The church secretly harbors hopes that if it chucks enough stuff overboard that the radicals will fall in love with Christianity. Now, if you are a good enough salesman you can draw a crowd with that approach. But you can’t really build a congregation of those who worship God in Spirit and in truth.

It doesn’t take a keen eye to see that our culture is drifting leftward into anarchy and has been for years. Most conservatives don’t understand why this is happening. This is happening because the left is employing a very careful, consistent, defined, and effective strategy, and they are employing it very well. This is true whether we are speaking of the political left or the ecclesiastical left.

Every true radical has read his Hegel or his Marx, or some more modern predigested rendition of it. They all understand something called the Dialectical approach to history. Let me present a dumbed down version of it.

Anybody who has done a good job of selling a car or a house or something else in the newspaper knows about haggling. If you hope to get $1000 out of a used car, you might start your asking price at $1300. Your potential buyer will come and look at the car and make a lowball offer of $700. You counter offer at $1200. The potential buyer comes up to $800, and so on until you two meet in the middle at $1000, and everyone is theoretically happy. This is a sort of rough analogy of how the Dialectical approach works.

Whatever view society holds on a given issue is called the Thesis. The Thesis is the status quo. It is the de facto “conservative” position in society. The radical understands that most people just want to camp somewhere in the neighborhood of the Thesis because most people are conformists and just want to be like their neighbors. The radical wants to move the Thesis. He wants to shift society’s status quo in a desired direction. He wants to change the way people think and feel on a given issue. Hegel and Marx have given him the tools to do that.

The radical understands that the way to move the Thesis in his desired direction is to present something called the Antithesis. The Antithesis arises because the radical begins to make a noisy demand around a particular issue or set of issues. He writes and speaks and community organizes and generally makes a nuisance of himself by agitating for a position far beyond what he actually hopes to accomplish at this stage. Groups form around the radical and his antithesis. They make demands and hold demonstrations and make use of whatever political processes are in place. This activity creates a sociological struggle. It creates tension in the society.

Society doesn’t like this tension. That’s why the Thesis exists in the first place. The thesis a place of relative peace and tranquility. Society wants the tension to go away. Middle class people, and especially middle class white people of Northern European ancestry, are very conflict averse. The radical is not. The radical uses that fact against the majority.

And so you have a Thesis and an Antithesis in contradiction with each other. The radical knows that all he has to do is to keep making loud demands and wait. Sooner or later some of the majority will come to him and say, “So what do you want? What will it take to shut you up and make you go away?” And then the haggling begins. Finally a middle position is reached. The radical gets some of what he has demanded. The majority give up more than they wanted to, but less than they had feared they would have to give up, much to their relief. This new position is called the Synthesis.

After awhile the Synthesis becomes the new status quo. It becomes the new de facto conservative position. It becomes the new Thesis.

But society is still not where the radical wants it to be. So he erects a new Antithesis which is even more extreme than his first one. He community organizes. He agitates. He makes a lot of noise. Before long a delegation from the majority comes and asks him once again what it will take to make him shut up and go away. We then have a new Synthesis and thus a new Thesis. And so on.
Do you see what’s happening? Now you understand why it seems that our culture is and has been sliding downward on an incline plane slowly and inexorably for our whole lifetime.

Think about how this has worked where human sexuality is concerned in the last forty or fifty years. Fifty years ago the Thesis concerning human sexuality was monogamous heterosexual lifelong marriage. Not that people all confined their sexual activity to monogamous, heterosexual, lifelong marriage, but that was considered the norm and what was right and good. That was the position of the social conservative. There were even social sanctions for breaking that norm. Society would not have tolerated the open elevation of fornication or adultery or sodomy as a new norm.

Now look at what we have today. I don’t have hard data, but I do have anecdotal and observational data. My sense is that “Social conservatives” fornicate, adulterate, cohabitate, divorce, and have children out of wedlock at rates which are similar to the culture at large. I do have hard data concerning those who profess to be born again evangelical Christians, and since there is a large overlap between “social conservatives” and evangelical Christians, I think I am on solid ground. I doubt that those who profess no Christ are going to be better off than those who do profess Christ. And this is what we find: George Barna wrote a book about a decade ago called Growing True Disciples. According to his research, approximately 90% of those professing to be born again, evangelical Christians exhibited no difference in their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors when compared with those who professed no Christian commitment whatsoever.

