Daily Verse | 2 Samuel 7:25-26
“And now, Lord God, keep forever the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house. Do as you promised, so that your name will be great forever.”

Tuesday’s Reading: 2 Samuel 8-10

Since this blog is concerned with faith, culture and politics, I look for the intersection of the three but spend a lot of time on the political state of our country. Today I want to take a brief look at how the cultural ethos of our country, supported by the political regime we live under, is affecting the church—specifically what we’d consider the “evangelical” church in the U.S.

The threat to the Church is the same threat that is grinding down our culture—that of cultural Marxism.

This danger is the subject of a new film, Enemies Within the Church, produced by Cary Gordon, Trevor Loudon, and Judd Saul.  It chronicles the destructive infiltration of the churches and the injection of “wokeism” – Marxism, social justice, Critical Race Theory, gender fluidity – into church doctrine.  The choir of radical Left ideology, having targeted and gradually co-opted the media, Hollywood, Big Tech, the unions, and the political parties, set its sights on penetrating and controlling the churches, a difficult, long-term endeavor.  And, as the film explains, the communists eventually succeeded in penetrating the Bible colleges, seminaries, and pulpits of many denominations to push Christianity in the direction they want.

In the article, the author reviews the film and reports on its themes, concluding,

The subversion of the Church has meant that religious terms have been redefined and recontextualized.  The film shows how seminaries have now become places to deconstruct Christian truth, thereby leading people away from G-d and Christ.  One heretical doctrine that’s gaining ground – antinomianism – claims that Christians are exempt from the obligations of the Ten Commandments and that feelings are more significant than facts.  Churches are now embracing LGBTQ in contravention of Christian doctrine and pastors are even repenting for past Biblical positions that rejected homosexuality.  Traditional clerics maintain that without the law of G-d to lean on, situationalism fills the void: right and wrong are decided not by ethics but by the cynical evaluation of the potential consequences of a decision.

But why attack the Church? Because the Church is at the core of the American experience. In Niall Ferguson’s book, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, he refers to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences twenty-year study of western society in which an official said:

‘One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.’

You would think that if the Chinese have figured this out, then maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to destroy our Christian heritage. It’s what gives us our strength.

But American Marxists also know this, which is why they are trying to subvert the Church. It’s the one truly significant obstacle to completing a Marxist takeover of the country.

And the Church is being subverted, especially by LGBTQ+XYZ activists.

Calvin University finds itself facing an awkward news headline. A lesbian staff member at the university, Nicole Sweda, married her live-in partner. That’s not all. An assistant professor of sociology at the college, Joseph Kuilema, presided over their ceremony. The problem? Calvin University claims an evangelical identity and is affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church in North America, which holds confessionally to Biblical definitions of sexual morality. This entails defining marriage as between a man and a woman, as well as prohibiting all sexual activity outside the bonds of matrimony.

You can read about it in the link above and find more here and here.

The point is that as secular morality has shifted away from a Judeo-Christian ethic, the Church has been pressured to conform to the new morality. In turn, that means that some churches have abandoned or explained away biblical standards for, in this case, sexual behavior.

I’ve seen it firsthand.

The move to normalize gay and lesbian men and women and to enfold them in the church I had attended for 30+ years was one of the factors that led to my leaving that fellowship. Church leadership had been imperceptibly moving us in a more progressive direction and I began to hear (or not hear) things that increased my concern. For instance, when SCOTUS decided in Obergefell v. Hodges “that state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same sex marriages duly performed in other jurisdictions are unconstitutional,” effectively granting same-sex marriages the same force and elevation as biblical marriage, our senior pastor said exactly zero about it.

And that said something to me.

A little over a year later the same pastor gave a sermon in which he effectively blamed the Church for “oppressing” the LGBTQ+ community. It was during that sermon that I stood up and walked out, never to go back. The church had gradually allowed a progressive thinking to infiltrate and corrupt its allegiance to Jesus Christ and to biblical ethics, especially as it concerned sexual immorality, and I could no longer be a part of it.

All this to say that if you’re a follower of Jesus, stay alert and hold strong to your convictions. It is what gives our country the remaining strength it has, as expressed through the body of Christ, the Church. And our neighbors need to hear it.