Since the turn of the twenty-first century, our beloved country has experienced a silent, growing revolution in American culture that has evolved this year into an explosive, oppressive, and intentionally harmful culture that is being forced upon America and its citizens. This cultural revolution has surpassed the turbulent cultural wars of the 1960s. Though this cultural revolution began as a slow, hidden (but radical) change promoted through our government, it has now entered a nightmare of terroristic evil that is bringing about the birth of a new America. This new ideological culture has taken place in the hearts and minds of a growing segment of our nation. Sadly, most did not discern these damaging changes of heart and mind until they were engrafted into the very fabric of our society. American society has come to an hour when it refuses to judge others for anything, even if what they are doing is destructive. This chosen ignorance has manifested itself amidst recent riots and burnings in over 1,000 cities, where over 750 police have been beaten, shot, or killed while endeavoring to control this mad, repugnant hate crime against America. Compared to just a few years ago, we have a completely different set of ideas about what constitutes acceptable societal behavior. As the human inversion manifested in Caitlyn Jenner declared in his (or her) reality show, “I’m the new normal.”
What we as Christians are now facing is a culture revolution that continues to radically mutate amidst the abounding of iniquity. From the changes of morals in society to the politically correct demands, to the ever-encroaching hate crime bills, these dark powers are ever descending upon us to destroy biblical Christianity and its allegiance to the principles of the Scriptures.
Christ—Character—Culture
Before an individual comes to know Christ as Saviour, his life has been an integral part of the world system:
Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others (Eph. 2:2, 3).
But the moment he repents of his sins and trusts Christ as his Saviour from those sins, Christ comes into his heart. Christ’s intent is to bring him to a life where he gladly says, “Not I, but Christ” as His presence and influence flows through the many outlets of his heart. This new-birth reality is to bring him to biblical character.
Biblical character is an inward life (heart, mind, conscience, and self) that is dominated by the principles of God’s Word. Nevertheless, there is a final frontier after character that needs to be conquered: our culture. Christian culture bespeaks the outworking of Christ in our character in the way we live in every compartment of life.
Although we were once of the world system’s culture, our culture (the outworking of inner principles) became Christian culture. We once were dominated by the principle of sin within; this principle was a powerful ally with the world without. Through this principle we lived by the culture of the world. But after we came to know this most important transformation of heart and life, we were caught between the culture of the world and the culture of Christ. This culture of Christ was calling upon every outworking of our living to be governed by Christ and His Word.
We may ask, what is the Christian’s perspective of culture amidst a world system context and its culture? Culture (no matter where it is found) is the creation of men; it is a creation of human societies who live together long enough to develop a distinctive moral and natural language and way of life. Nevertheless, God has played some part in creating the cultures of men, for God gave all men a degree of revelation through nature, the general primer revelation of God. We must realize that much of what His law requires is written on the hearts of men—their consciences. However, this conscience can be reeducated in another direction. This is what has happened throughout history and around the world. Man has steadily seen the good and done evil. He has known of God’s invisible nature and power and deity, yet made idols of men, beasts, and reptiles. Man has known that kindness is better than cruelty and yet has been inexpressibly cruel.
To some degree, God has played a part in man’s culture, but He has given man liberty with his will. In that liberty man with his sin nature has pursued realms that are against God in His appointed culture for humanity. If a segment of mankind consciously would pattern its life after the natural belief of God, then culture would be patterned more after a consciousness of God. He, therefore, would providentially play a greater part in that society.
Since Christian culture can arise in vastly different geographies, climates, customs, and economies, a society will inevitably change as it discovers God’s will and Word. True Christianity is to change not only the life of the individual but also the very culture of a people or nation into conformity to God’s Word. This too is part of the appointment of the Gospel message among men.
The Present Perspective of Christianity
We may stand in wonder of how our country has become so debilitated as we witness its public wickedness. But the Scriptures make all things clear: our nation’s political and Christian leadership has left God. There is no biblical spiritual power to keep these evil forces away. When we are told that only 5 percent of Protestants today believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ and His sinless life, this at least results in the fact that 95 percent of Protestants are not Christians. An individual must believe in the fundamentals of the Christian Faith to be truly born again. Most priests and teachers in Roman Catholic seminaries are Marxists; they are only Christians existentially (with a high percentage involved in sodomy). We dare not count such a segment of the public “Christian” Church as Christian. Additionally, the cultural living of professing Evangelicals abounds in worldliness and carnality. As society has radically changed, so has public Christianity.
