"The social revolution has left many Christians stunned, confused and
afraid," says Dr Joe Boot. Rather than defending the Christian foundation of
Western society, we have largely "lacked vigilance", wrongly assuming that our
values would hold. The result, he says, is a "radically politicised" church,
with leaders left unwilling to challenge cultural issues. In light of this, Joe
urges us to pray for courage to speak with boldness, confident in the ultimate
victory won for us by Christ.
It has been rightly said that the loves of a few men move the lives of
many. The deeply-held convictions of the minority, courageously pursued, are
culturally formative – at times for good, and at times for ill. In his recent
book The
Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, the Polish
philosopher and politician Ryszard Legutko offers a scintillating analysis of
the decay of western democracies into increasingly oppressive revolutionary
societies dominated by a committed Orwellian cultural elite, and manifesting a
remarkable and indeed frightening similarity in character to the former
communist regime in Eastern Europe.
On this homogenization of acceptable opinion, he notes that, "unfortunately,
since the transformation of democracy into a liberal democracy, the spectrum of
political acceptability has been distinctly limited. Liberal democracy has
created its own orthodoxy … [and] a political mechanism for the election of
people, organizations and ideas in line with the
orthodoxy."
Recognising a variety of historical forces shaping the homogenous 'new
orthodoxy,' Legutko identifies the 1960s as having had the decisive impact in
undermining freedoms in the West, because it was during this period that a
massive political revolution broke, out moving an impatient leftist radicalism
into the dominant cultural and political position. He comments, "The
language of the revolution was a medley of anarchist slogans, a Marxist rhetoric
of class struggle and the overthrowing of capitalism, and a liberal language of
rights, emancipation, and discrimination. Capitalism and the state were the main
targets, but universities, schools, family, law and social mores were attacked
with equal vehemence."He points out that this totalitarian drift has
continued into the present, and grown to the point where the ideology has become
institutionalized and entrenched.
There is no denying the staggering success of this anti-Christian
world view over the past fifty years in overturning Christian mores and
challenging every creational norm – right down to the foundations of life's
sanctity, the nature of marriage, sexuality and human identity as a binary male
and female. Things literally
unthinkable to my grandparents'
generation have become established social truth, and heretics are now being
punished by censure, exclusion, shaming, ostracism, legal threats, Human Rights
Commissions, loss of social standing, loss of employment and even loss of
liberty behind bars. The seemingly unstoppable advance of this neo-Marxist and
neo-pagan worldview, aided by a largely unprepared and ineffective church
pulpit, means the social revolution has left many Christians stunned, confused
and afraid. In such a context, Christian faithfulness looks distinctly like
courage, whilst compromise looks more and more like
cowardice.
How is it that Christians have been caught so off-guard and flat-footed
in our revolutionary times? There are many things that could be said about this
question, but one important answer is that, in general, Christian believers lacked
vigilance and neglected the
development and defense of a consistently scriptural vision of reality in the
wake of our remarkable, historic success in evangelizing and shaping Western
cultural life.
In other words, we too readily assumed that broadly Christian norms would
hold; that largely Christian categories of life and thought, established by
centuries of tradition, would remain the religious presuppositions of the
people; that a robustly developed scriptural philosophy and cultural theology
were unnecessary because Christian assumptions were now simply 'common sense'
assumptions; that the apologetic task was largely done and the sacrifices of the
past no longer necessary. Biblical laws were really 'natural laws' – surely
agreed upon by all 'civilized' people – and the Christian view of life and
truth, liberty and justice was in fact an essentially 'neutral' perspective
received by every 'rational' state in terms of God's common grace or a 'natural
theology.' In short, we need not insist on being distinctly Christian or
explicitly directed by biblical revelation as a culture, because people already
accept broadly Christian ideas. In the insightful words of Peter
Hitchens:
It was the triumph of the Christian religion that for many centuries it
managed to become the unreasoning assumption of almost all, built into every
spoken and written word, every song, and every building. It was the disaster of
the Christian religion that it assumed this triumph would last forever and
outlast everything, and so it was ill equipped to resist the challenge of a
rival when it came, in this, the century of the self. The Christian religion had
no idea that a new power, which I callselfism, would arise. And, having arisen, selfism has
easily shouldered its rival aside. In free competition, how can a faith based
upon self-restraint and patience compete with one that pardons, unconditionally
and in advance, all the self-indulgences you can think of, and some you cannot?
In the face of what Hitchens here memorably calls selfism, where every
man is his own god (Gen. 3:5), we have quickly capitulated. With all moral
restraint cast to the wind, who will resist? First we gradually
withdrew further and further from
the fields of conflict in family, education, law, politics, art and every other
sphere. Soon thereafter we abandoned a distinctly Christian vision for these
realms altogether, settling for the 'neutral' status quo and retreating into the
four walls of the church. But even there many began claiming that surrender,
synthesis or compromise was the better part of valour for the 'survival' of the
faith – albeit a faith radically altered and increasingly unrecognizable. At
this steep trajectory of declension we should not be surprised, for once you
have surrendered the Lordship of Jesus Christ in one sphere, you will eventually
surrender it everywhere.
