Replies

First, I want to thank all of the commenters here; you have helped me clarify and sharpen my argument.

Circlecity, you appear to be my brother in Christ. We agree that proclamation of the Gospel is necessary for the culture war to be fought and for American society to be renewed. We agree on my positive point.

Your disagreement is a negative one: no conscious organization for culture war. Gospel proclamation only. Your position is: nothing else is needed.

Before I give reasons why I disagree with you, understand that I certainly don’t hold that all Christians ought to mobilize for culture war. Culture war, like all wars, is fought by those who volunteer, or are drafted, for service. Any Christian who does not have a calling for the specific organization and activity I have called for can stay out of that particular fight.

You said,

“In other words, culture is bottom up not top down.”

But this cannot possibly be true. Consider some concrete examples: When the attitude of the general public about, and the laws concerning, homosexuality and abortion changed from opposition to approval, they did not change spontaneously. They changed because professors and other intellectuals began a campaign of teaching that these things are actually good. They changed because homosexalists, abortionists, and their supporters organized themselves to change the laws. They changed because the artists began portraying these things as good and those who opposed them as wicked.

Our culture’s attitude toward homosexuality and abortion most certainly did not change spontaneously. It was of course necessary that individual liberals changed their hearts and minds about these sins. But their hearts and minds did not change, and laws did not change, without organized effort.

And one could say the same thing about many features of our liberal landscape: general acceptance among non-Christians of Darwinism, the turn toward ugliness and nihilism in art and architecture, the acceptance of massively intrusive government and of mass immigration, and so on. None of these were present one hundred years ago, but they were put in place by deliberate action.

And if the liberals changed the culture by deliberately aiming to change it, so can we. It will be a very difficult battle, but we must at least make the effort.

You also said,

“You say ‘what is needed is to defeat the rule of liberalism by publicly defeating its fundamental ideas and by placing those who reject liberalism in positions of leadership.’ I say ‘replace’ them with what? Unregenerate people who believe in ‘non-liberalism’ (In whatever form that takes). Where does that get you? Ungodly men make ungodly societies no matter what their ideology.”

We should not aim for a society ruled in a Christian manner by Christians. We should only aim for what we had until roughly the 1950’s: A society in which the government generally allowed Christian communities to define themselves and act as they saw fit, and which did not tolerate, or force people to pretend to celebrate, obvious sins such as abortion, homosexuality, public blasphemy, and the deliberate attempt to replace white Americans people with hostile and inassimilable foreigners via mass immigration.

I would agree with you that theonomy, in which the government rules via biblical law, is not worth pursuing. But this is not an all-or-nothing situation. If we ought not have theonomy, it does not follow that Christians should make no effort to influence the government and the culture. Since attempting to make the culture better according to biblical standards (and the standards of the historic American nation) is obviously doing good, and since it is good for Christians to do good, it follows that it is good for Christians to engage in conservative culture war, if they have the calling.

One final point: the actual way we fight culture war is by persuasion. True, a properly-ordered (or at least tolerably-ordered) society will require non-liberals in positions of intellectual, spiritual and governmental leadership. But the foundation is persuasion. And this makes “culture combat” similar to evangelism and apologetics. And since proper principles of social order often come from the Bible, this effort supports, and is supported by, the Christian evangelism that we both say is crucial to the health of our nation.