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Gamaliel's Desk
Friday, July 05, 2002
 
Waging the Culture War
I am concerned about the Culture War currently raging in America. Radio commentators Chuck Colson, Janet Parshall, James Dobson and Cal Thomas are all talking about the Culture War in America and how to wage it. I maintain that Pharisees are the original Culture Warriors and that these “Johnny-Come-Lately” upstarts have co-opted and diluted our cause.

First of all, I must renounce these people because they define Christianity so loosely that they believe anyone who claims to accept Jesus Christ as personal savior is a Christian in good standing. They lack the rigid demands of a holy lifestyle that characterize the truly spiritual Christian. They even feel that these wild “Contemporary Christian” bands that play rock & roll music might actually be Christians. Such abysmally low standards can only hurt the cause of the Culture War.

Another fault with some of today’s Culture Warriors is their insistence that individuals need to experience saving faith in Jesus Christ before we can begin to bring them into a Christian worldview. What utter nonsense! This sort of “easy believism” will only lead to shallow professions of faith without a profound change in lifestyle. After all, isn’t conformity to our standard of holy living the real goal here? Isn’t that what the Culture War is all about? If anything, we need to bring them into conformity with our Pharisee culture before we can ever hope to reach them with the gospel.

Finally, we should take a look at past Culture War successes and failures and learn from them. Oliver Cromwell and the Resotration in England, the success of Prohibition in our own country and long standing Sunday Blue Laws to name a few. Each one of these causes began well but was ultimately lost because Christians did not stay the course. They allowed compromise to creep in and destroy the cause from the inside out. So even if we win the Culture War, the struggle is not over. We must fight every day against compromising Christians who would seek to lower our standards of holy living by allowing the Pharisee Culture to be infected with worldliness.


For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Ephesians 6:12 (NIV)

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