Brian Labosier © June 25, 2021
As we have already noted, our present situation in America in 2021 is the natural and logical outgrowth of the Fall in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God and go their own way. Tragically, this pattern of rebellion continues throughout history. As early as the time of Noah, the forces of evil had already reached horrific proportions when “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). God chose to bring judgment on the earth in the form of a flood and provide for a new beginning for humanity. But sin and evil continued, and before long God brought a second judgment at the time when people were seeking to build a Tower at Babel in direct violation of God’s instructions. At that time God came in judgment to “confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7-9). The period of the Old Testament judges marks another low period in history when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6). These periods of occasional ups and more frequent downs have continued through the centuries of both biblical and post-biblical history. Still it is helpful to listen to a number of voices from the past century or so who can assist us in understanding the more recent sharp decline in American evangelical church culture.
1887-1888: Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the leading British pastor of the largest church in his day, was engaged in what he described as the downgrade controversy in the late 1880’s. Spurgeon’s magazine, The Sword and the Trowel, reported that “We are going downhill at breakneck speed” on a slippery theological slope, as doctrine after doctrine was abandoned or compromised by other pastors in the Baptist Union of Spurgeon’s day. Although this controversy is separated from us by well over a century of time and over three thousand miles in distance, we would make a serious mistake to assume that the same issues that were present in his day are not also present in ours, and undoubtedly in even more significant ways. We too live in a day that combines biblical and theological illiteracy with an ever-growing rejection of key biblical and theological truths even by those within the visible church, and especially among its leaders.
1923: J. Gresham Machen was a seminary professor and leading churchman of his day, as well as the founder of both Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In 1923, he published his landmark book, Christianity and Liberalism outlining the key differences between biblical Christianity and the specific forms of liberalism that had arisen in his day. He saw this liberalism compromising both denominations, including his own original denomination, the United Presbyterian Churches, and seminaries like Princeton, where he had originally taught. His conclusion was clear and unambiguous: liberalism is not an alternative form of Christianity, as many had mistakenly assumed, but an altogether different religion that is separate and distinct from biblical Christianity. This book is still so relevant that Westminster Theological Seminary has republished it in a new Legacy Edition (2019), complete with seventeen new essays from present-day scholars encouraging the preservation of true, biblical Christianity in a time of spiritual decline. Although the term liberalism may seem somewhat dated, the realities Machen was describing have only accelerated over the past century.
1963: Harry Blamires, a noted Anglican theologian. teacher, and author of a previous generation, recognized the growing power of the secular mind and how it was impacting Christian thinking in his classic The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think (SPCK, 1963). He calls for the recovery of the authentically Christian mind, consciously built around God and biblical principles. In other words, we face the danger of falling into the trap of thinking like the world around us. He admonishes us that we need to learn to think biblically and Christianly.
1989: Lesslie Newbigin, a missiologist and Anglican pastor, published his classic The Gospel in a Pluralist Society in 1989 (Eerdmans). Newbigin was one of the first Christian leaders to see that America had already become a “pluralistic society” as early as the late 1980’s. This book describes how Christianity was no longer the primary world-and-life view in America. Even then, Newbigin saw the emergence of various alternative views or plausibility structures, each one attracting significant numbers of followers in aberrant directions. These plausibility structures are simply new ways of looking at life from different and purely human perspectives. They are built on an exaltation of human wisdom and logic combined with an ignorance of, if not an actual denial of God and His ways. Sadly, these alternative views of reality make sense to increasing numbers of people today and give shape and direction to the cultural changes we see taking place around us.
1992: William J. Bennett served as Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H. W. Bush and as Secretary of Education and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Reagan. One of his key books is The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children (Simon & Schuster: Summit Books, 1992). He begins by presenting his major concern, “We are in the midst of a struggle over whose values will prevail in America” (page 11). He sees our primary opponents as the liberal elite in the academy and the arts community, who “have increasingly shaped the popular culture” (page 28ff.). He challenges us to “go on the offensive” (page 12).
1994: Mark Noll, an American historian, wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in 1994 (Eerdmans). His conclusion is simple: there isn’t much of an evangelical mind. He believes that evangelicals have by and large abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of what is sometimes described as high culture. His goal is to challenge us to do better in the academic sphere and find the resources we need for turning the situation around through our commitment to God and biblical principles.
