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One of the best things that came out the 2016 election, more appropriately known as the 2016 dumpster fire, was finding the radio show, podcast, and writings of Steve Deace. His knowledge of history and theology with his ability to objectively analyze is refreshingly uncharacteristic to the rest of the media business. But it is his steadfast commitment to the absolute truth of the Christian worldview and a biblical social order in love that makes him a true Christian soldier in the Kingdom of God.
The culture war is fundamentally about the question: Who defines the world?
The Historic Ignorance of Americans
Mr. Deace’s latest piece that he writes in Conservative Review analyzes what is ultimately wrong with America, left and right, from an interview he did with Chuck Todd of Meet the Press. The basic point of his thesis, as I understand him (if I completely misunderstood, he can correct me), is that most Americans are ignorant of our Judeo-Christian heritage and that has cause us to lose our way. When a candidate like Judge Roy Moore comes along and espouses a belief in God and America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, it’s to utter shock and horror. The media and the Left screech in bewilderment, “What did he just claim? Did he just insert God into the political conversation? Is he some stupid theocrat violating the establishment clause of the Constitution?”
American revisionism vs. American surrenderism
“His questions were balanced and thoughtful, and I was given every opportunity to make my arguments without having to waste time fending off red herrings. Multiple choice: We, the people, as recognized under the American system of government, were endowed by _____ with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You know, like all the Founding Fathers did.”
In the title of Mr. Deace’s piece, he frames the problem in America as “American revisionism versus American surrenderism.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with his argument. He diagnoses the problem of secular revisionism and secular conservatism’s surrenderism poignantly, but I submit the problem goes deeper. Much of the problem lies at the feet of an effeminate, contemporary Church that is too pessimistically dualistic and is all too willing to surrender the definitions of God’s social order to the evil one.
I should warn you before you go any further that all my observations of the Church are generalizations of the Church as a whole. Not every church or every Christian holds these views and some are actually quite good at cultural reformation. But it is a profound enough theological crisis that permeates the Church generally that it needs to be addressed wholesale.
Two Kingdoms Theology
The American Church today has failed to take hold of the power of Christ’s resurrection, while confining it to mere personal salvation. In that miasmic doctrine, Christ’s First Advent happened merely to save people from a future of catastrophic judgment where Satan would take control before Jesus comes again. It is a dualistic view of the world with the Kingdom of Heaven being a spiritual realm in the hearts of Christ’s Church, while the prince of darkness rules this world.
But the Bible tells a different story. It tells of a death, resurrection, and ascension that was sovereignly powerful enough to destroy the old order, and establish a New Covenant order. It’s a Kingdom where Jesus is ruling from His throne in Heaven by His grace, with all authority in Heaven and on earth given to Him. And through the preaching of His Gospel and by the power of His Spirit through His Church, He is gradually redeeming, restoring, and reconciling all things and people back to Him.
The Cowardice Church
However, it is the cowardice of the effeminate Church, in our dualism, that has surrendered to the revisions of secularism. We have convinced ourselves our effeminate cowardice is a “retreat to commitment,” but in reality, we’ve surrendered God’s social order, the creative order we were mandated to subdue and cultivate. The contemporary Church accepts gender confusions, same-sex mirages, and effeminate and immoral desires because we’ve told ourselves “truth in love” means not hurting the feelings of the broken. It is this cowardice that is not pointing people to the redeeming love of the Cross.
The sexual revolution has fundamentally transformed the social order into ungodliness. And the Church, in general, does not preach with conviction and courage against the destruction of the nuclear family, the foundation of God’s social order. Creation has lost the procreative purpose of human life and making it sacred because the Church has been too cowardly to condemn the sexual revolution and defend the nuclear family.
If the Church can’t, or won’t, preach against the ungodliness of the sexual revolution and its redefinitions of male and female, marriage, and life itself, then what gives us authority to preach racial reconciliation? If gender identity, effeminacy, and sexual perversions are merely personal and aren’t social, then how is preaching the imago Dei in regards to race meaningful? What standard makes the issue of racial reconciliation social, while the issues of the nuclear family and marriage are just personal?
Cultural Reformation of God’s Social Order
The secularists are dismantling, with their sexual revolution and redefinitions, God’s creative order. It’s the social order, as defined by God’s Word, that will give the Church the authority to lead on racial reconciliation. If we continue surrendering the creative order and the moral truths that hold it together, all we’ll be doing on race is succumbing to and indulging the latest tribalistic outrages, solving absolutely nothing.
The culture war is fundamentally about the question: Who defines the world? The Church has a cultural mandate and Great Commission to essentially be the foot soldiers of God’s Kingdom cultivating the social order, as the Bible defines it, and making disciples who will go out teaching all that Jesus commanded. America is in desperate need for a revived Church with a restored authority and courage to fight for the redemption and restoration of the imago Dei inherent in the nuclear family. We must attack the sexual revolution with the boldness of Scripture, the heart of Christ, and the courage and power of the Spirit, inside and outside of the Church, and seek a cultural reformation of God’s social order.
The few Christians leading this reformation movement to restore marriage as a social institution of one man and one woman are the courageous men and women of the National Organization for Marriage, the organizers of the March for Marriage. I encourage all critical-thinking Americans, but specifically Christians, to get involved with the March for Marriage as courageously as you do for the March for Life. It is the procreative purpose of the nuclear family and the social order that makes the defense of life meaningful.
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