With the spheres of culture thus abandoned, and the Christian's life in
the world dominated by a secular and pagan vision, the church itself soon became
radically politicized, so that challenging the Christian in the pew about the
cultural issues that matter most has come to be considered offensive and
unacceptable. To speak plainly about life issues, biblical marriage, sexuality,
family, education, law, political and cultural life etc. in terms of the light
of God's Word is seen by many as a violation of church-state separation
(irrespective of whether the principle exists in the national constitution), an
invasion of privacy, or a political offense as though the church were a 'safe
space' to escape the convicting voice of God himself.
And so pastors and their pulpits bend to what their people want to hear. But, "has
not the greatest danger always been that those charged with the duty of
preaching the steep and rugged pathway persuade themselves that weakness is
compassion, and that sin can be cured at a clinic, or soothed with a pill? And
so falsehood flourishes in great power, like the green bay
tree."
In the face of the great retreat and surrender of the Christian church in
our time it is difficult not to acknowledge the moments of truth in the cutting
words of Hendrik Marsman, who suggested that the Christian
believer:
[W]ill in practice always be an enemy of the art of poetry, and
Christianity of culture. When things become tense or oppressive, the Christian
withdraws, with or without pretence, back to the kingdom that is not of this
world and leaves us, including the poets, alone, with the chestnuts still in the
fire. This is also what makes the Christian an unreliable player in the affairs
of this world, particularly in culture, and especially from the Protestant one
can expect nothing when push comes to shove. He is constantly ready to flee.
This is a terrible indictment and one which has too often come awfully
close to the truth when cowardice
is dressed as piety and faithless flight as innovation and
progress.
Yet at root the challenge of our time is not new, and the historic record
of many Christians who walked as men of Issachar in the face of oppression is
better than Marsman is perhaps aware of or ready to admit. The idea that we are
the first Christians to confront a radically hostile culture, to be considered
'haters of humanity,' or to find that sexual culture, human identity, life,
truth and justice are being defined radically differently is a myth. As the New
Testament scholar and specialist in pagan cosmology, Peter Jones has pointed
out:
Christians in the first century lived under a regime that continually
tempted them to modify their beliefs and adapt their behaviour to a culture that
didn't share their essential faith. Christians throughout history have been in
similar social settings, in cultures and under governments that had no regard
for Christian principles. Christians … are called by God in his Word to know the
particular ideas that constitute the world's pattern of thinking and belief; in
this way, we can both resist the Lie and make a statement of Truth that
understands and exposes the Lie and offers the only true hope in the gospel.
Ignorance of this will produce faith-destroying conformity and compromise.
The apostle Paul, acutely aware of his need for courage in the face of
seemingly insurmountable opposition in that pagan world of the first century
says in Ephesians 6:19-20:
Pray also for me, that the message may be given to me when I open my
mouth tomake
known with boldness the mystery of the gospel. For this I am an
ambassador in chains. Pray that I might be
bold enough in Him to speak as I
should (HSBC).
This is how we need to pray in our own time. Paul knew the power and
mystery being made known by the proclamation of the gospel. And he knew he was
Christ's ambassador – one who would suffer, even now in chains for his
profession of the faith. He did not seek escape from persecution by compromising
the message. He was not interested in going with the flow, in making the gospel
more palatable to the pagan world, shaving off the rough edges so that it might
be made more acceptable, more respectable, or more attractive to his humanistic
hearers. His request was simply for boldness to speak as he
ought.
Likewise, we are not to take flight, but must fight in prayer for the
courage we need to speak the truth with boldness, as we ought to speak. We should be confident of
being granted this grace, because the Lord Jesus reminds us of his total
victory,
"You will have suffering in this world. Be courageous! I have conquered the
world (Jn. 16:33)." We have only
one person to fear and that is God himself. The world and all its powers have
been defeated. As such we dare not not speak. Woe to us if we preach not the gospel
into a dark and evil world. In the sobering words often attributed to Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, "Silence
in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak
is to speak. Not to act is to act."
[1]Ryszard
Legutko, The
Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (New York: Encounter Books, 2016),
82.
[2]Ibid,
83.
[3]Peter
Hitchens, "The
Fantasy of Addiction," First
Things, last
modified February 2017.
[4]Hitchens,
The Fantasy of Addiction.
[5]Henrik
Marsman, cited in C. Van Der Waal, The
World our Home: Christians between Creation and Recreation, trans. Gerda Jacobi, ed. Conrad Van Dyk
(Neerlandia, Alberta: Inheritance Publications, 2013), 52.
[6]Peter
Jones, The
Other Worldview: Exposing Christianity's Greatest Threat (Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2015),
132.
Thousands of people have fled the city of Marawi in the
south of the Philippines after militants kidnapped 14 Christians and burnt down
their church.
Deputy Leader Peter Whittle said, “It’s clear that Paul
Nuttall showed a resolve, courage and leadership that has been lacking from the
rest of the Westminster establishment.
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