On Twitter recently I saw this short video of a young British Journalist, Louise Perry, explain why she became a Christian. In 2022 she published a book called, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which indicates like many secularist liberals she had been mugged by reality. It is obvious from the devastation coming in the wake of “the 60s,” and the rejection of traditional Christian sexuality morality, that something is terribly wrong. The rejection of monogamy and the sexual exclusivity of marriage, and yes between a man and a woman, destroyed the foundation of civilization and source of true human flourishing, the family. Not only have we seen the explosion of divorce and single parent households, but we’ve discovered that children raised in such an environment are often emotionally and psychologically damaged. Every study over the last 50 years makes this undeniable. Everyone agrees, even those who reject the primacy of the family, that children do best in a two parent, mother and father family.
Frenchman Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) founded the academic discipline of sociology, which can be defined as “the study of human society, social behavior, and the structures, institutions, and interactions that shape them.” It is clear from such study that certain things work better than others, meaning they bring human happiness, peace, safety, and prosperity, or they don’t. Normal human beings tend to prefer these to misery, war, crime, and poverty, so it makes sense to try to order our lives and society so they produce more of the former than the latter. For Ms. Perry, she saw that the sexual revolution and everything associated with it clearly wasn’t working. I don’t know her story, but she clearly saw a connection between what was working, what could work, and Christianity. So in her studies she came to the conclusion that if Christianity “were supernaturally true you would expect it to be sociologically true.” In other words, for human beings to function optimally in a society, the truth of Christianity could be verified by that, and she found that it is. That realization is happening to a lot of people in this age of Great Awakening. For some reason people prefer harmony over chaos, love over hate, beauty over ugliness, liberty over tyranny. Go figure.
Living in a Christian World: Gospel Influence Everywhere
A journey through Western history allows us to see these contrasts in living color. We can also clearly see this in other countries and their cultures today, but so much of the World is Westernized it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate how unique our Western culture is specifically because it was created by classical and Christian influences. I say classical because both ancient Greece and Rome have had significant influences on the development of the West, but those pagan civilizations were as unfamiliar to us as aliens from some distant galaxy far, far away.
Historian Tom Holland’s journey to an appreciation of Christianity in the development of the West is chronicled in his highly influential book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Here was someone who grew up enamored of everything he thought ancient Greece and Rome stood for, until one day he realized he had absolutely nothing in common with those people. Their moral value system and view of the world was completely, well, alien to him, something he could not relate to at all. Mind you, he’s not a Christian, yet sees the world through Christian lenses, and realizes we don’t have the modern world without Christianity.
Holland’s book was a profound revelation for me, and multitudes of others. We’ve all grown up in a Western culture that is what it is because of Christianity. On some level we know that, but like the air we breathe we take it for granted, as if it’s just the way things are supposed to be. The problem with this is that living in a dominant secular culture, we just assume the blessings we enjoy of living in a modern society just happened for no reason at all. We live with a modicum of peace and prosperity, political liberty, education, health, etc., just because. In other words, they come from chance, just like they think the physical universe came from chance. The “narrative” of the secularist is that the Enlightenment saved us from religious fanaticism and tyranny, and because of science and technology we have the modern world in spite of Christianity, most certainly not because of it. That gets the reality of the situation exactly upside down, as well as inside out.
The ancient world was a brutal place, brutal in a way unimaginable to us now. We see this in movies and literature, but it’s difficult for us to comprehend the realness of it, and how difficult everyday life was for most people. Because of Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder, I’m reading the 1951 novel, Spartacus, from which a movie as made in 1960 with Kirk Douglas. The story is about the slave revolts in the Roman Empire, and a line from the story is apropos for the time, “I am Spartacus,” as other slaves stood up to protect and affirm what Spartacus stood for. A lot of people today are saying, I am Charlie Kirk.
The author, Howard Fast, paints a horrendous picture of slavery and how cheap life was in a way that makes American chattel slavery in the 19th century look like Disneyland. The brutality of it is incomprehensible to us. The story starts with some wealthy patrician Romans taking a trip on the Apian Way, and on both side of the road 6,000 slaves are hung, naked, on Roman crosses as a sign of Roman justice. They had put down the slave revolt instigated by Spartacus, and the book looks back in time at how it all developed. It’s brilliant in the way it depicts the image of God in man struggling to live with dignity against impossible odds. This was the world Tom Holland grew up with and loved so much he became an historian of the ancient world.
