Conservatism, the Protestant Dilemma, and the Theocratic Element

Conservatism, the Protestant Dilemma, and the Theocratic Element

Aug 26, 2026 | Parents and Family

This post was inspired by what was for me an eye opening piece at American Reformer by Timon Cline titled, “Can Protestants be Conservative?”  I’ll explain what he means and lay out some of his arguments below, but this piece is really about setting up why Cline’s question is a perfect way to phrase the question and the dilemma it raises for we who espouse the Protestant faith. When I first saw the question it made no sense to me, but now it does, and hopefully before I’m done it will to you too. I encourage you to read his piece as well. He takes many of his arguments from a book published in 1962 by Clinton Rositer called, “Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion.” I haven’t read it yet, but it will be interesting to devel into Rositer’s perspective on the development of modern conservatism and it’s rebirth after the World War II. Liberalism’s dominance after Roosevelt and the War was absolute, and conservatism thought something of a joke and not taken seriously by America’s cultural and political elites.

In order to make sense of Cline’s question, and set up the answer to it, we’ll first take a look at my journey through conservatism.

I’ve been a conservative since shortly after I “pulled the lever” for Jimmy Carter in my first presidential election in 1980. There’s a story behind that lamentable choice. As my name indicates, I’m Italian and grew up in a thoroughly Americanized Italian home and family. The two sides of my family couldn’t have been any different. My dad’s side was crazy, like every stereotypical over-the-top Italian family we’ve seen in movies or on TV: loud, boisterous, argumentative, especially when the alcohol flowed. By contrast, my mother’s side was as calm as a summer pond on a still day. My dad was born in Brooklyn early in the Depression, and his outlook on life in large part determined by it. Given Italian immigrants we’re almost all Democrats, they were a proud Roosevelt Democrat family. Italian also meant Catholic, and although my dad didn’t start out a faithful church goer, as I grew up he wouldn’t miss a Sunday Mass.

All this lead to my dad’s identity being rooted in three words I’d often hear him say: He was an Italian, Catholic, Democrat, and he would never change! And he didn’t. I went away to college in the fall of 1978 pretty much apolitical. I guess I was a registered Democrat, but didn’t think much about it. Of those three words my dad used, one was about to change. I became a born-again Christian not long after I arrived at Arizona State University, something that would not make my dad a happy camper. I couldn’t do much about the Italian part, but by the time of the 1980 election I would not be long for the Democrat word either. Given my ignorance I had no conviction one way or the other, but since I guess I was a Democrat, I should vote for the Democrat, and why Carter got my vote. He would be the last one. The morning after Reagan won I was in the student union watching Reagan’s news conference, and the more he talked, the more I realized I was probably a conservative Republican, and that’s how it all started. I didn’t know at that time I would have decades ahead of experiencing conservative futility and frustration, but I was all in.

My political journey really started when I came across Francis Schaeffer’s, The God Who Is There, sometime in 1980. Realizing my Christian faith applied to all of life, including politics, was a game changer for me. The campus organization I came to faith through was typical of a Pietistic kind of fundamentalism focused on “spiritual” things like Bible reading, evangelism, Scripture memory, lots of Scripture memory, and fellowship with other Christians. All that really counted was my relationship with Jesus, and the worldly stuff while maybe important, wasn’t a priority. Schaeffer began to change that, along with his once Christian and conservative son Franky. It’s through the latter that I learned about National Review Magazine and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. These became my teachers about the conservative movement, along with reading books that taught me what conservatism is. It all sounded great to me, but as time passed I noticed nothing seemed to change. The liberals continued their march through the culture, and we only seemed to conserve their gains, albeit maybe a little more slowly.

The Culture Wars and Conservative Futility
I’ll never forget watching Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, and hearing the words “culture war” I think for the first time. For your average politically engage conservative, Buchanan was mostly an embarrassment. Bill Buckley, one of my conservative heroes, more or less accused him of being an anti-Semite. He had run for president against George Bush, but couldn’t gain any traction. The Bush campaign gave him a prime time slot to make his case for Bush, and his own vision for America. It’s one that looked increasingly prescient as the years wore on. It’s known as “The Culture War Speech,” which is a war mainstream Republicans wanted nothing to do with. What Buchanan understood, and Republicans didn’t, was that conservatives didn’t start the war. And what was most profound about his insight was that it wasn’t about culture per se, but about religion, about what Americans believed fundamentally about the nature of reality. A little more than halfway through the speech he lays out the case:

Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him for the freedom to choose religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.

We stand with President Bush for right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools, and we stand against putting our wives and daughter and sisters into combat units of the United States Army. And we stand with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture.

We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who interpret the law as written, and against would-be Supreme Court justices like Mario Cuomo who think they have a mandate to rewrite the Constitution.

My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.

That last paragraph was a planting-a-flag moment in American history, and a moment of clarity against the entire American political and cultural establishment, and they despised Buchanan for it. Around Reagan’s reelection in 1984 I got involved in Republican politics in California. I experienced even then how mainstream Republicans, who called themselves “moderates” looked down on we “social conservatives.” The 80s was the era of the Moral Majority, which inspired those pesky conservative Christians to become politically engaged, and the cultural elites from both sides of the political spectrum were none too happy about it.

The problem I didn’t quite see at the time, and what Cline exposes, is that the modern conservative movement is thoroughly secular. This doesn’t mean there were not deeply religious people involved, but that they bought into the myth of neutrality, that America’s liberty was based on a pluralism where Christianity had no more right to influence government policy than any other religion. Basically, and Cline points this out, modern conservativism was classical liberalism, an Enlightenment project that saw religion as a primarily personal issue, and religion in the public square as fundamentally divisive. America’s founders negotiated that tension, but given late 18th century America was thoroughly Protestant, and Calvinism dominant, Christianity informed everything about how the Republic was founded and governed.

I was not well versed on the history of conservativism or the conservative movement, having seen it as primarily a post-World War II phenomenon, but I learned from Cline it started well before that. Therefore, I assumed conservatives and conservatism was mostly on the side of we social conservatives because it sure sounded like they were. But as the 90s gave way to the 2000s and George W. Bush’s administration, I started to experience some cognitive dissonance. The 2006 midterm elections where Republicans got shellacked was like a gut punch. No matter what we do nothing changes, and the liberals and their progressive project marches on. Maybe conservatism slowed it down a little, but it almost seemed like conservatives and liberals were on the same page. I didn’t think that at the time, but suspicion was brewing up in me like a kettle on the boil. I concluded the reason we don’t get anywhere is that we ignore culture and think the answer is politics. So I went all in on the culture, but politics is important because as a wise older man once told me, it’s the distribution of power in a society.

After Obama was elected, the first Marxist president, the pessimism set in. I realized I probably wasn’t a conservative given their futility, but what was I? I thought about libertarianism, but that was a secular dead end. Maybe I was a classical liberal after all. I was hanging around some guys who embraced that moniker, but I realized it was too secular for me too, so now what? Trump! He reoriented everything for me, the very last person on earth I thought could do such a thing. At the time I had subscribed to National Review magazine, and had done so since the early 80s, and in February ’16 I got the infamous anti-Trump issue of the magazine in the mail. On the cover were big bold gold letters that stated, “AGAINST TRUMP,” and below the names of the contributors, a who’s who of the conservative movement. Some of since repented, but most of them got TDS so bad they could never recover. It was that day as I was trying to read some of it that I knew the conservative movement had been conning me all along, which is why I now call it, Con inc.

