The Culture War

It’s old hat at this point to bemoan the deleterious effects of feminism and the sexual revolution. The internet is brimful of pornography, enticing young men before they even reach double digits in age; public schools appear to be hell-bent on convincing children (likewise before they reach double digits in age) that sexual expression is the essence of human expression; and casual sex is so casual that, for some, it might better be classified as a hobby than an intimate act.

We’ve all grown accustomed—even jaded—to our culture’s sexual decline. But whatever the solution is, it doesn’t appear to be coming from the evangelical church.

David Ayers, in his recent book After the Revolution: Sex and the Single Evangelical, analyzes a set of statistics from the Centers for Disease Control that in a more sane era would have provoked an outbreak of sackcloth and ashes. According to this CDC data, 55 percent of evangelical women and 45 percent of evangelical men are “LGBT-affirming.” Of this number, 6 percent of evangelical women and 4 percent of evangelical men say that they same-sex attracted. Most shocking of all, however, is that 17 percent of evangelical women surveyed reported having had sex with another woman. 

These statistics were not drawn from mainline denominations or denominations that have long since dispensed with the Bible’s benighted (or so they say) sexual ethic. No, the women surveyed are in evangelical denominations—denominations that uphold the authority of Scripture as the ultimate authority in all matters of faith and doctrine (or so they say). Obviously, these churches have not recognized the threats to the spiritual health of their members. So, what is the solution to this crisis?

The first and most obvious answer is, of course, repentance. Pastors must call individuals to repentance, and individuals must respond in faith. Beyond that, however, the American church as a whole must repent of its failure to preserve a culture that is in submission to God. To paraphrase Henry Van Til, culture is merely religion externalized, and insofar as the whole of our culture is apostate, the whole of the American church is culpable.

But just as faith without works is dead (James 2:26), so cultural repentance without cultural renewal is dead. That is to say, having repented in faith, the American church must dedicate herself wholly to the work of building a Christian culture. And herein lies the solution to the sexual crisis that beleaguers our churches.

Evangelical denominations have, on the whole, been faithful in standing against sexual perversions, at least on the level of their statements of faith and confessional documents. The passage of Overture 15 at last year’s Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) General Assembly was an encouraging victory. Yet, a denominational resolution or a statement of faith is not a counterculture in itself. What good is clarifying the language in a statement of faith so as to absolutely rule out homosexual sin if the church members are still primarily products of popular culture?

Even a Sunday school class or sermon series is not enough to solve this crisis. As they were members of evangelical denominations, many of the individuals in the above survey had doubtless heard affirmations of biblical sexual ethics from the pulpit or in the Sunday school classroom. Rather, the only solution to this crisis is a distinctly Christian culture.

As pastor and author Douglas Wilson puts it, you can’t fight a naval war without a navy, so why expect to be able to fight a culture war without a culture? “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world,” says the Apostle John (1 John 2:15). The church must turn from the things of the world that have caused her to abandon her first love (Revelations 2:4). This means no more sending Christian kids to government schools to be educated by people who hate God. This means no more happy-clappy church music, the style of which has been dictated to us by money-grubbers in Nashville. This means no more youth groups feebly attempting to raise children one night per week in the place of parents who have abdicated their responsibilities the other six days.

No more.

The church must redouble its commitment to Christian education. The Church must regain a love for the glory and beauty of good music, composed by our far-sighted forebears. The Church must commend the centrality of the family, equipping and exhorting fathers to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4).

When the church begins to do this—when she begins to fight the culture war with an alternative culture—then, by God’s grace, her members will remain faithful to the Word, unsullied and unattracted by the perversions of the world.