in frequency. There are numerous charts in the article graphically displaying the jump in terms such as climate change, sexism, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, and so on. Apparently, all these things became such critically important issues around 2010 that America’s “paper of record” found it necessary to endlessly report upon them. In fact, they were doing what the left always does, driving “the narrative,” but in this case it went into overdrive. Joseph Goebbels would have been impressed.

The driving of “the narrative” took steroids when Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for president in June 2015. Speaking of the rebarbarization of civilization, Kimball gives an example we’re all too familiar with:

The 2020 election . . . took place during the period of eagerly embraced Covid hysteria. That hysteria provided a justification or, more accurately, an alibi for the numerous violations of the law in the conduct of the election. The Constitution of the United States stipulates that state legislatures are in charge of determining voting procedures. But various governors and secretaries of state, from blue states mostly, swept that Constitutional provision aside in their eagerness to assure the appearance of a Biden victory. Such anomalies were noted and commented on at the time but somehow never got traction. Why? Because the media, that great tool of The Narrative, determined that it oughtn’t to get traction.

Now that the media are “Guardians of the (left-wing) Narrative,” Edward R. Morrow must be rolling over in his grave. In their latest futile effort to destroy Trump, the Guardians have pulled out all the stops on narrative building because of the danger Trump poses to our DemocracyTM if he gets elected again. Oh the horror!!! Peter Berkowitz highlights some of these efforts in a piece explaining how these people imperil the rule of law (they believe they are a law unto themselves). He writes:

[A]nti-Trumpers have been sounding the alarm continuously against Trumpian tyranny since 2016 and have picked up the pace this cycle. This gives Democrats time to grasp the grave threat and take suitable precautions. But what precautions are suitable to thwart the authoritarian conquest of America.

For those who believe Trump is Hitler, there is nothing they won’t do to try to stop him.

God obviously has a terrific sense of humor. He not only picked Donald J. Trump, billionaire New York real estate developer and reality TV star to be the primary agent of change in this moment in history, He also apparently made him unstoppable. Everything the left and the Guardians have thrown at him for over eight years has only served to make him more popular and influential. Now that is funny!

Truth Wins
“Will the Guardians of The Narrative Win?” is the title of Kimball’s piece. I don’t believe he intended this to be a rhetorical question, but I do. Of course they won’t! If we live by sight, the odds of defeating them seem impossible, but God is in the habit of making the impossible possible. For example, the Lord tells Abraham and Sarah when she’s 90 and he’s 100 that they will have a son in a year. Sarah laughs at the absurdity of it. In reply, the Lord asks, rhetorically, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Although not meant to be answered, Paul speaking about Abraham gives it to us anyway:

He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were (Rom. 4:17).

For the God who created everything out of nothing, raising the dead and doing “the impossible” is what he does for breakfast.

Every time you’re tempted to live based on what you see rather than trust, which leads to fear, worry, and doubt, first repent. Then remember He makes things to exist that currently do not exist. I encourage you to think about this revealed truth for a while. Not only does the truth therein apply to you personally, your life and problems and dreams, but to entire societies, or Jesus would never have commanded the Apostles to “make disciples of all nations,” not individuals. It is, of course individual people who make up nations, but Jesus was giving us the big picture, the meta-narrative, the purpose for which he came to earth. When people repent and believe on the Lord Jesus, it isn’t only for their personal salvation and holiness, or to grow the church and populate heaven, but to bring his kingdom reign to the entire earth, his blessings transforming this fallen world “as far as the curse is found.”

However, sometimes, as in the depth of the Covid scam, it appears the Guardians will win, but it is impossible for lies to ever triumph in the long run. The Negative Nellies and Pessimistic Pauls always give power to lies they do not possess. In the Trump years I’ve come to call them doomers because for them it always seems to be doom and gloom, the worst just around the corner. They have an unhealthy level of skepticism we call cynicism. I love this definition of that unhelpful state of mind: a faultfinding captious critic, especially one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest. If you didn’t know the definition of captious either, it means, marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections. The word nature is important. Such people are inclined to be this way because that is who they are. Christians, by contrast, should never be cynics or captious because it’s sin and it’s not who we are in Christ. So if you’re a cynic or given to cynicism, stop it! If you’re given to doom and gloom, repent, and pray for God to give you a spirit of trust in his almighty power. If Romans 8:28 is true, then all things in our lives, both personally and societally, work for our good and his glory. If you believe that, I mean really buy into it, circumstances, including other people, will have no power to control you, specifically your emotions and peace of mind. As the prophet Isaiah says,

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you (Is. 26:3).

There is a reason truth will always win eventually: Jesus. He who is the Truth (John 14:6) will make sure of it. But it’s bigger than that. Our confidence, even optimism, is based on what happened when Christ ascended to the right hand of God after his resurrection. As he says in the Great Commission, all authority had been given to him, therefore go. We go and work and plan and make it happen not in our authority and power, but in the authority and power of Jesus Christ. He is now reigning over all things toward his glorious ends in a new heavens and earth until every last enemy is vanquished, the last being death. Knowing this, we understand that the Guardians are spitting into a gale force divine wind. They don’t have a chance.