Conservatism’s Theocratic Element: Against Protestants
I finally came to understand that the fundamental problem with conservatism was that it bought into the secular myth of neutrality, that America, or any nation for that matter, could be governed without any overt political reference to God, and specifically the Christian God. Cline explains how this process of de-Protestantizing conservatism developed in the late 19th century with industrialization and waves of immigration, much of it Catholic. The changes coming after the Civil War were monumental as America was developing into an industrial world power. The religiously conservative rurally agrarian society prior was becoming an industrial city based country. As conservatism became less overtly Protestant, it became more classically liberal, or what Rossiter called “laissez-faire conservatism,” and thus more individualistic, libertarian, and secular. This was when conservatism lost its “theocratic element,” meaning there was no longer, according to Cline, “any positive moral, religious vision for society.”

The new conservatism would be more ecumenical, part of a “Judeo-Christian” tradition, less Protestant as it was in America’s first century. By the time of the development of the modern conservative movement, it became primarily a Catholic and Jewish driven movement. It wasn’t until the above mentioned Moral Majority that conservative Protestants declared their relevance again, but they were not exactly welcomed. Today we see this dynamic play out in movement conservativism’s aversion to anything smacking of “Christian nationalism.”

If you read the founding fathers you will find they were all, even the most supposedly Deistic among them, completely comfortable with the primacy of Protestant Christianity as the worldview and moral driver of the republic. When Adams said the following he was speaking about Protestant Christianity:

Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

This was axiomatic for the first hundred years of the Republic, but secularism slowly took over, and conservatism went right with it.

What was most revelatory for me was the transformation among conservatives of the role of government. I always assumed per Reagan’s quip, that the government that governs least governs best. Since liberty was now defined primarily in economic terms, minimalist government became the default conservative position. Cline explains it well:

The purpose of government was always stated in purely individualistic terms. This was the minimalist, nightwatchmen theory of the state. Government was merely the umpire there to call foul if the rules of the game were violated. The state was decided not an active instrument of leadership, and was certainly not charged with social happiness. The goal was to reduce government’s relevancy and size to such a degree that, as Grover Norquist would say, it could be drowned in a bathtub.

One of the things Donald Trump exposed, ironically enough, is the secular-Protestant divide in modern conservatism. Traditional (as we’d see them now) laissez-faire conservatives despise Trump. A robust executive who exerts moral leadership over the nation is not at all welcomed. This is why conservatism developed, as Rossiter termed it, “an intense cult of the Constitution” rising to the level of “a second holy writ.” Reading those words was shocking to me because I assumed that cult was the normal state of affairs. Cline counters:

Whereas the actual framers had been ambivalent about the Constitution as a pragmatic mode of governance, the new conservatives sacralized it. Now the parchment was “great and sacred,” and inviolate, immutable even. “In short, the Constitution was a closed book by which Americans must live henceforth and forever,” and this closed book was a “catalogue of limitations rather than a grant of powers.” In need of an interpretive key and inspirational hermeneutic, the Declaration of Independence was rediscovered as the philosopher’s stone.

This gave us a new clergy, men, and now women, in black robes, judges became the new high priests. As Cline aptly puts it, “The move was not to suggest a moral, directing power to government, but rather the divinity of absolute restrictions against such activity.”

What I discovered reading Cline’s piece is that the reason modern conservatism is a loser political philosophy is because while it lost “the theocratic element,” the left never did. They understand what conservatives forgot a long time ago: there is no morally neutral place from which to govern a society. The left is driven by a moral force that will not be stopped, while the secular right is powerless to stop them. That is, until Donald J. Trump showed us what conservatism could and should be. It’s crazy for me to write that sentence, let alone think that thought, but God used Trump to reveal what I’d been wondering about for a very long time, why Con Inc. proved to be a con. Once I discovered this I realized modern conservatism was just liberalism in a skirt, and Cline confirmed that.

Protestants are finally debating the “theocratic element” and breaking out of the secular trap. Nobody knows where this is going to go because it is a complicated subject and everyone has an opinion, but at least we’ve started a journey that had to be made. Conservative Protestantism needs to be back at the center of the conservative movement and American public life. It’s our American heritage and we need to fight for it.

Epistemology and the Fall: The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Epistemology and the Fall: The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Aug 19, 2026 | Epistemology - Trust, Parents and Family

Knowledge is better than ignorance, knowing than not knowing, as you can appreciate when you see the pilot enter the cockpit on a flight you’re about to take. Or when you see the surgeon and medical professionals wheel a loved one into an operating room. Or let’s say you’re lost in a place you’ve never been without a map, nowadays without your phone able to display Waze or Google Maps because there is no cell service. You’re nervous because it’s dark and you’re alone and low on gas. What you would give for the knowledge that comes with cell service or a map now. Yet sometimes ignorance is better than knowledge, as when bad guys want to do harm but don’t know how to use a weapon. Or a child not knowing how difficult their life is going to be. Then we might use a saying we’re all familiar with—ignorance is bliss.

Yet at the very beginning of our faith, it’s genesis we might say, is a prohibition by God not to eat from a tree he called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” It’s fascinating that what is philosophically called epistemology, the study of knowing, has been central to our religion from the very beginning. That this tree is right next to another tree, one God called “the tree of life,” is also something to ponder. And as we learn in Genesis 2, these two trees were in the middle of the garden, not out on the periphery or in some random location. Whatever is in the middle or center of something is of the most importance, and in some way life and knowledge are connected. We don’t know in verse 9 when we’re told this what the relationship between these two might be, if there is any at all, but I suspect there must be given their proximity. We know specifically that knowledge at least has an inverse relation to life in that it can cause death. We’re told after “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it,” he gives the man this warning:

“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

It may be the act of disobedience to God is what causes the death, or the knowledge itself. Most seem to think it was a kind of test, that the prohibition was a probation, a trial to see if man could be trusted with such knowledge. He could not, as we know.

Again, we’re not told, and over the millennia there has been much speculation as to what this might mean. It could be both knowledge and disobedience, in that disobedience to God is what made man’s awareness of evil a reality and thus caused death. It seems man was created not to have knowledge of evil because everything God created was very good. There was no evil in the world prior to the fall, but evil existed in the universe, in the non-material world because Satan had already fallen. We’re getting into mysteries beyond the ability of the finite human imaginations to comprehend.

It is clear from the rest of Scripture, however, and common sense, that knowledge itself is not the issue given we are exhorted continually to grow in our knowledge because knowledge is a good thing. For example, the Lord says through Hosea that “my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge” (Hos. 4:6). And we see from Proverbs that wisdom is knowledge rightly applied. It very much depends on what kind of knowledge we’re talking about, knowledge of what and how it is used. So if we go back to the garden we might conclude that man already had and could grow in his knowledge of the good, like the God’s creation in order to rule over the earth, to fill and subdue it. They couldn’t do that without knowledge. That means we’re left with the conjunction “and,” or the connection between knowledge and evil. It is knowledge about evil that was the issue, knowing what evil is. Another way to put that is, man would now have the knowledge of taking God’s good creation and perverting it, turning good into evil.

You Will Be Like God: Knowledge and the Fall
We’re not told, but we can speculate if man had passed the test, he could then be trusted with such knowledge, and have access to the tree of life forever. This understanding seems to fit because the tree of life is at the beginning and end of the Bible. There are four references to it in the book of Revelation, three of those in the last chapter. The first reference is in chapter 2:

To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Adam and Eve lost that right to paradise because they chose to disobey God. Satan knew if he could get man on his side in his rebellion, he would have a better chance to take down God who he saw as the usurper, the one who had taken his rightful throne as ruler of the universe. Talk about hubris. He was the one created by God, not God by him. So the first thing he does is question God’s command, “Did God really say?” When Eve answers the question, then Satan calls God a liar by contradicting him, “You will not certainly die.” Then he attacks his character, “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The implication is that God is petty and jealous and doesn’t want man to have what he has.