One of the influential voices in the emerging church movement has been Brian McLaren, who proclaims the desperate need for a radical change in Christianity:
You see, if we have a new world, we will need a new church. We won’t need a new religion per se, but a new framework for our theology. Not a new Spirit, but a new spirituality. Not a new Christ, but a new Christian. Not a new denomination, but a new kind of Church in every denomination.
This statement is an insight to rising Contextual Theology, a theology that seeks to re-image Christianity for the contemporary. This method of theology seeks to take into account the spirit and message of the gospel and adjust it in the light of a desired context. From this perspective the Bible is not viewed as the autonomous authority for the living of a society of people; rather, the Bible is to be interpreted and declared according to the culture of the people. Thus, the Gospel message must be adjusted to fit the people and their culture; the Gospel is not to change them to conform to the message of the Bible. Inevitably, they proclaim that the Bible is totally ineffective without this contextualization in its presentation to men.
In contrast, the words of our Lord are very clear:
Enter ye in at the strait [narrow] gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it (Matt. 7:13,14).
This passage is very clear and forthright as to the reality of Christ’s Gospel. Nonetheless, the powers of ecumenicity have pressed to redefine this strait gate and narrow way to a “wide gate and broad way” to include everyone in the identification of Christianity. This is not only true for individuals but also for all concepts of religion to be assimilated into Christianity. This radical change of principle has now become the new form or “root” principle of Christianity and must replace the biblical faith with the understanding that anyone can find his own path to God. To these radicals, heaven is not the goal; heaven is the hope to bring about a perfect kingdom of God on the earth.
The true Christian must remember that we now live in a postmodern world:
A broad, diverse, and often dialectical, emerging culture defined as having passed through modernity [reason and logic], but now is ready to move to something better beyond it.
President Donald Trump basically lives by the old way of life, by logical reason and the principles of capitalism, traditions, and nationalism. He is being pressed and severely intimidated into becoming a globalist, one who denounces nationalism. He does not fit into the postmodern globalist agenda.
Once there are enough foreigners living in our country who know absolutely nothing of America’s past, they will successfully press for progressivism, radically changing the “old” America to establish a “new” America that has no historical roots or purpose. Once again, everything today is being forced to change from the “modern,” or historical reasoning and living, into the postmodern, which demands no logic and no moorings of history to sustain us.
In The Church on the Other Side, Brian McLaren states the following:
We are exploring off the map, looking into mysterious territory beyond our familiar world on this side of the river, this side of the ocean, this side of the boundary between modern and postmodern worlds. We are looking into an exciting, unmapped world on the other side of all we know so far.
To him (and many others) the future must be without roots, without foundation, and without any stable voice like the infallible Word of God. In a Post-Christian World, pluralism is the norm of society. In such a pluralistic world, religious culture can have no absoluteness; all religions must be viewed equally. This is part of the liberal cry of “Equality, Fraternity, and Liberation.” Thus, Buddhism, Wicca, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or any eclectic blend of religious thought must become the ecumenical soil of the American religious culture.
America in its basic religious thinking has shifted from the logical and rational to the realm of the delusional, subjective experiences, and a self-interpreted mysticism. Yet even this postmodern perspective is ever changing. Political leaders today believe that historic Christianity has no life influence for contemporary cultural society because it is identified with the past, the ancient, and thus has become dead for our present society. As one author observed:
In recent decades every major sphere of life has evolved to become postmodern—movies, literature, art, architecture, business, and politics. Everything, that is except the Church. In many ways, the church is the last bastion of modernism in our culture.
The contemporary has called for the Church to enter the fluid and unstable ocean of the world’s postmodern culture.
Now that public Christianity (identified as “the Church”) has already entered the culture of postmodernism, along with the rest of society’s religious perspective, they have carefully graven a new god for their culture, along with a new Jesus, a new gospel, a new worship and spirituality, and a new purpose for the existence of the Church. Postmodern Christianity now abhors the Word of God; they embrace a bible diluted and rewritten in the vulgar, contemporary language. The so-called message of salvation of the postmodern church is found only in dialogue, not doctrine. They are ever searching but never finding, or as the apostle Paul described them, “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). Dear reader, public Christianity has entered the nebulous cultural tide of End-time humanity that will ever be changing with the ever-mutating End-time culture.
The Powers of the Social Media Cultivating Our Culture World
Even Christianity has embraced its own delusional lies, stealing from the secular ideologies, and Christianizing their message for popular appeal. This phenomenon has been called permissiveness and has become a cultural offspring of relativism and dialecticism.
