Culture Wars

The Culture Wars are not over and if anything I expect them to get uglier. As a Christian, it is the ugliness that is my main concern. At both ends of the political spectrum there is a strong tendency towards conspiracy-theory-thinking which renders rational discussion impossible and raises demonizationism of opponents to a virtue. This is all reinforced by selective filtering of information sources so that the hyper-partisan world-view will not be challenged by contrary input. All this may be a common propensity of people, but that Christians would be at the forefront of it is not OK.

In Roman’s 2 where Paul is challenging the self righteous Jews who, “…are proud of your God, and know his will, and tell right from wrong because you have been taught by the Law (17b),” he points out that they too violate the law and thus “bring God into contempt.” He finishes with the quote from Ezekiel 36, “It is your fault that the name of God is held in contempt among the nations.” Paul is not challenging the truth of the Law but rather the arrogance of its would-be promoters. That, to me, is disturbingly similar to the situation with today’s Christian Culture Warriors. I’m not saying this is true of all or even most politically involved Christians, but one need only look at the comment threads about editorials on the web to see graceless dogmatism and alarmism phrased in ways that are as far from Christ-likeness as one can imagine. The same tone was abundantly demonstrated in the anti-Obama emails that so many Christians were forwarding and in the interviews conducted with people at Palin rallies. The later may have been over-represented by the media, but the fact that it was so easy to find such voices among Christians should be of great concern to the Church. Over the past few decades, the broader American Church has evolved a theology of the relationship of the Church to the World that makes it imperative to use human political power to pursue Kingdom goals. Rather than having the effect of Christianizing political discourse and methods, the result has been to transform the Christian effort into the standard hyper-partisan language and tactics of politics.


There is no doubt that the Gospel message will always face opposition in the world and there is no excuse for the Church to avoid that reaction by watering-down the Truth. That kind of opposition is; however, completely different from the hypocrisy-driven contempt that Paul is talking about in Romans and from the contempt that is being generated by the ugly forms of our Culture Wars. It may only be a small subset of the Church that is so vitriolic, but my fear is that far more of the Church is sympathetic and that the leadership does not seem to be working very hard to help its people find the line between being “salt and light” and representing a “gospel” which is unacceptably mixed with political ideology and a contemptuous attitude. This mixed-gospel-Christianity is so pervasive that it is isolating to those who are fully orthodox in their faith, but not aligned with the particular brand of Republicanism so widely conflated with “Evangelical Christianity.” I know many Christians who were reluctant to let others in their church know that they supported Obama in the last election because to do so is considered heretical by many of their fellow believers.

Now Obama is going to be the President and hopefully most Christians will be praying for him as the scriptures command and as our enormous challenges demand. Some Christians will almost certainly ratchet-up their Culture War efforts believing that is the only way to prevent something like the apocalyptic vision of 2012 presented by the Dobson organization. Unfortunately, some of this will be ugly and if the Church as a whole continues to acquiesce to these voices, we will be guilty of causing God’s name to be held in contempt.