This threefold attack is at the center of every sinful human being; question God, accuse him of lying, then attack his character. Man’s motivation at the center of his being now became the same as Satan’s; he wants to take back his rightful throne, to be the one calling the shots, to determine what is good and evil, to be like God. So, knowledge itself is not the issue, but who gets to be God.

22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

An important question when thinking about these things is the nature of evil, what it is. This was Augustine’s dilemma, who writes about his struggle trying to figure out what evil is in his Confessions. Early in his life he was taken in by the Manicheans who believed good and evil were two distinct and equal forces in the world doing battle against one another vying for our loyalty, light verses darkness. Over time he realized that made no sense because he could never find something evil that was not first good perverted. In other words, the Bible’s account made more sense, that God created everything good, including knowledge, and man’s rebellion caused him to take the good thing God created and pervert it, use it for evil ends.

So what happened in the fall is that man now had the knowledge to misuse God’s good creation towards his selfish ends. Instead of allowing God to dictate the meaning of things and their use, man would do whatever he wanted. He would now live in the subjective world of his own meaning creation, rather than living in and discovering the objective meaning of God’s creation. This orientation is a definition of sin Augustine gave us, and Luther emphasized as well, “incurvatus in se,” in Latin, or being curved in on ourselves. For me it is the perfect definition, a self-orientation, instead of a God and others orientation, and ourselves in that context. Knowledge now became something we possess to build our own kingdoms, to be our own sovereigns, sitting on the throne of our lives for our glory. What could go wrong!

We see immediately how the horrible effects of this orientation began to manifest themselves. Adam and Eve didn’t die right away like God seemed to threaten; physical death would be later and be inevitable. But it was a kind of spiritual death. The first bit of knowledge they have is that they are naked. It hadn’t occurred to them before that was even an issue, but now it causes fear, specifically of God. So the first thing they do is sew fig leaves together and make themselves loincloths, which is a poignant expression of the futility of man’s efforts to escape the judgment of God. 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. The world’s religions express this futility in a myriad of ways, but they can’t heal the chasm between sinful human beings and a holy God.

Then instead of communing with God when he comes “walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” they hide “themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” All religion is basically man hiding from God because he is our judge, jury, and executioner. No wonder we hide. Then in the very next chapter Cain kills Able, and it starts.

Thankfully, God had a plan and we’re given what’s called the protoevangelium, or the first declaration of the gospel in history. God promises the seed or offspring of the woman, Christ, will bruise or crush the serpent’s head, and redemptive history starts God’s millennia long process of reconciling himself to man, to save the world, and knowledge would be integral to that project—we’re given a book filled with it. But the serpent wouldn’t stop his deceits in the garden.

Knowledge and the Creation of the Modern Secular World
It’s no surprise we’re told that “the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.” His deceits would manifest themselves in a variety of ways, and in the modern world he would use epistemology to bring down Christendom and turn it into a secular paradise more resembling a dystopia. I’m semi-obsessed with the history of ideas, and in the development of the modern West, knowledge and knowing is a central feature. It goes back to the ancient Greek sources that inspired Western intellectuals, but the ancients were primarily looking to discover the world as it was, while moderns were looking to remake the world; big difference.

As I’ve written about many times, it all started with a pious Catholic French philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650). He was concerned about the growing skepticism developing in Europe, and decided to address it. He started by doubting everything that could be doubted, and came to the conclusion the only thing he couldn’t doubt was his own existence because of his own thinking. So he came up with a phrase so powerful it transformed the medieval world of Christendom into the modern world of secularism: I think therefore I am, or in Latin, cogito ergo sum. Speaking of orientations, the entire Western world began to shift form a God centered outward orientation, to a self-centered inward one. Talk about big differences—it was Satanically brilliant! This was the beginning of modern philosophy, and the so-called Enlightenment, an ironically named movement if ever there was one. With the development of rationalism, for the first time the world was given an epistemology based on human reason alone. The way we come to know is solely through our minds and thinking, our reason, which to Western cultural elites in due course made revelation unnecessary. Man would now get to determine good and evil on his own, no God required.

It didn’t take long for the the Satanic threefold attack to begin. It started with the questioning of God and his word. It wasn’t long before Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a the Jewish Portuguese Philosopher, decided Moses was not in fact the author of the Pentateuch. At the time this was highly controversial, and he was excommunicated from his Jewish community in Amsterdam for his troubles, but it wouldn’t be controversial for long. In the 18th century skepticism about the Bible increased, and philosophers started accusing God of lying, did he really say? French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) was the first to go public, so to speak, of directly attacking God’s character. After the terrible Lisbon earthquake in 1755 in which over 50,000 people lost their lives, he wrote a poem basically outlining the problem of evil, something no one would have thought to do before the Enlightenment. The late 18th century saw the rise of Deism and a God having nothing to do with the Bible. Then with the 19th we have a great flowering of open rebellion against God.

Once naturalism, nature is all there is, was accepted as axiomatic, unquestionable dogma, the Satanic floodgates opened. This all happened among intellectuals and cultural elites, and then slowly flowed down into the rest of Western culture. German philosophers like Kant and Hegel developed systems of thought that made the God of the Bible superfluous, although they weren’t themselves atheists. This gave rise to Marx and Darwin, and German biblical criticism, which treated the Bible as just another human fiction, more or less. This then fed something called liberal Christianity which was rationalism cloaked in religious garb, and secularism, society without God, became the worldview of Western culture. It took some time in the 20th century for the full flowering of a God-less view of reality to fully take over the culture, but by the infamous 60s the victory of Satan was complete. Now man had total moral autonomy, and over a hundred million people were killed in the process, but that was a small price to pay for man finally becoming “like God.” We’re now living in the rubble of epistemology without God.

But a funny thing happened on the way to John Lennon’s Imagine paradise. All the people were not living in peace. There was no brotherhood of man or the world living as one. Without God life was exactly what we would expect—a hellhole. And an increasing number of people want nothing to do with it. Being God isn’t as easy as it looks, and an increasing number of people want the life only God in Christ can provide, reconciliation to their Creator, and the blessings that comes along with it.

The Difference Between Being a Parent and a Grandparent

The Difference Between Being a Parent and a Grandparent

Aug 5, 2026 | Parents and Family

I’ve thought about this a lot since we became grandparents over four years ago. As our kids were growing up and entering adulthood, I encountered people who had become grandparents tell us what’s great about being a grandparent is that you can enjoy your grandkids and then send them home. That seemed kind of hard-hearted when I heard it, or they didn’t really appreciate what they had, but I understand what they were saying now.

Raising children is a young person’s game and it’s a lot of work, especially when they’re young. Our daughter and son-in-law have three kids four and under, and it’s a challenge to say the least. My wife experiences it daily during the week as she sits the kids with our daughter who works from home. Praise God they live five minutes away and she can do that, but it’s a grind for a grandparent, even more exhausting than for the parents. It’s an incredible blessing and she loves it, but when she comes home at the end of the day the benefit of being a grandparent is obvious.

I was inspired to write this when I saw a post on Twitter/X where a guy whose children are just entering adulthood asks:

Don’t we all miss our babies? Does this feeling come back when you become a grandparent?

It depends on what feeling he’s talking about, but yes, we most certainly do miss them, which I’ll muse on below, but for us being grandparents is a completely different feeling.

