morality

If all Christians were more like Christ, could our post-Christian and even anti-Christian culture remain the same?

CNN reports that the percentage of Americans who strongly dislike the opposition party has risen by 400 percent in the last two decades. Social media plays an outsized role here as well. Christianity Today public theologian Russell Moore recently pointed readers to a relevant article by Robert Wright, who in turn quoted psychologist Leon Festinger: “People who make public commitments to a position are going to be motivated to bolster it. They’re going to become better and better at generating reasons why they’re right and their would-be critics are wrong.”

My articles this week have focused on the abortion issue from biblical and secular perspectives. Let’s close with two practical imperatives for believers.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, quoting historian Tom Holland, “What’s happening with #MeToo is essentially an attempt to reimpose…Christian sexual morality.” Having witnessed the destruction of unrestrained sexual impulses, many are now more open to the idea that sex belongs within boundaries. The boundaries Christianity proposes, such as lifelong marriage and chastity, will seem quaint, traditional, and unrealistic. But short of these crisp, solid lines, are bad ideas bound to have victims—victims who will be asking, like Ratajkowski, “Why am I so unhappy?”

It is conventional wisdom today that all truth is personal and subjective. As a result, sharing Christ in public is viewed as the imposition of our beliefs on others. This view of truth extends especially to the claim that non-Christians need to trust Christ to escape hell for heaven (Acts 4:12). Such a claim is increasingly seen as intolerant in the extreme, a view that is affecting and infecting Christians as well as the larger secular culture.

According to the 2021 General Society Survey by NORC at the University of Chicago, more American young adults under 35 years of age are having less sex than in past generations, especially among those who are religiously devout.

If we will pray for boldness to stand courageously and compassionately for biblical morality, our Lord will always answer our prayers (cf. Acts 4:29-31). If we will ask the Spirit to help us use our influence to lead others to truth and transformation in Christ, he will empower and employ us in ways we may not fully understand on this side of eternity (1 Corinthians 13:12).

C.S. Lewis knew that without morality, human beings act less than human. Now more than ever, it’s a message we need to hear.

In the months after 9/11, a well-known Christian apologist confidently announced that postmodernism was dead. After witnessing the evil of that day, no one, he suggested, would embrace a worldview that denied absolute truth or morality. He was wrong.

Because of the awful realities of life after the Fall, Christian thinkers throughout the ages – from Augustine, to Aquinas, to Luther, to others today – have sought to contextualize acts of war within a Christian moral framework, so that believers could actively oppose grave injustice without becoming part of the injustice themselves. Some believers, who hold that this is impossible, have embraced various degrees of pacifism. However, the majority of the church settled on a set of criteria that, if met, justify acts of war.