Christian Pitfalls in a Secular World
00:00:00.000 | Dr. Moore, you have said that you think Christianity is going to become more marginalized in this
00:00:09.920 | country, which means that the church's political power will diminish. Christians who hold to
00:00:14.340 | a biblical sex ethic will increasingly be viewed as bigots or freaks or out of touch
00:00:19.540 | with reality. And this will lead to various responses and fears from faithful Christians
00:00:24.760 | who live under the authority of Scripture. Back in episode 371, you gave some examples
00:00:29.440 | of things the church can do to faithfully engage her calling in a secularizing society.
00:00:34.720 | But I think it's worth looking at the negative side of this as well. As America secularizes,
00:00:39.720 | as the church marginalizes, what are some wrong responses the church will be tempted
00:00:44.160 | to take?
00:00:45.800 | Christianity is going to seem stranger and stranger in American society as American society
00:00:51.400 | secularizes. I think that's clear. That's something that we're seeing right now in front
00:00:56.440 | of us. And I think that could be bad for America in many ways because the Bible Belt kept certain
00:01:03.680 | things from happening that otherwise wouldn't have happened. I think of the fact that there
00:01:08.920 | are many people who, for instance, in the 19th and mid, up to the mid-20th century,
00:01:15.240 | didn't divorce because there would have been a social cost that came along with divorcing.
00:01:20.280 | And that external pressure kept that from happening. This could be bad for America,
00:01:26.040 | but I think it's going to be good for the church because there's been this idea in American
00:01:31.680 | culture that a nominal cultural form of Christianity is how you get to be a good person in this
00:01:39.400 | society. It's a sort of implicit prosperity gospel. And that's all being stripped away
00:01:45.760 | right now because as American society secularizes, it's no longer necessary to be identified
00:01:51.680 | in a cultural nominal sense with Christianity. That's, I think, going to be good for the
00:01:56.080 | church. And there are several ways that we can respond to this that I think would be
00:02:00.200 | less than helpful. One of them would be denial that is happening and just to assume, "Let's
00:02:05.720 | just keep doing what we're doing right now, except more so, and somehow we'll be able
00:02:11.460 | to turn this around." If we don't understand what's happening in the culture around us,
00:02:16.400 | we don't understand why the culture is starting to not ask certain questions, and why the
00:02:23.440 | culture is seeing Christianity as freakish, then we're not going to be able to address
00:02:28.920 | it. Another bad response, I think, would be a sort of a negotiated settlement, which is
00:02:34.400 | to say, "We will strip away some of the aspects of Christianity that the ambient culture finds
00:02:44.560 | unpalatable so that they will like us." Now, the problem with that is, one, it isn't Christian.
00:02:51.400 | It isn't right. You can't grow Christian churches with sub-Christian theology. But secondly,
00:02:56.560 | it doesn't even work because the culture isn't going to allow that sort of negotiated settlement.
00:03:03.960 | That's what the older liberals wanted to do with, for instance, the miraculous, and now
00:03:08.480 | people are wanting to do that with sexual morality. It doesn't even work. That's the
00:03:14.160 | reason why the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church USA are in a state of freefall and
00:03:20.960 | collapse. It just doesn't work. Another bad response, I think, would be withdrawal. Let's
00:03:28.120 | simply sort of retreat back to our enclaves, into our churches, and not worry about what's
00:03:34.640 | going on in the culture on the outside. The problem with that is, first of all, that's
00:03:39.160 | impossible to do. There's no way to escape from the culture around us. And it also is
00:03:45.160 | a surrendering of a crucial part of our mission, which is to shape people's consciences, to
00:03:53.200 | enable people to be able to carry out all of their responsibilities. John the Baptist,
00:03:58.400 | for instance, when he's calling people to repentance, tax collectors and Roman soldiers
00:04:03.700 | came to him and said, "What do we do now?" And he had to have a word for them as to how
00:04:08.940 | they were to live, carry out their responsibilities, and still be faithful now to this new repentance
00:04:15.640 | that they have embraced, Luke chapter 3. We have to be able to do that as well. Another
00:04:21.080 | bad response, I think, is a sort of siege mentality, which is to respond to the culture
00:04:27.540 | outside with anger and with hostility, simply to express outrage about what's going on around
00:04:34.940 | us. And that's easy to do, because it's easy to find one sort of cultural atrocity after
00:04:41.980 | another. And we can just kind of talk to one another by saying, "Can you believe how bad
00:04:47.400 | it's getting out there?" And we can sort of reinforce the fear that we have about what's
00:04:53.500 | happening on the outside and what's happening in the culture in a way that isn't fundamentally
00:04:59.700 | Christian. I think that the verse that we probably need to be remembering more than
00:05:05.660 | anything else in the years to come is when Jesus says, "Fear not, little flock, because
00:05:13.240 | it is the Father's good pleasure to give to you the kingdom." Jesus says what the Bible
00:05:19.800 | says consistently, "Fear not." And why does He say that? He says, "Because you have the
00:05:26.300 | hope of, despite the fact that right now you are a little flock." And one of the things
00:05:32.380 | that we as Christians in America need to give up is the illusion that we're somehow a moral
00:05:38.760 | majority in this culture. Christianity is never a moral majority in this present world.
00:05:46.660 | We need to recognize instead, though, that we are part of a great cloud of witnesses.
00:05:51.700 | It is the Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. So we don't respond with fear,
00:05:57.800 | we don't respond with outrage, we don't respond with a siege mentality, and we don't respond
00:06:03.000 | by retreating and by giving up. We respond with hope, speaking clearly a call to repentance,
00:06:12.100 | and starting that repentance with the household of God, because we believe ultimately that
00:06:18.820 | we are on the winning side of history. That changes, I think, the perspective that we
00:06:23.820 | have, even when the rest of society starts to see us as strange and maybe even subversive.
00:06:29.900 | Amen. May that be true of the church. Thank you, Dr. Moore, for your time this week. Dr.
00:06:35.300 | Russell Moore serves as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of
00:06:38.660 | the Southern Baptist Convention. He is an author, blogger, podcaster, and he appears
00:06:42.460 | from time to time on televised news shows. You'll see him on TV every once in a while,
00:06:46.540 | and you can try and keep up with him at RussellMoore.com. On Monday, John Piper returns, and I will
00:06:52.980 | ask him about how we purposefully delight in what is not God, as in how do we delight
00:06:57.900 | in the gifts God has given us? I'm your host Tony Reinke. Have a great weekend.
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