Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

This article can be summarised in three questions:

• First, how did we as Christians arrive at this state of being in a “culture war”?
• Second, as the culture has drifted so far from us, what do we have left to us and what do we have that can halt or even reverse our cultural captivity?
• And third, what do we do if we can’t reverse or even halt this drift?

Left-Leaning ALP

In the past year or so, we have seen a number of Labor Premiers introduce radical new laws in relation to abortion to full term and euthanasia, as well as Victoria’s even more radical gay and transgender “Conversion Therapy” Bill, a bill which Martyn Iles, the CEO of the Australian Christian Lobby, rightly described as “the most dangerous and draconian bill we have ever seen in Australia”, which would “make the Soviets blush”.

There is also the greater willingness among Labor states, as well as the Party nationally, in line with their Greens allies, to aggressively pursue contentious climate change measures through exclusively renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind turbines.

All of these “hot button” social issues, as well as the legislative path from being fully proscribed to fully accepted, are like the fable of the camel in the tent. They arrived at their current situation gradually over the past fifty years.

Liberals Heading Leftward Too

Recently we have also seen legislative creep in relation to these issues from conservative premiers, most notably the legislation in New South Wales to allow abortion up to full term, as well as the pursuit of renewables, particularly by the New South Wales Minister for Energy Matt Kean, whom critics have dubbed “Green Kean”.

Coupled with these is the Liberal Government in South Australia following Victoria’s lead in seeking to similarly enact “Gay Conversion” legislation, as well as the liberalisation of their abortion laws, and an almost universal political consensus across Australia favouring euthanasia.

All of these have combined to blindside conservative Christians.

How Did We Get Here?

So why, all of a sudden, are we seeing these moves away from what have always been the core social issues which have aligned Christians with the conservative political parties? For the answer, I think we need to see what happened in the past which has led to this situation. As Francis Schaeffer wrote in the foreword to his book Escape From Reason (1968):

“If we are to understand present-day trends in thought, we must see how the situation has come about historically and also look in some detail at the development of philosophic thought-forms.”

So we need to go back fifty years and see the trend from the beginning.

Neo-Marxist Philosophy

Many have noted the influence of a small number of neo-Marxist philosophers from the past century, notably Antonio Gramsci, whom some have called the “Godfather” of Cultural Marxism. He originally theorised about the need for what he called “the long march through the institutions” (i.e., through the schools and universities).

Gramsci was followed by the group initially from pre-World War II Germany known as “The Frankfurt School”, then in particular the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, and one representative of The Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse. All of the latter escaped Hitler’s Germany and wound up in tenured positions of influence in America’s top universities.

Before their influence had grown from within academia in the ’60s and early ’70s, and trickled into the surrounding culture, if you had examined the policy positions of the two major parties in the US or Australia, or in fact any Western democracy, you would have found them to be in almost perfect lockstep, with a traditional view on these moral and social issues, along with the rest of the nation. So why did those issues gradually seep into the ideology of the Democrats in America and Labor here?

I’m no historian, but here’s my theory, so see what you think.

A New Focus

What neo-Marxism did by changing the focus of victim status and repression from economic to cultural issues gave those on the Left a new focus at a time when the working class of these countries was gradually morphing into what I would call a “consumer class”.

By this, I mean that they had gone from being a class of people whose working life was a struggle to get ahead, to a class who worked to get more things. These are the people who went from being the post-War generation who were “trying to make ends meet” to become, two short generations later, “aspirational voters”, or as they were labelled in the ’90s, “Howard’s battlers”, with their new McMansions in new housing estates and two late model cars in the double garage.

The result of this for the centre-left parties was that the “class struggle” was gradually being won, or at least providing less political traction, so those parties needed new issues to fight for. And along came the neo-Marxist inspired “Sexual Revolution”, a radical Feminism, as well as the more extremist fringes of the Civil Rights movement in the US, creating new and fresh “victims of oppression” out of women, racial and (a bit later) sexual minorities (you can now throw in the environment as a “victim of oppression”, too).

So these former “working class” parties gradually became progressives on social and moral issues, while the conservatives remained consistent to that label. And that is the political landscape we have become increasingly familiar with over the past 40-50 years, with left-wing parties, whenever they’ve been in office, slowly chipping away at the moral and social structure that was predominant for many centuries in the West.