1994: Os Guinness wrote his analysis of our contemporary church situation in his book, Fit Bodies Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do About It (Baker, 1994) that builds on the concerns of Harry Blamires and Mark Noll. Here Os Guinness focuses on what he sees as the major problem in Evangelicalism: there is a deep-rooted anti-intellectualism. This is true especially among more conservative believers, resulting in their failure to think Christianly about things. In other words, there is no sense of vision or a distinctly Christian mindset guiding and directing believers, either individually or corporately. Later Guinness expands what he means for believers to “grow in the mind of Christ” through such alternative expressions as: “‘Christ-centered thinking,’ ‘biblical thinking,’ ‘developing a Christian mind,’ ‘thinking under the lordship of Christ,’ “life-long learning under Christ,’ ‘developing a Christian world-and-life view,’ and so on” (page 136). Instead, Christians typically by default fall into side issues such as pietism with its potential overemphasis on spiritual feelings, or pragmatism with its focus narrowly on practical accomplishments. One of his chapters is entitled, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” in honor of Neil Postman’s 1985 book by that same title. Guinness’s bottom line is that Christians, by and large, simply aren’t serious about what they believe or committed to dedicating their minds and hearts to the God of this universe.
1994-2014: David F. Wells, a professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary for much of his life, is certainly the most prolific author in this genre of historical surveys documenting the spiritual decline in America. His first book was No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Eerdmans, 1994). This was followed almost immediately by God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Eerdmans, 1995), and a third book, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (Eerdmans, 1998). Other books by Wells in this same genre include: Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2005); and God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World (Crossway, 2014). The overarching theme of David Wells in these books is that people have lost sight of the grandeur and majesty of God and settled for a light-weight, inconsequential version of God who makes no practical difference in how we live today. Although Wells is always stronger on analysis than he is on prescriptions for the church, the solution is obvious enough in his writings: we need to recover biblical Christianity in our preaching and teaching, and thus in our thinking and church life.
1990s: James Montgomery Boice, the former pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, made a surprising and significant statement that he had used in a number of his books and articles regarding the recent spiritual decline in Evangelical Christianity.
“For years I have spoken about what I consider to be the worldliness of the liberal churches, accusing them of four things: pursuing the world’s wisdom, embracing the world’s theology, following the world’s agenda, and employing the world’s methods. What has hit me like a thunderbolt in recent years is that what I had been saying about the liberal churches at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s now needs to be said about the evangelical churches as well, since many of them have become as liberal as the larger mainline denominations before them.” (https://opc.org/nh.html?article_id=93, accessed March 6, 2021.)
What is particularly significant is that his conclusions regarding the church in the 1990s came at a time when churches seemed relatively more conservative than they are today.
1999: Gertrude Himmelfarb, an American historian, wrote One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution (Vintage, 1999, 2001). She describes the present gulf in American society between the more traditional republican virtue and the cultural critics growing out of the counterculture of the late 1960s that have now come to dominate both academia and the media: including journalism, television, and film. One of the benefits of her analysis is her highlighting first the role of the new liberties of the Roaring Twenties and then especially the countercultural movement of the 1960’s. Both movements emphasized similar themes of freedom from all restraints as the primary foundation for understanding the present cultural divisions in America.
2000: Iain H. Murray is a British pastor and author who has written dozens of insightful books and articles promoting the Christian faith. He builds his material around careful historical analysis and writes from a clearly Reformed perspective. He is also a co-founder of the Banner of Truth Trust publishing house. His book, Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of the Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000 (Banner of Truth, 2000) is particularly relevant to this present analysis of the changes in Evangelicalism in recent decades. While this book focuses primarily on events and trends in England and is more historical than contemporary, still it helps us understand the more recent decline in clear biblical teaching and preaching we see all around us. In particular, this book analyzes the ministry of some of the key players in British Evangelicalism between 1950 and 2000, namely Billy Graham with his British crusades. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, James Packer, and John Stott. His analysis focuses on theological issues where biblical truths were compromised or at least not presented as clearly as they should have been.
2013: Kevin Swanson presents a different kind of book that is more popularly written but still very insightful in terms of helping us understand how we got to where we are today in our broader culture in twenty-first century America. The book is Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West (personally published by Generations with Vision; 2013, reprinted 2018). Swanson has recently completed a more extensive analysis, entitled, Epoch: The Rise and Fall of the West (the same publisher, only now called Generations: Passing on the Faith, 2021). He provides an analysis of western culture and how it has been impacted by such men as Rene Descartes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He also discusses how William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck promoted the decline in traditional Christian faith and popularized a humanistic or man-centered approach to life and faith. Swanson seems to provide a unique and often helpful perspective on understanding what has shaped our present culture.
