8 Reasons Why the Church Lost the Culture Wars in North America by JOSEPH MATTERA for Charisma News
It is evident that the Bible-confessing church has been losing cultural influence over the past several decades.
At the turn of the 20th century, Judeo-Christian values were promoted in this nation. By the 1950s, they were celebrated. By the ’70s and ’80s, they were tolerated, and by the late 2000s, they were hated in popular secular culture.
While there are many reasons for this, I will talk about only a few reasons in this article. The following are some of the reasons why the Bible-confessing church has lost the culture wars. (By using the word “lost,” I do not mean that I believe it is a done deal, but for now, it has lost its cultural influence.)
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1. Pastors abandoned the gospel of the kingdom. Since the end of the Civil War in the late 19th century, the church has replaced preaching the kingdom of God to focus on waiting for the rapture. This new focus led the church to go from cultural engagement to cultural escape. This resulted in almost all elite higher learning institutions being taken over by secular humanists in the 1920s. Secular humanism became the religion of choice amongst the cultural elite way before it became mainstream in America. It took only one generation before students’ mass inculcation resulted in the sexual or cultural revolution during the mid-’60s. Now our nation is being ideologically led by the children of the ’60s rebellion.
2. The Johnson amendment accomplished the author’s desired goal. The 1954 Johnson amendment resulted in the legal possibility of revoking the 501(c)(3) nonprofit status of churches if they engaged in endorsing a candidate or political activity. Before this law, congregations looked forward to hearing from the pastor regarding the biblical position of political candidates before they decided to vote. Nowadays, despite most Christians desiring political input from their pastors, pastors have remained silent on the significant cultural and political issues of the day for fear of their church losing its tax-exempt status. This silence has effectively taken the Bible out of the public square and left a vacuum that humanists have been glad to fill.