I remember vividly how I felt when our daughter finally decided to make her entrance into the world after a grueling labor for my wife. I loved her instantly; it was total and complete. I had previously told my sister that I liked children and all, and looked forward to having them, but nothing prepares you for the love and emotion welling up inside you when it’s your child. My first thought through the flowing tears was, “There is a God!” It was by far the most profound thing I’d ever experienced in my 31 years of life. God is the only explanation for new life. As a Christian, knowing these feelings are in some way analogous to how God the Father feels about us, his people in Christ,  is incredibly comforting given how terribly imperfect we all are. Do we love and feel any less emotionally connected to our children because they are rotten little scoundrels sometimes? Well, I guess that depends when you ask the question, but having children teaches us unconditional love, and that is what God the Father poured out on us his children in Jesus on the cross.

But back to this-worldly realities. After a couple of days at the hospital, we were almost shocked they were letting us take her home. I thought, nobody’s coming with us? Somehow, she survived, obviously. I remember spending time just looking at her asleep in her crib and marveling. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen! I’d get emotional with the marvel of it all, of God giving us this little creature, of letting us co-create with him a new life on earth and for eternity. Just entirely too heavy.

Thinking about this reminds me of this passage from a book by Whitaker Chambers. He became famous in mid‑20th century Cold War America because of his association with convicted Soviet spy and American government official, Alger Hiss. In his magisterial autobiography Witness, Chambers tells the story of his life, including his conversion from atheistic communism to Christianity. The profound turning point in his journey came from something you’ll never guess: His daughter’s ear. Every parent knows how exactly he felt, even if it doesn’t lead them to Christ, which it should.

My daughter was in her highchair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.

Unless you’re a parent you have no idea what these feelings for your little children are like. It’s the purest emotional love imaginable. I see it in my daughter now as she beams when she’s with them, holding them, or even talking about them. It’s so incredibly special to see this experienced in the next generation, to relate to exactly how she’s feeling, and also, sadly, how fleeting it is.

The Depressing Passage of Time
This is another huge and inevitable difference between being a parent and a grandparent. When you’re in the middle of raising children, you have no clue how fast it goes. You catch glimpses of it, of course, but nothing prepares you for the thief that is time. It steals our lives from us once second at a time and we don’t even realize it until we find it impossible to believe. Where did it go? How did I get here so quickly? The birth of a child, as any grandparent can tell you, seems like a hundred years ago and yesterday at the same time! It’s crazy, and only those getting closer to the end than the beginning can fathom its mystery, an unsolvable one. As Augustine said, everyone knows what time is, but when asked to describe it, we’re rendered mute.

The mystery of time and its passage is an obsession with me, as anyone who knows me will tell you. After our first grandchild was conceived, I turned to my wife and said, “In the year 2,100 she’ll be 78!” and she replied, reasonably, “Can you just let her be born first?” Good point. Well, that little one is now well on her way to 2,100, and she only has 74 years to go! Be here before ya know it! Now she’s as cute as a button, an impossibly cuteness cute. It just rips your heart out. The is where parents and grandparents are on the same page. Your grandkids are clearly the most adorable on the playground; isn’t it obvious! But her already being four is a reminder of how swiftly time is moving along. Now a little girl, before you know it she’ll be a teenager, and then a grown woman. It makes our daughter sad, a common feeling among parents, maybe more for mothers than fathers.

We have neighbors who have two boys who walk to and from the bus stop every day during the school year; I’ve been watching them for six years. One morning I was outside with our grandkids while my wife stopped by the house with them on the way to the park. The youngest of the two boys and his mother were passing on the way to the bus stop, and I said to the mom, “Wow, he’s becoming a little man!” and she replied, “I know! And it makes me so sad.” Welcome to the club! You want to capture time in a bottle like Jim Croce sang, to hold on to these moments forever, but they slip away as if like a child on the playground taunting you.

I’m reminded of this every day. A couple years ago we got this thing called a Frame, which is basically a slideshow within a picture frame. As we’re walking around the house, in and out of the backyard, closing and opening the nearest window, we see on the rolling display a kind of kaleidoscope of our lives, years or decades passing as one picture slides into the next. When I see our kids as children or teenagers, the family on memorable trips, more than once I’ve turned to my wife and said, “That’s depressing.” She agrees. Even though old people, like I am now, try to warn us when we’re young how quickly it goes, to appreciate it now because before you know it . . . . , we have no idea until it happens.

Solomon in Ecclesiastes says that God has put eternity into the heart of man, which is why we get sad when we begin to realize just how fleeting life is. We want to somehow capture forever these moments in bottle, and we know we can’t: the wages of sin . . . . In that sadness we perceive something of the reality of eternal life which in this “body of death,” as Paul calls it, we can’t have. But thanks be to God! As he also says, we will have it, and one day will be, as John tells us, where there is “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” for the old order of things will have passed away, praise God! Right now, this longing for eternity, as C.S. Lewis said about all human longing and desires, implies there is something existing that will fulfill it. That sure hope is what allows us not to be consumed by our sadness, and enjoy those fleeting moments God has so graciously granted us.

AI and the Longing for The Real

AI and the Longing for The Real

Jul 15, 2026 | Culture, Parents and Family

I’ve heard the phrase Artificial Intelligence all of my boomer life. Grok says the phrase goes back to 1955 and a proposal some scientists put together to study the concept. This lead to the “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” in 1956 which is regarded as the founding of AI as a formal field of study. I was eight years old when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, and although the phrase Artificial Intelligence isn’t used in the movie (“machine intelligence” is), AI was by then culturally well known. It hasn’t been until the last several years, however, that the real life implications of AI have become culturally ubiquitous. Along with that have come debates about its value, whether it promises unproblematic endless benefits, or dystopian dangers. And likely plenty of both. I just learned about the history of AI with a simple question to Grok—benefit!

But as sinful human beings are won’t to do, hubris and overreaching is part of the deal. I think that’s where we are. And whenever there is overreaching, as any physicist can tell you, there is always an equal and opposite reaction. The Covid debacle and peak woke are perfect examples. Hundreds of millions of people around the world were driven to question, many for the first time, the “experts” and the managerial class, including in modern medicine. Like me, they decided, also for the first time, that their health is primarily their responsibility and nobody else’s. And tens of millions of people in America decided peak woke was a bridge too far, and turned back to God and traditional morality. I see the same reaction regarding AI, and God is part of that too. When God in his sovereign providence provides the cultural and historical conditions for revelation, we ought to consider taking advantage of it.

I grew up in the era of vinyl records. In the mid-60s big four and then eight track cassette tapes became popular so you could actually listen to your music of choice in the car. Then by the mid-70s little cassette tapes came along, which was mind blowing at the time. Then in the 80s came CDs, and it wasn’t long before vinyl would be dead and gone forever. Uh, maybe not. Everyone said digital was the future, and analogue was passé. Get rid of your records, boomer! Get with the times. It seems, however, analogue waves are more appealing than digits. There are other reactions against all things digital. It’s impossible today to know with any kind of certainty if a picture or video or music is real or AI fake. It’s like living in a world with plastic flowers that look real but have no smell and don’t feel like flowers. How about cars without drivers? For many of us there is something unnerving about that, even as flawed as human drivers can be.

The AI hype seems to have struck a nerve in people who are pining for The Real, the creational order, objective reality as God designed it to be. We can see this in other reactions to what most agree by now is a dying secular culture.