2015: Peter Jones, a life-long observer of American church culture, has written his definitive book on this topic, The Other Worldview: Exposing Christianity’s Greatest Threat (Kirkdale Press, 2015). Jones combines a description of the contemporary state of events (as of 2015) with an analysis of how we arrived at our present situation in contemporary America. His description and analysis of our present cultural tailspin are both exceedingly sobering and thought provoking. Jones believes that every philosophy and worldview may be classified in one of two categories, which he calls Oneism and Twoism. The key question for Jones goes back to whether we accept God as Creator or not, or in other words, whether there are two ultimate realities (God and His creation) or only one (creation itself).
If we accept God as Creator, then ultimately all of life is built around two realities: God and the created world, and the key question in life involves the nature of our relationship with this God who has created us. Recognizing God as Creator is absolutely foundational to our thinking because this means there is more to life than our own thoughts and feelings and what we can see and experience in creation around us. On the other hand, if this world created itself, and thus, this present world is all that there is, then we are left with an empty universe and the need to create meaning and purpose in life as best as we can. Ultimately, Jones tells us, this leads to some form of paganism, where we are no better or different than animals. Consequently, we are left to worship nature in one way or another, often in the form of such vague entities as Mother Earth.
Jones believes that our present culture is best described as postsecular paganism, which sometimes goes under the guise of progressive spirituality or even progressive Christianity. In other words, the reigning mindset in today’s world is no longer atheistic secularism, but a variety of views we can lump together as non-Christian spirituality or what he calls paganism. He believes that this popular approach is already well on its way in recreating a new and totally different culture from the one we have known in the West for virtually our entire history.
2018: Trevin Wax, as a part of his own doctoral studies, has written the very insightful study, Eschatological Discipleship: Leading Christians to Understand Their Historical and Cultural Context (B&H Academic, 2018). For Wax, discipleship involves spiritual formation in an eschatological sense where it prepares us for both this life and the next. Wax bases his usage of this word eschatological on Geerhardus Vos’s The Pauline Eschatology (P&R, 1930) to remind us of the importance of a redemptive-historical perspective in our discipleship efforts. Perhaps some of us may also be reminded of John Piper’s Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God (1995, 2012) with its God-centered, eschatological perspective. Thus, we are building on everything God has done in the past in redemptive history, especially in the person and work of Christ and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost, even as we look ahead to Christ’s return and the final consummation. In other words, our present-day ministry in discipleship is not communicating a set of static truths, but grows out of all of God’s Trinitarian work as Father, Son, and Spirit in the past, and is clearly and decisively oriented toward a great and final consummation in a new heaven and new earth. Simply engaging in personal spiritual disciplines or being active in church-related activities isn’t enough in discipleship; there needs to be a change in one’s thinking or worldview as well as changes in one’s actions and sentiments. In other words, there needs to be a transformation of the whole person.
Wax also knows that in order to do discipleship properly, we need to understand our present culture. Thus, discipleship begins with identifying and confronting the faulty rival ideologies or worldviews of our contemporary culture. He sees three inter-related challenges. The first and overriding challenge grows out of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on human autonomy and its eschatology of progress apart from any outside divine revelation or assistance. Wax also includes the impact of Romanticism with its focus on feelings, along with the driving force of the autonomy of the Enlightenment. The future of this naturalistic view of history is one moving toward a future of technological and scientific achievement accomplished by purely human energy. The second cultural worldview he describes involves these same values from the Enlightenment and Romanticism, only now specifically applied to the sexual revolution. Here eschatology takes the form of progress in tolerance for all possible views of sexuality, leading presumably to happiness for all. The third variant is consumerism or what can be called materialism, where happiness is found simply in what is created and consumed.
Wax is also fully persuaded that as Christians we need a comprehensive worldview or lens through which we see and understand the world to give us basic answers to the questions of life. Developing and nurturing this comprehensive vision for life based on biblical truths and principles is the task of discipleship. And for Wax, this discipleship model involves both confronting the rival eschatologies of personal autonomy, sex, and consumerism, and then actively presenting the biblical alternative in the form of a worldview based firmly on the gospel of Jesus Christ.