There is a growing passion among professing Christians to enter the secular, cultural, self-centered arena of social media showing and telling everything about themselves and their families. There is a boldness to “bare all” on Facebook, Twitter, and other popular phone apps that create today’s internet culture. Like the world’s culture to gab about personal trifling matters, Christians seem preoccupied with revealing everything from our baby’s burp, what we ate for breakfast, and our new clothes, to the personal details of our family’s comings and goings. Yes, the culture of our time has excitingly enticed us into a “tell-all” culture, no matter what it is, and how it is said, effortlessly enabled by social media empires. This is an hour of self-centered promotion from politicians down to the preteen and teenage blogs which have mingled themselves into the massive, pervasive powers of the internet cultural world. Christian wives and mothers have been ignorantly drawn into the End-time “share all.” All this has become a part of our “culture.” Sad to say, the ongoing provision of information from our private homes is making its way into the mega-media and onto the collection servers.
The Culture of Political Correctness
Political correctness has become a most oppressive, intimidating influence on our culture today. Motivated and implemented by liberal think tanks, it has come to dominate public institutions and corporations. Especially since the administration of Obama, political correctness has been used by government to forcefully control parts of American culture.
The term political correctness first appeared in the Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the coup known as the Russian Revolution of 1917 to describe strict adherence to policies and principles of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. Political correctness was invented by the communists to camouflage the truth about events and policies in the Soviet Union that had resulted in mass murders, the starvation of millions, and massive slave labor camps. It was considered politically incorrect to reveal such facts. All truly loyal to the communist party chose to promote the same politically correct truths about the “good life” under totalitarian government. In addition, political correctness entailed strict adherence to the Soviet Union’s current foreign policy at that time.
Initially, American communists firmly opposed our military preparedness against Nazi Germany during the operation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939). However, once Germany invaded Russia in 1941, the American communists did a swift turnabout becoming pro-war against Germany. How could a practice so contrary to American principles of freedom of speech and the press come to be widely tolerated in American society, especially in academia several decades later? The early 1990’s witnessed the rise on college campuses of politicized curricula (typically on behalf of causes advocated by the political Left) especially in issues relating to race, class, and gender. Students were increasingly taught that the United States is an inherently racist society; that, contrary to the claims made in the Declaration of Independence, our political regime was designed to serve the interests of a rich minority at the expense of other citizens, and that Western society as a whole was intrinsically “patriarchal,” benefiting male oppressors at the expense of women. Perhaps more importantly, an increasing number of college faculty made clear to their students that any expression of dissent from these liberal views would cause the students’ grades to suffer. Even when professors’ claims went directly contrary to known facts (such as that the greatest known emancipation of slaves in world history occurred in the United States; that America’s free economy has offered historically unparalleled opportunities for hundreds of millions of immigrants and their descendants to rise in economic and social status, along with political influence; and that women in the Western world enjoy far greater freedoms than their sisters in less-developed societies), it was made clear that the open statement of these facts was denounced, lest it interfere with the advancement of favored “liberationist” causes.
In these most recent decades, the reign of political correctness (PC) extends well beyond the colleges and universities and has become a part of our ordinary language in the name of not giving offense to selected groups. Hence, a blind person should be called visually impaired (or, better, differently abled); homeless people are temporarily displaced; illegal aliens should be called undocumented immigrants. Asking a stranger where he’s from is now considered a microaggression implying that he doesn’t belong here. Yet, meanwhile, back in the ivory tower of professors and the Ivy League ruling class, they were directed to add trigger warnings to their syllabuses, warning students that course readings might include materials (e.g. Huckleberry Finn) that might distress them. Similarly, law schools could avoid teaching courses dealing with rape, for the same reason. The number of offenses has continued to grow over the twenty-first century, feeding on the successes of PC censors.
A “woke” person keeps up with the list of offenses and adds to them, hoping that by altering language, one can change beliefs and overcome all inconvenient facts of the actual truth of the matters. But political correctness now entails much more than transforming the meaning of words. It also means “prohibiting the appropriation of another’s culture.” It is now improper for children to dress up in the costume of another ethnicity, such as dressing as an Indian (or Native American) at Thanksgiving. Political correctness has also become synonymous with an unwillingness to engage in discussion with those who are judged to hold non-PC views. Such intolerance for the expression of dissenting views reveals the false claim of the PC crowd to be standing up for “tolerance” and “diversity.” By their own acknowledgment, the only speakers who should be tolerated are those who agree with them. PC has been carried to such extremes that it has the capacity to destroy Western culture entirely.