Secularism and the Turn to the Subjective
AI offers us a stark contrast to what I like to call, The Real. This explosion of AI is happening at the same time secularism as an experiment in Western culture is coming to the end of its cultural credibility. The idea of secularism started to develop in the 17th century in response to the wars of religion. Christians killing each other because they disagreed about theology wasn’t real appealing, so Western cultural elites and intellectuals decided to push religion, i.e., Christianity, out of the cultural spotlight, and try to build societies without God. Religious practice became a personal thing, and Pietists went right along with that. It took several hundred years for this to fully infect Western culture, but by the middle of the 20th century, secularism became the default worldview of Western peoples, in effect, the entire world outside of Islam.

Secularism did what C.S. Lewis warned about in The Abolition of Man, turning him inward and making everything in life about the subjective, our feelings, our thoughts, our opinions. Life’s all about me! He famously uses the story of a high school textbook teaching students how the beauty of a waterfall is more about our feelings than about any objective beauty in the waterfall. On the surface this doesn’t appear to be a big deal, but in fact it was the beginning of abolishing human beings as God created them. This is where we find ourselves in this third decade of the 21st century. We got to a point where everything in the culture focused on the individual, “the sovereign self.” The deeper one goes into that self, the deeper one realizes there is nothing there on which to anchor life. That has to come outside of us, something really there, something we can depend on as real.

The indications of the cracks growing in the secular Berlin Wall can be seen in a variety of consequences, but a blatant one is the mental health crisis in our country. I recently received a publication from my Alma Mater, Westminster Seminary Philadelphia, about exactly this. The author starts with statistics from the National Institute of Mental health to make the point:

Over 20% of the population 18 years and older is being treated for a mental illness. For adolescents, 49.5% report having a mental disorder. According to the CDC in 2023, 12.8 million adults seriously thought about suicide; 2.7 million made an actual plan; and 1.7 million went through with it. Depression rates, according to the latest Gallup poll, are at a record high.

Once we reject or ignore God’s created order, and its Creator, we are preparing for disaster. This inevitable descent into the subjective because of secularism was always eventually going to turn out this way. In the book Lewis tells us why objective reality, the real as God created it, is so important:

It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

The mental health crisis is a result of people being deluded into seeing themselves as something they are not, embracing lies about who they are and what the world is. The delusions are why disaster is inevitable, a form of God’s judgment on rebellious humanity.

The title of the first chapter in which this quote is found is called, “Men Without Chests.” In the classical understanding of man, he is three-fold: the mind, the upper, and the appetites, the lower, and in between is the chest where magnanimity and sentiments are trained so they might become “the indispensable liaison officers between the cerebral man and the visceral man.” Without that training, to put it crudely, we’re screwed.

The Craving for the Real
I’m convinced, in general, people crave what is Real more than what they feel. This is because they are created in God’s image and live in God’s creation; postmodern relativism will always eventually disappoint. We can’t make up our own reality no matter how hard we try. By definition, postmodern relativists have a tenuous grasp of reality because they think they get to determine what reality is. Their take is a slippery one, like living their lives walking on rocks through a shallow rushing river. Why would that be? If our epistemology—what we know and how we come to know it—is based on what is inside of us, then how can we ever really trust what we think we know? Maybe what I’m thinking about at the moment is just a bit of indigestion, as C.S Lewis once said. Or maybe the conclusion I’ve come to about such and such is only some Freudian trauma I’ve experienced with my mother or father.

Postmodernism requires us to believe there is no there, there, and what might be there only has relevance because of my thoughts about it. It’s really always a guessing game. Postmodernists may say, “That’s true for you, but not for me,” and believe it, but they really have no idea, and deep down they know it. Such a shaky hold on existence is the logical conclusion of the triumph of the subjective. By contrast, The Real is truth, not just an abstract philosophical concept, but things as they actually are.

If there is a God, then he made reality a certain way. Sure, sometimes because of our sinful, rebellious hearts we want to do it our way, but the hope is that it doesn’t take too long for us to realize our ignorance or stupidity. We are all born ignorant and stupid; it’s called sin.

The Real can also be seen in the creational order, the way God created it to be. If we follow that order, life gets easier. For example, we might deny the objective reality of absolute moral values, but our denial doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that we get to determine those values. I’ve heard it said that we can no more break God’s physical laws than we can break his moral laws without consequences. Both are part of the very fabric of existence. Postmodern relativists, however, affirm physical laws but believe they can define moral laws. Reality doesn’t work that way. Take sexual morality, for instance. There is a reason God established monogamy between one man and one woman as the moral norm for sexual relationships. Flout it, have sex with whomever you want whenever you want, and you could die. Embrace it, and no sexually transmitted disease will ever touch you. As I often say, “That’s the way the world works.” You do it God’s way, in other words, and chances are things will work out well. If you do it your own way, good luck. I love what Isaiah tells us in this regard:

He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of the LORD is the key to this treasure (33:6).

It is this solid foundation that as we come to the end of this secular age that is becoming increasingly appealing to an increasing number of people.

How Ancient Greeks Help Us to Understand the Real
Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle can be of some assistance when we discuss The Real. They believed in and argued for the existence of objective goodness, beauty, and truth—something countercultural in an age awash in the vagaries of postmodern relativism, yet what every human being believes exist and longs for.

What humans experience of goodness, beauty, and truth, Plato argued, points to the universal or the ultimate form of these things; they exist in life because they exist ultimately. Aristotle, a student of Plato, took his mentor’s thoughts in a more empirical direction: the real for him lay in the thingness of the thing itself, and not in some universal idea of it. Thus, there is a certain dogness in dogs; dogs have the nature of dogness. Roses have a roseness, and so on. This is not as silly as it sounds, and it is perfectly biblical. In Genesis 1 God created everything “according to their kinds.” Things are the way they are for a reason; we can’t wish them to be other than they are, as many Western cultural elites are trying to do with the current debate over gender. Is gender a malleable concept, based on what we feel or think, or is it rooted in the order of creation, “male and female he created them”? The answer is obvious.

It will make more sense if you consider Aristotle’s concept of Telos, or purpose, the ultimate object of a thing. All things in created reality have a reason for being, whether created by humans or God. Their purpose or end defines them. Tim Keller says, “Unless you know the telos of something, what it is for, you can’t make right judgments about whether the thing is good or bad.” It is readily apparent that a hammer has a different telos, or purpose, than a nail. It would be odd to see someone trying to “hammer” a hammer with a nail: Seriously, dude, I think you have that backward.

Everything of human origin has an obvious purpose, and when it comes to creation, the concept is every bit as relevant. I have a simple example that took place in a discussion I had with a friend about something called same‑sex marriage (which assumes sex, male‑female, has nothing to do with why marriage exists). He thought Christians were being unreasonable and judgmental to deny homosexuals the opportunity to marry and be happy; he was adamant the Bible didn’t forbid it. Every biblical argument I tried to make hit a brick wall. Then I brought up the idea of telos. I told him it is evident that the human anatomy, male and female, clearly has a telos. Without getting graphic, it’s clear to any objective observer that certain body parts have an obvious designed end, a purpose for which they were created, and homosexuality doesn’t fulfill those purposes. It’s like trying to “hammer” the hammer with a nail. He got a strange look on his face, stopped, and said, “I’ve never thought of that.” The Bible didn’t open his mind, but telos did.

I’ll end this little foray into the ancient Greeks with a short excursion into nominalism and realism. The Associate Pastor at our church, Rev. John Ravell, is philosophically well read, and young (only 34), and in an e-mail exchange about something related to the ideas in this post, he said modern people are “basically hyper-nominal” as opposed to being grounded in philosophical realism which goes back to the ancient Greeks and Medieval philosophy. I love that phrase. Nominalism as a philosophy was developed by William of Ockham (1287-1347) in a debate with those who espoused realism. A simple overview of nominalism comes from Chat GPT:

Only individual things really exist; general categories or abstract properties are just names we give them. For example:

  • You see many red objects: an apple, a stop sign, a shirt.
  • A realist philosopher might say there is a real universal property called “redness” that all these things share.
  • A nominalist says there is no separate thing called “redness” existing independently — we simply group similar objects under the label “red.”

