"I’d respond with my own guarantee. The best way to destroy a faith is to abandon it. Just ask mainline Protestants. They’re no longer recognizably Christian, they’re prone (like the PCUSA) to embrace vile evils like abortion and anti-Semitism, and they conform to the culture and lose adherents by the hundreds of thousands. After all, why go to church when you can get the same sermon from the Sunday New York Times?"
Exactly.
This is an excellent article.
The irrationality that is so prevalent today is frightening.
It is difficult to have the patience to address it in such a manner as French has here.
M4L
Why do we as Christians so easily give up our beliefs to be a part of the culture? God did not say to be double minded or to walk on both sides of the fence. We became a problem when we stopped saying no. We accept anything the schools hand down, we avoid worship to watch football, we accept the fare on television and at the theatres, and generally go along with the culture.
This distinction, between status and acts, or between and among different acts themselves, used to be a matter of common sense. And it certainly still is amongst lawyers. No one (yet) is telling me that to maintain my law license I have to represent anyone who asks for help, no matter the case or cause. But if I have artistic talent, now the rule is different: My talents are the community’s talents, or I’m “seceding” from society. So the Christian baker, who’s more than willing to bake a cake for anyone, gay or straight, man or woman, black or white, for — say — a birthday party or an office celebration, is now seceding from society if they’re unwilling to help celebrate a gay wedding.
That’s the contention of Jonathan Rauch, a guy I’ve long respected and whose book, The Kindly Inquisitors, is a must-read for anyone who questions the value of free speech in a pluralistic society. Unfortunately, his latest essay in The Atlantic, gets things exactly backwards. Accusing Christians of a “great secession,” of “walling themselves off from secular society,” he says this:
"Culturally conservative Christians are taking a pronounced turn toward social secession: asserting both the right and the intent to sequester themselves from secular culture and norms, including the norm of nondiscrimination. This is not a good idea. When religion isolates itself from secular society, both sides lose, but religion loses more. "
PFL
No wonder. Christians have abandoned the culture in the USA and we lost it to evil.
This is because Christians bought a demonic lie sold to them from those working to create a hedonistic secular oligarchy over us: don’t judge.
Because Christians in America by and large have grown biblically ignorant, it was easy for the Secular Hedonists to use the scriptures, out of context - against them.
A society that would not be governed by God and His Laws - will be ruled by the tyranny of men, and theirs.
And it always results in men rejecting God’s Laws and biblical morality and imposing their own morality upon their subjects.
Here we are.
True Christian Churches will increase under persecution. Up until now it has been a time of withering. Only recently are people being directly attacked because of their faith. The Church has always grown under persecution - the difference between the world and the Church becomes so more stark and the Church becomes the haven for those who no longer have a fence to sit on!
Also, call it what it is -- An attempt by the ruling class to expel certain people from the common culture.
“As far as I know, during the divorce revolution it never occurred to, say, Catholic bakers to tell remarrying customers, “Your so-called second marriage is a lie, so take your business elsewhere.” That would have seemed not so much principled as bizarre.”
Maybe if they had, nobody would be shocked today when Christians refuse to recognize ‘gay marriage’ or whatever other impossibility the state decides to call marriage at the time.
FReegards