What’s powerful about the book is that the slaves are driven by visions of a world they think will never exist, but they are willing to die for a taste of freedom and their Utopian dreams. Spartacus is the inspiration for those dreams. Little could they have known that in a hundred years another man would die like a slave on a Roman cross to free mankind from the sin that enslaves far worse than shackles. In the book Holland focuses on the crucifixion and how absurd it is that such a thing would become the inspiration and symbol of a religion that would take over the world, and make it a better place. What the slaves in the slave revolt missed is that the nature of a civilization cannot be changed by force of arms because unless man is fundamentally changed, nothing else will change. To transform the nations, man must first be transformed, which can only be found in one religion on earth, Christianity. All religions in one way or another require people to confirm to some kind of law to change, whereas Christianity declares the person supernaturally changed by the power of God, and who because of that now wants to obey God’s law. The inner person is changed before the outer person can truly live a different life.
We call this gospel, the good news, man set free so he can live free. Then those set free can live in a way that enhances human dignity in everything they do because now they live according to their natures as created by God, the telos or purposes for which He created them. True human flourishing can only happen in a Christian context. God in the Old Testament reveals to us that obedience to his law is required for blessing, while disobedience incurs His curse. The gospel, the New Covenant, as the Lord tells us in Jeremiah 31, means God’s law has now been put in our minds and written on our hearts. This now spreads throughout society in everything Christians do, and personal transformation allows societal transformation, gospel influence everywhere and in everything.
Transformation and Truth
The contrast of the ancient pagan world, BC, to what the world eventually became because of Christianity, AD, is what prompted Holland to write an almost 600 page book. He was driven to such effort because he had to know what it was that made the modern world in which he lived and embraced and loved so different from the ancient pagan world. What exactly caused the change? Jesus of Nazareth! It’s unfortunate that Holland still hasn’t been able to embrace Jesus as risen Lord and Savior, but he’s on my heathen prayer list, so I trust God will bring him there in due course. Nevertheless, he has done the church a great favor by writing the book, and completely changing the nature of the conversation about Christianity and the modern world.
The book was published in 2019, and it certainly didn’t appear at the time anyone except Christians were buying his argument, especially going into the 2020s as the woke and Covid nightmare took over the world. But something amazing happened on the way to the leftist repaganizing of the world: Jesus of Nazareth! Even the once angry “New Atheists” are proclaiming the benign influence of Christianity on Western culture, when they once declared that “religion poisons everything.” Secularism is proving the feeble lie it’s always been.
That is the contrast in our day, not to ancient paganism, but to a modern secularism that was just another version of the ancient, barbaric creed. As secularism has come crashing down in this third decade of the 21st century, we’ve been able to see the contrast juxtaposed, side-by-side with Christianity, and secularism is not looking like the dream Utopia our cultural elites promised. It’s in fact just another form of slavery Spartacus and the Romans slaves could have recognized as such. The reason so many are now coming to this realization, and that we’re seeing a Great Awakening among us, is what Louise Perry discovered. If Christianity is supernaturally true, it must also be sociologically true. In other words it is self-authenticating, obviously true, first lived out in an individual’s life, and then in society. If it’s true, it will work. If it claims to be an explanation for reality as we find it, how it got here, why it is the way it is, then it should also tell us how to make it work the way it’s supposed to work. If you want to fix a car engine that’s not working, it’s best to use a repair manual for that specific model, and everyone agrees the world we’re born into is very broken and needs to be fixed.
I’ve listened to hundreds of Christian testimonies in the last handful of years, and the more I’ve listened to the more I’ve realized what a powerful apologetic transformed lives are for the veracity of the Christian faith. The skeptic would chalk up changed lives up to psychology because that’s all they got, but mere human psychology can’t make fundamental transformations of human nature. In other words, thinking good thoughts of sweetness and light and fairy tales, doesn’t mean good results will follow. In fact, each human being knows there is a war going on inside of them, the proverbial angel on one shoulder and demon on the other. Pascal puts it perfectly as he normally does:
Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.
Positive thinking without supernatural power can never fully address our wretchedness. When you hear enough stories of people’s personal transformation you realize lies cannot do that. Multiply that by entire societies and nations, and thinking lies can do that is every bit as ridiculous. If Christianity isn’t true, then it’s a lie. J. Gresham Machen writes in Christianity and Liberalism that, “Christianity depends, not upon a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event.” That event is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a man tortured to death on a Roman cross. If that event didn’t happen, if Jesus didn’t come back to life as his followers claimed, and gave their lives for that claim, then Christianity is a lie, all of it. But it is not a lie, and the transformation that inevitably comes in its wake is powerful, even irrefutable, evidence of that.