March 2020: Timothy J. Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and Chairman & Co-Founder of Redeemer City to City (CTC), is the author of How to Reach the West Again: Six Essential Elements of a Missionary Encounter (Redeemer City to City, March 2020). Keller does a number of things in this short 60-page book. His primary goal is to provide a manifesto for moving forward (see a later section of this paper). But he also provides at least a brief analysis of our present culture. To get us started in our thinking, he describes “Two Americas,” and quotes James Eglinton’s recent Christianity Today article (November 20, 2018) regarding these two different views: “One attracts those receptive to the restoration of national greatness, the importance of groups over individuals, and the conservation of the past. The other pulls on those receptive to a starkly individualistic future, unhitched from the obligations of the past, and bound, instead, to the notion of progress” (page 10). What is especially insightful is that Keller notes that “both [views] are secular—the transcendent God is missing, and something created and earthly is deified” (page 11). Keller also warns us, “The great danger is churches getting caught up in this polarization and becoming mere tools of either leftward or rightward political coalition” (page 11).
June 2020: R. Albert Mohler has written his own analysis of twenty-first century America in his The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church (Thomas Nelson, June 2020). The title of his book says it all. Things are bad and getting worse. Mohler fully expects increasingly dark days for Christianity in America. He offers a timely warning regarding a whole host of areas:
October 2020: Carl Trueman’s new book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, October 2020) is clearly the most comprehensive analysis of where we are culturally in our present world. Trueman includes a comprehensive philosophical and cultural explanation of how we got where we are today. He notes that many of these cultural trends date back to Genesis 3 and the story of the Fall, but they have been steadily accelerating in the last few centuries through such movements as the Enlightenment (with its focus on the autonomy and sufficiency of the human mind) and Romanticism (with its emphasis on the priority of human feelings). Then in more recent decades, these trends have continued to gather speed through a combination of increasing biblical illiteracy as well as deliberate rejections of God and His ways in the broader culture around us. In particular, he traces how the self was given the strange power it has in today’s world: “The self must first be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized” (page 221). The net result is that we now live in a very different world from the one in which many of us grew up.
While Jonathan Tjarks, in the article mentioned earlier, says, “Your Neighbor Is Probably a Unitarian Universalist,” Trueman suggests something far more radical is happening in contemporary America. Any concept of God—however faulty it may be—is now being squeezed out of public consensus, and all one is left with are individual selves trying to make sense of life through their own personal resources. Any notion of a Creator God or of our need for a Redeemer has disappeared and been replaced by an empty spiritual world filled with an overly inflated view of our selves pursuing our own sense of personal authenticity.
Perhaps the key question in our day in the popular culture is, as Trueman suggests, what does it mean to be an authentic and fulfilled human being? Or to put the question more simply: what will make me happy? Typical answers today focus on different aspects of expressive individualism, to use Trueman’s terminology, where one is guided by his or her own feelings and pursues whatever promises hope of providing a fresh sense of authenticity or self-fulfillment. For increasing numbers of people around us, the self is all that there is—and yet the self is surprisingly often seen as more than sufficient in one’s pursuit of personal fulfillment.
April 2021: Rebecca McLaughlin provides still another perspective on our contemporary culture in her book, The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims (The Gospel Coalition, April 2021). For her, “a secular creed” is simply a statement of belief that “centers not on God, but on diversity, equality, and everyone’s right to be themselves” (page 1). Her conclusion is our contemporary church is partly to blame for the cultural mess in which we find ourselves today. She writes, “the secular creed has been driven not only by sin in the world out there, but also by sin in the church in here” (page 2). The strong point of this book is the fresh perspective it brings.
April 2021: Voddie T. Baucham Jr. has written what is perhaps the best explanation of Critical Race Theory both in terms of what it is and some of the dangers it represents. His newest book is Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe (Salem Books, April 2021). Baucham has been a pastor and church planter in America and currently serves as Dean at the African Christian University in Zambia. He brings to bear both his background as a sociologist as well as a theologian and offers a unique Black perspective to the issues confronting us today, especially in the area of race and racial tensions. This book is admittedly out of step with positions on race and Critical Theory found in the popular media, but he presents a case for clear biblical thinking in an area that is admittedly difficult and controversial in our present day. It is a must read on this topic of race and Critical Theory.
As we conclude this survey of voices analyzing how we got where we are today, we need to recognize that while many of us may not necessarily be attracted to all the current trends in our contemporary culture, we need to understand something of why these conclusions are so natural and plausible to vast numbers of people in our culture, including at least some in our own churches and ministry contexts. The place to begin in sharing God and the gospel with others is understanding the forces that are driving the popular culture around us.