Christians have found themselves in dire circumstances in the past. Christianity was illegal for several centuries in ancient Rome. Yet in that period, Christians did not shrink back from a bold witness; they ramped up their courage, engaged the public square, and continued to courageously proclaim the gospel. For people to suggest that this modern time demands by its hostility that we give up the gospel and culturally unpopular biblical teaching is to be both historically naive and scripturally unfaithful.

A Southern Baptist theologian called for a new “Christian conservatism” while addressing an audience at the Family Research Council.

Dr. Owen Strachan, a professor of theology and church history at Boyce College, the undergraduate school of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, offered his remarks during a scheduled lecture on the “Sacrificial Witness of the Christian Moral Tradition.”

The Christian Moral Witness and Compromise

Strachan’s remarks come in the context of what he sees an increasingly dysfunctional evangelical community in America, one in which the moral witness of the Christian tradition is being compromised. Strachan confronted what he sees as ethical compromise in the post-partisan movement in Christianity, heralded by Rachel Held Evans and Jonathan Merritt.

“Those who would divest themselves from courageous biblical proclamation are, perhaps unwittingly, playing the cynic. For them, God’s truth is not powerful; it is not efficacious; it is not ultimately gracious. In reality, it is held over the barrel, hostage to the whim of a generation,” Strachan said.

Strachan sees current evangelical trends playing loosely with Christianity’s historic moral witness:

“What is at play here is really this: courage, or lack thereof. Many today do not wish to sacrifice on behalf of Christ. Having grown up in low-cost circles, places where perhaps many people were at least culturally Christian, some of the so-called “Millennial” generation is finding that the gospel of Christ and the body of ethics it animates is a reproach. So: God must be reworked. The message of salvation through judgment that propelled the historic church to preach and act and love must be reworked into a declaration of God’s absolute and total love without concern for his holiness. This means, if we’re putting boots on the ground, that God is the great Acceptor of All. Like a boyfriend in a pop song, God becomes the ‘One Who Is So Sublimely Loving That He Would Never Ask You to Change.’”

“All this, my friends,” Strachan remarked, “is an end-around. It leaves us with a weakened church, a comatose gospel, and a message not of salvific transformation but earthly approbation. Like the mainline Protestants of a century ago, the moral arc of this “post-partisan” Christianity is long, and it bends toward the culture. In the end, it is lost there.”

“[I]f we lose sight of the potency of Christ’s sacrifice and become cynical toward grace, we ourselves will lay down a sacrificial witness,” Strachan concluded in the middle of his address.

Recalling the historic witness of the early church up to German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr., Strachan called for Christians to invigorate their public witness with an ancient flavor.

A New Christian Conservatism

In the third section of his address, Strachan called for a newly robust “Christian conservatism.” Gently critiquing elements of yesteryear’s Religious Right movement, Strachan argued that a new Christian conservatism should be tonally superior and more theologically rooted than movements supported by religious conservatives in the past.

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