Until fairly recently, the predominiant moral culture of America was heavily bent towards Christianity. As Christians in the U.S. we've had it easy, when compared to Christians throughout the world and throughout history. For most of America's history, our “values” were shared with the majority of the country. At some point we took this cultural acceptance for granted. Now that the values of society have changed, many Christians are deeply alarmed and feel betrayed by society...but in many ways it was our fault.
We place too much weight on how “Christian” America's culture or politics are. We reduced Christianity down to a set of moral behaviors that weren't specific to those having a relationship with Jesus Christ. Get married, have a family, go to church, etc. and you were deemed a good person and in many cases, deemed Christian.
Now that people who aren't Christians feel comfortable behaving like people who aren't Christians, we've started to panic. This type of reaction is foolish. In the coming years our faith will truly be tested culturally. We'll live in a society that doesn't support our beliefs and one that may be openly hostile to our faith. For me this is ok. We'll live in the type of contentious environment in which so many people of faith thrived. If our faith is real, cultural antagonism should only make it stronger.
1 comments:
Excellent post. Very, very, true.
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