Some members of my church left their old church last year because one of the worship leaders was pregnant out of wedlock and nobody thought a thing about having any sort of social sanction, open acknowledgement of sin, or church discipline on the matter. This wasn’t a liberal mainline church. This was a mainstream evangelical church. Of course nobody wanted the woman driven from their midst, but public sin calls for a public rebuke when the offender is unrepentant, and for public repentance when the offender is repentant. What had been a private sin became a very public sin as she started to show. Public repentance would have certainly been appropriate. Wisdom might dictate that she take some time away from her worship leadership duties as well. In days gone by that would have been the normal thing to do. Fornication (and the resultant pregnancy out of wedlock) is now pretty run of the mill occurrences. In our day fornication doesn’t even qualify as a serious sin, and the idea of public rebuke and public repentance is widely viewed to be the result of a serious lack of charity.

Now, what the average irreligious “social conservative” does about this, I have no idea. But I do know what the Christian does about it.

This whole process is predicated on the notion that there is no absolute truth or absolutely good standard of belief and behavior. The “conservatives” at each stage tacitly share this assumption and show that they share it by agreeing to move the consensus in the radical’s direction. What’s true and good becomes defined by what most people in the culture think is true and good. This is obviously an unbiblical notion. God has given us the only Thesis that will stand against this entire onslaught. It’s called the Word of God.

Now, here’s the tragedy: The church is supposed to stand fast on God’s Word and say to the culture, “No. This is wrong and this is right and we will not compromise! Instead, we will preach a warning to you about the end of those who follow this path.” But what does the church do today? At best the average evangelical Christian is simply a laggard who falls into the “Late Adopter” segment of the culture. We join the party ten or twenty years after it has started.

At worst the church falls all over itself to become part of the new Synthesis. Indeed, most of what is prescribed by the various church growth movements, and most of what goes under the name “engaging the culture” in the contemporary evangelical church is nothing more than trying to find places where we can agree with the radicals and affirm them in their sin and error. The church secretly harbors hopes that if it chucks enough stuff overboard that the radicals will fall in love with Christianity. Now, if you are a good enough salesman you can draw a crowd with that approach. But you can’t really build a congregation of those who worship God in Spirit and in truth.

We are suck ups and lickspittles groveling at the feet of the enemies of God. We are acting like morons who have confused crowds for congregations. I can understand how an Arminian might fall into this sort of error, but how one who claims to be a Calvinist can fall into it, I do not know. It is inimical to Calvinism at every point. But we Calvinists are doing it right now. “If I can only affirm the goodness of the arts… if I can only uphold social justice issues… If I can only look like I’m doing serious thinking and philosophizing … if I can only do enough nice things, then people will like my Jesus.”

Yes, they might like your Jesus. The trouble is that the Jesus you are showing them is not the Jesus of the Bible. They won’t like the Jesus revealed in the Bible one whit more than they did before, unless the Spirit of God comes upon them in power and shows them their sin and their need for a Savior and empowers them to flee to the Throne of Grace for forgiveness of their sins. The Word of God applied to sinful human beings is the only thing that God has ordained to perform that function. Art doesn’t do it. Social justice doesn’t do it. Shallow pop philosophy doesn’t do it. Good deeds don’t do it. The Word of God preached does it. Law and Gospel. The thunderings of Sinai followed by the sweet offer of pardoning grace. That’s what does it, and that’s the only thing that God has promised to consistently bless.

Enough of this nonsense! The Church serves the world best by standing apart from it and criticizing it wherever it is at odds with the Word of God. That means criticizing both the members and positions of all political parties wherever they stray. Let God’s people repent and obey, or let us at least be silent until God raises up a people who will repent and obey.

Brian Carpenter is pastor of Foothills Community Church (PCA) in Sturgis, S.D.