Constantine the Great’s Conversion and the Beginning of Christian Western Civilization
Because of Pietism and dispensationalism, modern Evangelical Christians are confused about the influence Christianity should have on society and culture. The question confronting us reveals the confusion. Should Christianity’s influence on the culture be the incidental fruit of the gospel? In other words, mostly personal, and society influenced unintentionally because of that? Or is societal influence one of the main purposes of the gospel? Jesus in the Great Commission made it clear that entire nations should be discipled, not only individuals. Since the Second Great Awakening, however, discipling the nations came to mean discipling Christians within nations, not actually teaching entire nations. The word disciple in Greek means to instruct or teach, to become a pupil. So Jesus was telling his disciples that they were to go and teach and instruct entire nations, a foreign concept to the personalized Pietistic Christianity that dominates most modern Evangelicalism. I read something recently that captures the Evangelical mindset perfectly. Speaking of the Great Commission, this person said that “God is calling people to himself out of every nation . . .” No he’s not. God is calling people within nations to Himself to transform those nations, starting with themselves and their families, then their communities, and so on.
Which brings us to Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor in the early 4th century who converted to Christianity and slowly brought Christian influence throughout the empire. Why do you think he thought doing this was an important part of his Christian faith? Or thought that Christianity wasn’t merely about his personal life? Because Jesus’ disciples, the Apostles, taught the world transforming power of Christianity, and the early church embraced that. We must never forget in this debate between Pietistic personalized Christianity and world transforming Christianity, that the declaration, “Jesus is Lord,” was treason in the Roman Empire. It was a blatant political statement. The societal transformation skeptics, let’s call them, tell us that we don’t see any political or cultural engagement in Acts or the New Testament church as if 2,000 years of history hadn’t happened. But most importantly they forget what “Jesus is Lord” meant in that context—Christians were radically political.
Constantine, who ruled from 306 to 337, began this transformation not long after his conversion in 312. He issued the Edict of Milan in 313 which stopped the intermittent persecution of Christianity throughout the empire, and granted tolerance to Christians, allowing them to practice their faith openly. The process was slow and no doubt imperfect, but his favoring of Christianity marginalized traditional Roman pagan religions, reshaping Roman cultural identity toward Christianity. He also introduced laws reflecting Christian morality such as banning the brutal practice of crucifixion, and ending gladiatorial games, which was just another use of slaves for Roman entertainment. He also enacted measures to protect widows, orphans, and slaves. He realized something that Martin Luther taught over a thousand years later, and Christians have forgotten in our day: law is a teacher. The laws not only reflect the cultural values of a people; they teach the people cultural values. The ancient pagan world was slowly becoming the modern Christian world because of Constantine.
I can hear some Christians complain about my describing the modern world as Christian. You’ll have to read Holland’s book to understand what I’m saying. It was the influence of Jesus through his church, his people, that we have human rights, slavery is outlawed, if not disappeared, the rule of law, the nation-state, science and technology, capitalism and free enterprise, among other blessings. All those Christians complaining about how rotten things are would never want to exchange modern life for life in the ancient pagan world. As you can see, the Christian influence that transformed the ancient brutal pagan world into the much less brutal modern world goes far beyond what we consider “spiritual,” but it is all spiritual.
And speaking of that, this allows me to address the contentious topic of Christian nationalism, or what a Christian nation is. You might be able to infer from what I’ve said about Christian influence in the world, that in a Christian nation not every person has to be an orthodox Christians who confess Jesus as risen Lord and Savior. What they do have to buy into Christian assumptions about the nature of reality, whether they are aware of them or not, or can explain them or not. It doesn’t matter what each individual in a society believes on a metaphysical or religious level, they will benefit if Christianity is the dominant cultural worldview. That doesn’t even take the majority of people to be Christians, although that is certainly what we want.
What counts on a sociological level is what people believe about the ultimate nature of reality. Since we’ve been talking about sociology, let’s use a sociological concept to describe this: plausibility structure. This is the mental and psychological societal structure, a mental map, that defines reality for a people. It makes certain things seem real, the way they are supposed to be; it’s just the way things are. Since the mid-20th century, post-World War II, and especially “the 60s,” the West’s plausibility structure has been secularism. That has proved a complete failure, and now Christianity is rushing in to fill the empty space.
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