In Lectures on Calvinism (1898), Abraham Kuyper distinguishes Christianity and modernism as two fundamentally different life-systems. Remaining distinct from the world is especially difficult in modern times.

The legal establishment of same-sex marriage in New York state—not by a rogue court, mind you, but by legislative act—raises pressing questions for the Church.

Will we stand for Christian principles in the face of this blindly egalitarian normalization of homosexuality, and the polygamy and incest that will logically follow?

Will we stand firm when people call us bigots and compare us with unreconstructed racists?

Will we continue to follow uncritically the principles of the world around us?

Evangelicals have a history of culturalaccommodation, after all. Will we join with our clearly anti-Christian society in this moral collapse, or will we present an alternative by clearly identifying, thoroughly rejecting, and firmly replacing those socially self-destructive principles?

Facing the same-sex marriage development, I suddenly feel like a mainline Presbyterian who now thinks his denomination has crossed the line because it has voted to ordain homosexuals. But that is like finally leaving a burning house because the roof fell in. Prior to that, it was an inferno. Prior to that, it was on fire. Prior to that, you watched passively while your children were playing with matches in the basement.

At some point, the Presbyterian Church (USA) unwittingly imported principles that were fundamentally hostile to the Christian faith. That bit of leaven has leavened the whole lump. The ordination of women in the mainline churches could pass only because they had already replaced their biblical foundations with individualistic ones drawn from modern cosmology.

Was it the denomination’s adoption of The Book of Confessions in 1967? No, the problem far predated that. J. Gresham Machen left Princeton and the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1930s after his clash with them over modernism. The Southern church took longer to decline, so it was not until 1973 that the conservatives there finally made their break.

If same-sex marriage in the nation parallels the ordination of homosexuals in the PC(USA), where was America’s point of departure from Christian principles? (My concern here is chiefly for the integrity of Christians in America, not for America herself.)

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on world.wng.org–however, the original URL is no longer available.]

D.C. Innes is associate professor of politics at The King’s College in New York City and co-author of Left, Right, and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Russell Media, forthcoming in fall 2011).