The powers of political correctness have now proven that everything in society’s culture must be political. By any consistent standard of political correctness, Shakespeare is certainly non-PC. To cursory readers and audiences, The Taming of the Shrew promotes misogyny; Othello contains racist remarks; The Merchant of Venice contains an anti-Semitic strain. (Only a close study of the plays, of the sort most contemporary English professors avoid, would overcome these impressions.) More recently Kate Smith’s “God Bless America” was dropped from the Yankee Stadium soundtrack because in the past she recorded songs that are now regarded as racist. Yet amidst all this reckless abandonment of sanity and reason, rap singers who celebrate sexual subjugation of women and use words like “ho” and the otherwise dreaded N-word receive a free pass to do and say what they will.
We have also witnessed the pressure of political correctness during the Obama administration as to the term Christmas. This has profoundly affected manger scenes, Christmas carols sung in public, and certain Christmas decorations. These overt changes have been under the guise of harassment and intimidation of religion. During the Obama regime there were many Christmas identifications that became silent in our country out of fear of political correctness. But it has been in the days of President Donald Trump that both the word and its tangible identifications have openly and publicly returned to America. Even the honorable salutation “Merry Christmas” has become a warm refreshment to hear, being declared without fear. This has also been true of the fear to acknowledge that abortion is murder and an attack on the innocent. He has also been a president who has not been timid or intimidated to use the name of God in honor and respect.
But, despite our President’s bold usage of politically incorrect terms, PC still has an oppressive rule in America. If the so-called PC purity test continues to rule, we will see the day when all libraries, museums, concert halls, and all the churches will be closed due to the offense everything has become in the name of culture—except that which is part of the correctness of the political party in power.
Conclusion
We may soon witness political correctness become so overpowering in our country that we will not be allowed to mention publicly the name of God again. We may not even be able to use the pronoun He in identifying this “personal God” but have to change the pronoun He to she or it (as the Christian liberals have already undertaken in certain versions of their Bible). Will we be permitted to have an honorable, subdued prayer in restaurants before our meals? Will we be forced to change our conservative attire to conform to the casual culture of our day? As we are hearing of sensitivity training under the guise of racism, will such sensitivity training be forced upon all Christians, including their children, to detox their minds of belief in God? How many of our hymns will have to be thrown away simply because they are offensive to some? The list of political correctness is unending. It will force a nation’s citizens to bow the knee to the political ideology in vogue. And the Bible itself may simply become a museum artifact.
The Progressives and Liberals were the key ones who went back into history and drew from tactics of the Communists as well as the intimidation ploys of Saul Alinsky and re-introduced this mind-controlling political correctness in our country. They have used it to reshape our culture by intimidating anyone who is contrary to their thinking. Such key politicians who dominate Washington and the governors’ mansions across our country have become the people best positioned to impose their attitudes and ideologies upon the public (due to their domination of the main-stream media and the public schools and universities across the country). The battle of the cultures is actually the battle of principles which produce and govern the culture of a society, of a nation’s people.
The Devil has many antichrists who are empowered with satanic wisdom to make ready the world prepared for the coming of the Antichrist. He also has a diversity of advocates who have given their lives and hearts to bring about a final one-world assault against God and His people. The days have declined to the point of “raging” and “imagining” the vain thing (Ps. 2) to overthrow God in society and its culture. They are “setting themselves” and taking “council together” against the God of heaven and against those who identify with Him on earth. America is witnessing the confrontation of unrighteousness against natural righteousness, of error and the Lie against the Truth, of immorality against morality. According to Scripture, only the coming of the Lord will right all the wrong. It must get worse—much worse—before Christ comes to be the Emancipator of mankind from the destruction of himself. Yes, Christ must come back to save the world from its own destruction. Daniel 2 concludes the dream of Nebuchadnezzar with the Stone coming out of heaven destroying the Image made by the Gentile world. We long for the day when this will become a reality.
But what must the Christian do while waiting for the trumpet to sound and Christ’s promise to be fulfilled, “I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:3)? Until then, we must ever live the Christ culture by living through the principles of His Word. We must not let this world system squeeze us into its mold; we cannot be taken captive in the web of its herd ideologies. In becoming a Christian, we continue to live in the world, but we are not to be of the world. We must not be “conformed to this world”: we must not imitate the manner and culture of this world’s system, “but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Rom. 12:2). We must never let this world control our thinking, to say nothing of our living. Every word we use (nouns, verbs, and even pronouns) and what we do (including social distancing and the mark of the mask) are being scrutinized now by the political correctness of our day. How far does a Christian submit to the powers of this world before Christ no longer is living our life? When is it sadly clear one has submitted to the culture of dictatorial political correctness?
Paul declared, “For to me to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21). The word live demands that the very living of my life moment by moment is to be the Christ within. May God grant us both the grace and wisdom to live the Christ of Scripture in our present age; and may our personal culture, our biblical culture, the very culture dictated by God’s Word, be the outliving of the Christ within.