The word comes from the Latin nomen, meaning “name.”

This was a huge shift in Western Christian culture. Richard Weaver in his wonderful book, Ideas Have Consequences, said this was a profound “change which came over man’s conception of reality.” Indeed it was. Instead of being grounded in an objective reality of things that exist independent of our perceptions of them, we’re awash in a world of meaningless particulars, puzzle pieces with no puzzle or bigger picture into which they fit. As my young pastor friend put it, “We don’t believe in realism anymore. We have a hard time even articulating what it would look like to believe in realism, but it’s exactly in line with a biblical worldview and imagination.” He added, this leads modern people who “attempt to say something about the whole always fixating on the parts, which leads invariably to paralysis.” As Weaver puts it perfectly in the book,

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than and independent of man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. . . . The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. . . . which means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of “man the measure of all things.”

This was written 78 years ago in 1948. Weaver couldn’t imagine, although he wouldn’t be surprised, the depths of absurdity people have gotten to by living in figments of their own imagination. It is exactly such absurdity that is opening an increasing number of people to The Real, and leading them back to the Creator, for from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.

 

 

The Culture Project and Societal Transformation

The Culture Project and Societal Transformation

Jul 8, 2026 | Culture, Parents and Family

I mentioned The Culture Project in a recent post, and I decided I needed to share my thoughts about the importance of Christian cultural transformation in more detail. Not only is Christian influence on society critical for the long term health and flourishing of society, but it’s also an important piece of advancing the kingdom of God on earth. I’ll get to that below, but The Culture Project was a non-profit I started in 2008 after I realized almost 20 years of conservative and Christian futility was because we had ignored the importance of culture in the transformation of our nation. We conservative Christians were so focused on politics figuring the culture would take care of itself. It most certainly will not. The late great Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture.” I believe that’s true, to a degree. Public policy and laws are extremely important and have cultural implications, but without cultural transformation long term political effectiveness, which means governance from a conservative and Christian perspective, is a pipe dream.

The vision for my non-profit was to recruit young people into what I called professions of cultural influence, like media, entertainment, law, education, etc., and teach them about the importance of their faith and a Christian worldview for their profession. I envisioned a kind of mentoring project yet on a cultural scale. I’ve since come to see it as a different, more expansive visionary kind of discipleship, something I wasn’t aware of at that time in my Christian journey. We tend to view discipling of children or other young people as a “spiritual” endeavor having to do with their relationship with Jesus, which it is, but that’s not all it is. We bring our faith into everything we experience, and it impacts everything we do, even the most mundane aspects of our daily lives, including our careers, family lives, entertainment, hobbies, everything. We are to have, and teach to our children, a Christian world and life view, and to teach and share that with everyone in our circle of influence.

Christianity over the last several hundred years turned primarily into a personal affair about our relationship with God and our personal holiness. As anyone who is at all familiar with my work will know, this descent into a totally personal faith is a result of Pietism which eventually developed into revivalism and fundamentalism. Along with dispensational eschatology, this truncated version of the faith eventually took over Evangelical Christianity in the 20th century. A unique confluence of cultural streams came together in the 19th century to turn Christianity inward, and destroy the cultural influence it once had. Let’s address that first before we look at the biblical case for cultural engagement.

The Cultural Streams Leading to Christian Cultural Irrelevance
The 19th century was a profound civilizational turning point in Western history, the transition century from a Christian Western civilization to a secular one. It took until the 1960s to fully dominate, but forces that had been building since the Reformation, through Pietism, and the Enlightenment all exploded in the 1800s. Specifically, rationalism, that we can know things apart from God’s revelation in Scripture by human reason alone, developed alongside the scientific revolution. This built into Western culture a faith in human progress melding nicely, and disastrously, with a kind of postmillennial eschatology that had nothing to do with actual, biblical, postmillennialism. A substantial slice of Christianity toward the end of the 18th century was becoming increasingly liberal, which can be seen in a widespread rejection of the Trinity. This effectively turned Christianity into moralism which rejected the gospel of the divine supernatural and transforming power of Christ’s atonement, and the power of the Holy Spirit. Christianity, on a personal and societal level, was turned into moralism by human effort alone.

The father of liberal Christianity is Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), a German theologian who attempted to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant Christianity. That reconciliation, as did the liberal Christianity coming in its wake, swallowed the naturalistic assumptions of rationalism hook line and sinker. That means miracles and the supernatural really can’t happen, which provided the foundation for German higher criticism, an intellectual movement in German universities that completely eviscerated the true meaning of the Bible. That in turn became the foundation of liberal Christianity in America as American scholars went to Germany to learn the latest and greatest about Bible scholarship.

At the same time in the latter part of the 19th century scientific and technological progress was exploding, and Christians in Western culture were convinced there was nothing mankind could not achieve to bring a version of the kingdom of God to earth. Christian politician, and three-time nominee for president with the Democrat Party, William Jennings Bryan, echoed what most Christians believed prior to World War 1:

Christian civilization is the greatest that the world has ever known because it rests on a conception of life that makes life one unending progress toward higher things, with no limit to human advancement or development.

Bryan, a conservative Christian, wasn’t an outlier, but this vision of endless progress toward higher and better things was more in line with a secular version of postmillennialism than biblical postmillennialism. As J. Gresham Machen in Christianity and Liberalism argued, liberal Christianity having rejected supernatural biblical religion was another religion all together. H. Richard Niebuhr captured this perfectly in a book called, The Kingdom of God in America, written in 1938. Speaking of the nature of this basically secular version of Christianity, he says it presents

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.

It simply could not be said any better. This was the version of Christianity coming out of the 19th century developed in the first few decades of the 20th century into what came to be called the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. While the Bible-believing conservative fundamentalists were basically saving Christianity, at the same time they were losing the culture to secularism. The cultural turning point came with the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925. The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity started here, although as we see the foundation had been laid for several hundred years, including the rise of Darwinian evolution. With the trial it became the official creation myth of secular America.

The revivalism of the mid to late 19th century combined with the new eschatology of dispensationalism basically set the stage for the 1960s and what came afterwards, secular dominance of Western culture. This assertion seems counterintuitive to most Christians, but revivalism and dispensationalism turned Christianity inwards. Christians still complained about sin in society, but that’s about it. In addition to all the various influences I mentioned above, the gospel and salvation, especially with the rise of D.L. Moody and revivalism, came to mean going to heaven when you die, and growing in personal holiness while you’re here. In this view of things, which came to dominate fundamentalism in the next century, cultural influence was merely accidental and had nothing to do with real, “spiritual” Christianity. By the 1950s the die was cast, and whatever influence Christianity had in American and Western culture was slowly dying.

Some Christians realized this wasn’t a good thing. For example, Billy Graham and some others started calling themselves Evangelicals to differentiating them from cultural hating fundamentalists. They founded Christianity Today and Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. In 1968 Francis Schaeffer wrote The God Who is There, and started what became a robust focus in Evangelical Christianity on worldview and apologetics. Today, more Christians than ever understand the importance of Christian cultural influence, and slowly but surely the church is breaking out of its fundamentalist aversion to cultural engagement. Pietism is still dominant, so the case continually has to be made that the impact of the Christian faith is meant for more than our individual lives or the church, but entire nations. Christianity is in fact a culture project! Why is that?

