truth

According to a recent poll published in Reason magazine, trust in American political parties is at a historic low. For the first time, more than 50 percent of the electorate now identifies as Independent, as opposed to Republican or Democrat.

One of the great contributions of Christianity to human history is the very idea that all people should be treated justly. As the influence of Christianity spread across the world, God’s instructions for how Israel should treat the poor and the disabled and the unborn and the foreigner spread as well. Today, both inside and outside of the church, demands to address injustices are ubiquitous.

I appreciate the American impulse to protect and support the rights of minorities, in this case the transgender population. And I want to state clearly that God loves all people, whatever their sexual orientation or gender identity (John 3:16). We are all broken people (Romans 3:23). We are all loved by the God who is love (1 John 4:8).

At the same time, transgender Americans constitute only 0.6 percent of our population. How do we also protect the rights of the majority?

The ban of President Trump from several social media outlets has left some wondering if evangelicals will be the victims of censorship by social media companies in the future? If they consider our stance on same-sex marriage to be “harassing” or “objectionable,” for example, will they block our content?

Throughout history, Christians have faced demands to be silent. Throughout history, they refused. In Live Not By Lies: a Manual for Christian Dissidents, blogger and author Rod Dreher thinks Christians in the West are entering a season where we will not only have to decide whether we will be silent; we will have to decide whether we will allow ourselves to be forced into going along with what is not true, with lies.

In what could be the motto for our day, Hamlet claimed, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” We have been taught that “truth” is the result of our subjective interpretation of our subjective experiences. Your mind processes your senses differently than my mind processes mine. As a result, there can be no such thing as objective truth, only “your” truth and “my” truth. The fallacy of this reasoning becomes apparent the moment we recognize that those who reject absolute truth do so absolutely.

Former New York Times writer, Bari Weiss, recently published a piece warning of a “danger, this one from the left … one that has attained cultural dominance, capturing America’s elites and our most powerful institutions.”

“I am here to ring the alarm,” writes Weiss. “I’m here to say: Do not be shocked anymore … It’s time to accept reality, if we want to have any hope of fixing it.” Weiss describes a growing and institutionally enforced anti-Semitism, and proceeds to list a series of incidents that she says cannot be accurately understood as isolated, but instead as an essential and insidious component of the new liberalism, a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.”

According to a new poll, more than half of Americans believe that moral truth is individually decided.

If truth is grounded in the person of Christ, our proper response must be to not only know truth, but love truth.

We should never remove a fence until we know why it was put up in the first place.

There’s no doubt we live in a culture that’s quite committed to clearing away all kinds of moral fences in all areas of culture, often replacing them with new fences in new places. What used to be unthinkable is now unquestionable. What used to be unquestionable is now thought of as quaint, Puritanical, and in some cases, oppressive and evil. What used to belong to families now belongs to the state. The guilty are now victims; the good guys now the bad guys; the essential now non-essential.