Shifting Standards

But why are we now seeing conservatives suddenly going down the same road? Again, I believe we need to go back and see what happened over that previous half-century culturally, because politics, as Nancy Pearcey tells us in her book Total Truth (2004), “tends to reflect culture, not the other way around”.

Francis Schaeffer, in another of his books, The God Who Is There (1968), tracks how what our culture calls “standards” have changed gradually over time:

“The shift spread gradually… People did not suddenly wake up one morning and find that it had permeated everywhere at once… it spread… from one discipline to another, beginning with the philosophers…”

He then outlines how it seeped into the arts and music before it permeated the general culture.

This is why we now face a situation where both right and left-wing parties, which actually both have foundations built on strong Christian principles, have now both left Christians feeling betrayed and marginalised. These issues have now gained a position of acceptance in the community, with polls showing a majority of Australians are in favour of abortion and euthanasia, while same-sex marriage became law by means of a popular vote. And now the transgender movement is making its insidious presence felt everywhere, along with the more catastrophic expressions of climate change.

In relation to the former, I think most Aussies are still sceptical about their claims. Yet we’re now seeing “transgender equity” becoming enforced by governments and corporations across the Western world, insisting on the use of approved gender pronouns, as well as the issue of parents being disempowered by the State when their children self-identify as transgender, among other things.

So where does that leave us as Christians standing against this tide flowing so strongly against us in this post-Modern world? If we lose these battles, doesn’t it mean we’ve lost the whole war? Because surely if we’ve lost on these issues, then what’s left?

One Last Shot

I believe there’s only one thing left to us on the cultural level. It’s possibly the only shot left in the locker. But it very well could be the best shot of all.

Truth.

For a long time now we’ve been doing our best to appeal to the surrounding culture on the basis of Christian “values”, but these days that term has actually become (if you’ll pardon the pun) devalued.

Let me explain. Francis Schaeffer, in The God Who Is There, speaks of a two-storey view of reality, like a two-storey house. Our editor Kurt Mahlburg does an excellent job of distilling Schaeffer’s thoughts in his book, Cross and Culture: Can Jesus Save the West?:

“In the lower storey are what philosophers call ‘particulars’, and in the upper storey are ‘universals’. These two terms are not easy to define, but for our purposes here, particulars are the diverse array of our earthly experiences. A particular might be a blade of grass, a law of science, an emotion, or the colour purple. A universal, on the other hand, is a transcendent truth that sits above all the particulars, linking them together and making sense of the big picture.”

This means that originally there was a direct link between the lower and upper storeys in the way people lived and thought. But over the centuries, particularly through the rise of Enlightenment philosophies which have elevated what we know in the physical world above what we believe, that has changed, and now the upper storey has been effectively separated.

At this point, we’ve crossed what Schaeffer defined as the “Line of Despair”, where a certainty in relation to absolutes has gradually been replaced by cynicism and a complete rejection of absolutes. Due to this, the upper-storey reality has been rejected as representing anything of value as truth, being reduced in the process to the realm of personal opinions and preferences, and consequently any beliefs arising from those absolutes as mere myths, or what we today call “values”.

This “division”, as Pearcey describes it in Total Truth,

“… explains why Christians have such difficulty communicating in the public arena. It’s crucial for us to realise that nonbelievers are constantly filtering what we say through a mental fact/value grid.

For example, when we state a position on an issue like abortion or bioethics or homosexuality, we intend to assert an objective moral truth important to the health of society — but they think we’re merely expressing our subjective bias…

The fact/value grid instantly dissolves away the objective content of anything we say, and we will not be successful in introducing the content of our belief into the public discussion unless we first find ways to get past this gatekeeper.

… Christians must find a way to overcome the dichotomy between public and private, fact and value, secular and sacred. We need to liberate the gospel from its cultural captivity, restoring it to the status of public truth.”

I agree with Pearcey that we need to reassert our truth as truth and not merely “values”. And we do have “many convincing proofs” (Acts 1:3) for what we believe, not just in Scripture, but in the areas of logic and philosophy, history, and science (Pearcey’s book is just one of hundreds of valuable sources in print and online). Francis Schaeffer summed up this reality perfectly in an address at the University of Notre Dame in 1981:

“Christianity is not a series of truths in plural, but rather truth spelled with a capital “T”. Truth about total reality, not just about religious things. Biblical Christianity is Truth concerning total reality — and the intellectual holding of that total Truth and then living in the light of that Truth.”