Abraham, The Patriarchs, and God’s Blessing the Nations
The whole point of redemptive history is to bless the nations, not just individuals within those nations. I’ve just been reading through Romans as I write this, and this morning I read Romans 15. Paul is speaking about the promises to the Patriarchs, which are the covenantal foundation of our faith. Do you remember what the promises are about? What the purpose of God is in redemptive history? To bless the nations! The Jews seemed to miss the message, but it’s clear God’s plans always included more than Israel and the Jews. Paul does something interesting in this chapter quoting four passages from the Old Testament. He is talking about the gospel going to the Gentiles, which means every person on earth who isn’t Jewish, so that they too might glorify God. Here is what he says:

As it is written:

“Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles;
I will sing the praises of your name.”

10 Again, it says,

“Rejoice, you Gentiles, with his people.”

11 And again,

“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles;
let all the peoples extol him.”

12 And again, Isaiah says,

“The Root of Jesse will spring up,
one who will arise to rule over the nations;
in him the Gentiles will hope.”

I looked back at each of these verses in the Old Testament, and almost all the translations use the word nations. Paul uses the Greek word ἔθνος-ethnos, the same word Jesus uses in the Great Commission in Matthew 28. The point is the scope of the gospel’s blessings, those promised to the Patriarchs, going beyond individuals to people groups making up nations. That means the various countries and the cultures they create. That’s what people do when they live together in communities, they create cultures, which includes economics, and law, and art, and education, and science and technology, and entertainment, and architecture, and cities, and transportation, and food, all of it. The point of the gospel, of God’s purposes in redemptive history isn’t to save people’s souls so they go to heaven when they die, or just to make individuals more holy, but to transform their lives and the cultures they create on earth. What does that mean?

What’s the opposite of blessing? That’s easy: curses. Deuteronomy 28 is the well-known blessing and curses chapter where God lays out to his people the blessings for obedience, and the curses for disobedience. The latter is much longer because God wants to get across the point that they really should chose obedience because the option is suffering, which is what brings curses from disobedience. Do you know that the most quoted book from America’s founding generation is the Bible, and the most quoted book in the Bible is Deuteronomy, and the most quoted chapter is chapter 28? America’s founders were not building a secular Republic, but a covenantal Christian nation they desperately wanted God to bless. Without God’s blessing that comes from obedience to his laws they knew there would be curses and thus suffering.

What most Christians seems to miss is that the so called “culture wars” aren’t about “imposing” Christianity on anybody, but about loving our neighbor as ourselves. Remember, when Jesus is asked how he would sum up the greatest commandment in the law, he basically sums up the entirety of the Old Testament like this:

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

This is in fact what the “culture wars” are about, what it means to disciple nations, to create Christian nations in obedience to Jesus’ command.

Our Christian Culture Project and the Kingdom of God
Another way to refer to a Christian nation is the kingdom of God. Jesus and John the Baptist introduced Jesus’ ministry with the exact same words in Matt. 3:2 and Mark 1:15: “The kingdom of God is near” (Matthew uses heaven in his gospel instead of God as his primary audience is Jews). Then Jesus spent three years introducing his people to this kingdom, was crucified, died, buried, raised from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of God to bring the kingdom of God (heaven) to earth. When he said on the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30), the kingdom manifesting itself in this world was inevitable.

When Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven,” do we think it was wishful thinking prayer? Was he saying, like I interpreted it most of my Christian life, we know the devil has the upper hand “down here,” so we’ll just have to do the best we can and wait till he returns to finally get God’s kingdom on earth? No! I now completely reject that as unworthy of any interpretation of God’s covenantal redemptive purposes in history. When he promised the Patriarchs to bless the nations it wasn’t only  to bless them in the eternal consummated state after sin and death are completely defeated, but on this fallen earth, in our fallen bodies among fallen people, to bring blessing to the nations.

The Apostle John tells us the reason Jesus came to earth (I John 3:8):

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

And this isn’t just in our personal lives. The purposes of God in redemptive history, from the Patriarchs to Jesus, were always geared toward nations, ethnos, to people living in community and everything they create. Jesus himself gives us a stark contrast between two diametrically opposite expressions of spiritual reality in this material world (John 10:10):

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

He’s simply saying what he already said to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and confirmed through Moses, David, and the prophets.

So, instead of hiding our light under a basket, instead of keeping the blessing for just our personal lives or within the walls of the church, we’re bringing them into every nook and cranny of existence. Our vision is more expansive, more world encompassing of everything we see and do and experience. Like I said above, it’s a more visionary kind of discipleship, teaching others and our children how their Christian faith impacts everything. Our lives and theirs are in fact, a culture project, bringing of transformation not just to our personal lives and relationships, but to everything we put our mind and hands to. It’s an exciting way to live because Christ didn’t come in futility, but in victory over the works of the devil. Let’s believe that, live it, proclaim it, and live by faith, not by sight, for ours and others’ good, and God’s glory.

Uninvented and the Unlikely Apostle Paul

Uninvented and the Unlikely Apostle Paul

Jun 24, 2026 | Apologetics, Parents and Family

I wrote my book Uninvented because as I studied apologetics, the defense of the Christian faith, I consistently came across the argument that the Bible and the stories contained therein could not have been made up, were not mere human fiction as critics have insisted for several hundred years. The Apostle Paul is a powerful piece of the argument.

The Apostle Paul is probably the most influential figure in all human history (without Paul no one may have ever heard of Jesus). While some radical skeptics don’t even believe Jesus existed, nobody, not one historian or scholar would ever claim Paul did not exist. For an ancient, Paul was a voluminous writer, and ancient writers are much harder to dismiss. What we find in our New Testament is probably a small portion of his actual letters. The question isn’t whether the Apostle Paul existed, but most troubling for the skeptic is the question: how did Saul become Paul? Paul’s conversion is difficult for the skeptic to explain away. I once heard someone say how unlikely his conversion would have been. Not unlikely as in, wow, that’s surprising, but . . . . that just can’t be! He gave a couple examples of equally unlikely conversions. Imagine Winston Churchill becoming a Marxist. Or Hitler becoming a Jew. The Hebrew Pharisee Saul becoming the Christian Apostle Paul is every bit as inconceivable.

Paul’s conversion is the primary thing skeptics must explain away. For them, Jesus couldn’t have appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus because, well, Jesus was dead, and dead people don’t come back to life. Therefore, Jesus couldn’t appear to Saul, as he was then named. See how this works? But the radical conversion of Paul is one of the most well-attested facts of the ancient world, and nobody denies it, so it must be explained. Only the supernatural elements need to be, for the skeptic, explained away. I haven’t done any in depth study of those who engage in such anti-supernatural arguments for Paul’s conversion, but I’m confident they’d be even less persuasive than the anti-supernatural arguments for the empty tomb and the subsequent growth of the church. The only real option explaining away Paul’s conversion is psychological (Paul thought he saw the risen Jesus), and then engage in some Freudian or Jungian analysis of his upbringing and mental state, and heap conjecture upon conjecture. Or maybe they should just believe Paul’s own testimony (Gal. 1):

11 I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. 12 I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

13 For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. 14 I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. 15 But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased 16 to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. 17 I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.

18 Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. 19 I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother. 20 I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie.

Galatians is one of Paul’s “undisputed” letters, meaning scholars of even the most skeptical stripe are convinced Paul wrote it. Thus, we have a choice: either what Paul says here is true, and we believe his assurance, or he is lying. Those anti-supernaturalists, though, insist there is a third option. While Paul obviously didn’t see Jesus on that road, he wasn’t in fact lying because he thinks he is telling the truth. That whole “road to Damascus” experience only happened in his head, maybe with some natural explanation for bright lights and such, but Paul really, really thought he saw Jesus, thus he wasn’t lying.