Prepare for Tribulation

But even though we possess ultimate Truth, we still need to be prepared for the likelihood that our Truth will be rejected by the world around us. After all, if religious and political leaders could plot against and kill Jesus after they knew had raised Lazarus from the dead, then we should be in no doubt as to the ability of the people in the world to reject what they know to be true intellectually if it cuts across their own desires and ambitions. In fact, Scripture basically tells us to expect it as a default.

As Mike Gore, the CEO of Open Doors, wrote recently:

“I really believe this is one of those crossroads moments for the Western Church where we have the choice to understand that changes in culture are inevitable and learn how to remain courageously close to Jesus (despite the changes) or spend years living fearful and uncertain walking in circles spending exorbitant amounts of energy trying to reverse what is a biblical deterioration, and in so doing risk jeopardising our trust in Christ and the church as we wrestle and debate moralistic changes, mislabelling them as a move away from what we call “Christian” values…

I think that everything we’re seeing within society and culture is in line with the scriptures. I believe that the Bible paints a picture of a world that deteriorates (Matthew 24) and that the story does not end with the world coming to know Jesus, but rather under great turmoil and pain, but it’s in that moment that the triumphant Saviour, Jesus returns.”

But Mike, working first hand as he is with some of the most persecuted people groups in the world, sees hope in their responses to that persecution, and it’s here that I find hope for our future should that level of persecution come upon us:

“I’ve spent the last 10+ years working with people who live in cultures that are hostile towards Christians and despite this I’ve seen time and time again Jesus still builds His church… These are people who have every reason to fear the deterioration of culture and the ever-increasing conflict but, they find hope over fear and their hope, it’s in Jesus.

The mind-blowing thing is that the people I’ve met from North Korea to Morocco, China to Kazakhstan essentially use their suffering as a hauntingly beautiful confirmation that the gospels are true and accurate and the promises of God real.

Their focus is distilling the values of Christianity and on-teaching them to those in their care, walking “with” people year after year after year focused on discipleship. If we continue to measure our proximity to God based on His provision of safety, the more we will fear changes in society and culture and mislabel them as persecution.”

I think Mike nails it in the last two sentences. If persecution does come our way, and public displays of our faith, not to mention our opportunities to present our Truth, are diminished or even extinguished, it will be that one-to-one engagement of “walking with people” that we know, not only speaking Truth, but living it before their eyes, which will be as effective for us as it is in those persecuted people groups.

We actually have no better example in this time of COVID than the early persecuted church in Rome. When plague first came to Rome in the second century, while wealthy Romans fled the city, including the famous classical physician Galen, it was the Christians who risked their own safety to care for the sick and dying, removing and burying the bodies of the dead, and setting up the first examples of hospitals and charities.

As well, it was living out truths in relation to the treatment of unwanted children and newborns, women and girls, through that form of one-to-one engagement with those they knew and those they encountered which brought about the growth of the church in spite of severe persecution. In relation to this linking of our truth to our actions, I’ll let Pearcey have the last word:

“We may do a great job of arguing that Christianity is total truth, but others will not find our message persuasive unless we give a visible demonstration of that truth in action. Outsiders must be able to see for themselves, in the day-to-day pattern of our lives, that we do not treat Christianity as just a private retreat, a comfort blanket, a castle of fairy-tale beliefs that merely make us feel better…

Sociologists call this a “plausibility structure” — the practical context in which ideas are fleshed out. The church is meant to be the “plausibility structure” for the gospel. When people see a supernatural dimension of love, power, and goodness… then our message of biblical truth becomes plausible.”

With this in mind, I am convinced that God is calling us to make use of this time as a preparation for possibly even greater calamities, whether an even far more virulent disease than COVID-19, or perhaps an economic collapse, or some other situation that knocks the whole society off-balance.

He is calling us to be ready and unified, having set aside cultural, political and theological differences, to finally become an Ephesians 4:13 people, progressing on that path “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ”.

Because that society which has had its every certainty challenged and toppled will be looking around for something to believe in that can withstand that.

And there we’ll be, waiting for them.

[Photo: 1STunningArt/BigStock]