The problem with this anti-supernaturalist reading is the historical record. The only reason we know this happened on a road to Damascus is because Luke records the event in Acts 9, and as a companion of Paul on his missionary journeys Luke likely got the story from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. We know he was a close brother and friend of Paul because they spent a lot of time together, as we learn from what are called the “we passages” in Acts where Luke moves from describing events in the third person, to the first person. For example, in Acts 16:10-17 Luke writes, “After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” Paul also says of Luke in his letters that he was “the beloved physician” (Col. 4:14). He tells Timothy when he was in Rome, “Only Luke is with me” (1 Tim. 4:11). He also calls Luke one of his “fellow workers” (Phil. 1:24). Luke knew Paul as well as anyone, and there is nothing about what happened on the road to Damascus to suggest it was merely a psychological event in Paul’s brain. Here is how Luke describes what proved to be the greatest inflection point in human history (Acts 9):

Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest 2 and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. 3 As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

5 “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. 6 “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”

7 The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. 8 Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. 9 For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.

We’ll discuss the Saul of “murderous threats” below, but we’re again confronted with the perpetual question any Bible reader must answer: Is this historical? Did it happen, or not? The writers of the gospels, including Luke, were clearly attempting to write history. Without a question begging anti-supernatural bias, we are free to assess the evidence of the text itself, and not read our prejudice into it. With bias, we must conclude it’s made up. Without bias it is straightforward history of a supernatural event. It was also not Paul alone having the experience, but several others witnessed it. Something happened, and it happened instantly. In Damascus, the Lord appeared to a man named Ananias, and he told him to go and lay his hands on Saul to restore his sight. Ananias’ reply reflects the Saul everyone knew about, and the one they were expecting:

13 “Lord,” Ananias answered, “I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. 14 And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.”

After being rebuked by the Lord for questioning him, Ananias goes to see Saul, and his sight is restored. It is difficult to explain what happened next unless it really happened:

Saul spent several days with the disciples in Damascus. 20 At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. 21 All those who heard him were astonished and asked, “Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name? And hasn’t he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?” 22 Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.

It would be like being in a worship service at a Jewish synagogue in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s and seeing Adolf Hitler come waltzing in wearing a prayer shawl and yarmulke. There would be a lot of cases of severe whiplash. To see and hear Paul preaching about Jesus as the Messiah mere days after getting to Damascus was every bit as shocking as Hitler embracing Judaism. A mere hallucination can’t explain it. And nobody could make it up because it was Paul’s declaration of his conversion for the rest of his life. How best to explain it? God!

A Hebrew of Hebrews and Mission to the Gentiles
As for the “murderous threats,” the conversion of Saul is most plausibly explained by it happening exactly as Luke describes it. The reason is found in why he was so rabidly anti-Christian. Saul’s parents obviously had big plans for the young man, and he was sent from his hometown of Tarsus to Jerusalem to study under one of the great Rabbis of the day, Gamaliel. Known as something of a moderate, his pupil Saul most certainly would not be. Steeped in Judaism, it defined everything about him. In Paul’s own words we see him recount his Jewish bona fides in Philippians 3 and Acts 22. In the latter he then goes into detail about his conversion experience and encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. I imagine Paul recounted his coming face to face with the risen Jesus many times during his life, and every time he believed it was real. The only plausible explanation for his life and influence on world history is that his   encounter with Jesus was indeed real, not a figment of his imagination.

What is every bit as radical and unexpected as Paul’s conversion was his teaching and missionary obsession. The reason for the latter was the former. Until Paul, religion had never been considered universal in scope. The Jews should have known better because God’s promise to Abraham was that through him, and thus Israel, all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 12). The Lord gave them an important hint through Isaiah (42:6, 49:6) when He said Israel would be “a light to the Gentiles.” By the time of Jesus, however, Jews wouldn’t even eat with Gentiles, let alone be a light and blessing to them. For the pagans it was the same but for quite different reasons. Martin Goodman explains why in Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations:

The sense of mission set Christians apart from other religious groups, including Jews, in the early Roman empire. The notion that it is desirable for existing enthusiasts to encourage outsiders to worship the god to whom they are devoted was not obvious in the ancient world. . . . On the contrary, it was common for pagans to take pride in the local nature of their religious lives, establishing a special relationship between themselves and the god of a family or place, without wishing, let alone expecting, others to join in worshiping the same god. Christians in the first generation were different, espousing a proselytizing mission which was a shocking novelty in the ancient world. Only familiarity makes us fail to appreciate the extraordinary ambition of Paul, who seems to have invented the notion of a systematic conversion of the whole world, area by geographical area.

Spoken like a true question begging anti-supernaturalist! We’re supposed to believe Paul “invented” this notion of converting the entire world all by himself? He made it up because of some non-supernatural “experience” as he was going to persecute the followers of “the Way”? Then he immediately starts proclaiming the message of those he was supposed to be persecuting? Not only that, but in doing so he goes against every cultural instinct of literally every single person in the world, Jew and pagan alike, including fellow followers of “the Way”? Somehow, he comes up with the notion out of nowhere that every person in the world needs to believe this? I don’t think so. A better, more believable, and plausible explanation is God!

The God ordained nature of Paul’s mission becomes more apparent when we understand the dynamic of the early Jewish church, and the intense struggle he had moving outside the bounds of Judaism. We see this played out in Acts and described by Paul in his epistles as he confronts the Judaizers. It’s difficult to imagine what would motivate Paul to invent an idea so against the religious expectations of the entire world without divine intervention. There are plenty of other examples of why it was so difficult for Paul to take the gospel beyond Judaism, both in Jerusalem with the other Apostles and on his missionary journeys. For the latter as he was speaking to Jews and they rejected the message, he told them he was going to the Gentiles and it made them furious.

On the Pagan side of the equation, what Paul was doing was equally as disturbing to them as it was to the Jews. Syncretism was the religion of the ancient pagan world, and to require someone to give up every allegiance for just one God or one religion was unheard of at the time, and deeply unpopular. Even though Jews rejected such Syncretism, they never had a vision or mission to turn all pagans into Jews. Christianity for Paul was world conquering or nothing, and Paul doesn’t invent that all by himself.

There is also the issue of Paul’s world transforming teaching which I can’t get into in any depth here, but will briefly mention broad areas of Paul’s teaching that radically contrast with his Jewish upbringing, and Jewish teaching of the time. These like his missionary zeal could never have been invented by Paul himself, or what would become the Pauline theology of Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, etc. It had to be revealed to him. The Messiah of Jewish expectation was not a sin-bearing redeemer who would be punished for the sins of his people. There is not even a trace of such an idea in pre-Christian Jewish literature. Where, then, would Paul have come up with such an idea if not in the Judaism he was raised and immersed in? It is not there. Another area of Paul’s teaching that was mind blowing and incomprehensible to Jew and Gentile alike is found throughout his letters, and can be summarized in these words from Galatians 3:28:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

The implications of this verse turned every cultural assumption of every person in the ancient world upside down and inside out. It would have been positively ludicrous to even say such a thing at the time, let alone believe and try to live it. Yet, there was Paul teaching it throughout the Roman empire as the logical conclusion of God redeeming his people in Christ and saving them from their sin. It was so radical at that it can plausibly be argued no one at the time could have invented it on their own, and it was only that it was in fact true, and revealed, that it eventually transformed the world.