Are Conservative Christians at War With the Left? (Part 2)
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Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. (ESV, 1 Tim 6:12)
The Bible frequently describes Christian living as a war. It also calls us to “stand” under attack (Eph 6:10-19). But does it call us to defend our liberties, oppose cultural change, or save our nation from decline?
Before we can think biblically about these issues, we have to get our fighting priorities straight. Everything else we fight for or against must be informed and shaped by the ages-old war at the core of the Christian way of life.
Where is this fight fought?
In a previous post, we saw that for each of us, the war begins with self, every hour of every day.
But it doesn’t end there.
2. It extends beyond “me” to “us”: family and church.
If we scan the table of contents of our Bibles and note all the books written to tell unbelievers how they ought to behave, how many are there? Scripture overwhelmingly focuses on teaching God’s people what they should believe, desire, and do.
The pattern is doubly clear in the epistles, where we find most of what we know about church life and Christian living. That should tell us something about what daily problems should top our list of concerns.
If nearly all of the battle of the Christian life happens within each believer, most of the rest of it happens in the arenas of family and church.
A few passages that emphasize the importance of getting our own act together vs. trying to fix the society around us:
but no human being can tame the tongue….with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God… . . My brothers, these things ought not to be so. (Jas 3:8–10)
Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. (1 Pet 2:12)
and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, 12 so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one. (1 Thess 4:11–12)
For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. 14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. (Gal 5:13–15)
So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? 5 I say this to your shame… (1 Cor 6:4–5)
If we’re thinking Christianly, we recognize that whatever we’re supposed to fight in our culture, and however we’re supposed to go about fighting it, it’s way down the list of threats and foes.
3. It reaches as far as “making the world a better place.”
Though the war within self, home, and church is the focus of the New Testament, we’d be in error to say we have nothing to fight in the society we live in.
We need to reflect carefully on why.
Christians’ response to cultural decay should be driven by the belief that a well-ordered society is good for people. We’re supposed to want our fellow humans to enjoy the blessings of living in a society that is as just, free, and good as it can be.
So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith. (Gal 6:10)
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. (Matt 5:13)
In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. (Matt 5:16)
For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. (Rom 13:9–10)
The heart evident in these passages doesn’t seem to be the dominant driving force in today’s conservative Christian engagement with the issues. Whatever love of neighbor exists as motive is drowned out by the sound and fury over the wrongs of the Left, the media, the government and the corporations. Our concern seems focused on precious things we feel we’re losing, rights we feel are being violated, not human beings we want to see flourish.
So what does the Left have to do with our struggle as Christians?
It may help to pause and consider what defines the Left. It boils down to three sets of factors. They happen to also be the same sets of factors that define the Right.
Defines The Social/Political Left:
| Defines the Social/Political Right:
|
In my lifetime, there were decades when the decisive factors seemed to be prioritized in that order. But lately, it’s clear that an inversion has taken place. The defining factors now seem to start with reactions to the other side and rarely get to principles at all. (Consider for example that vaccine negativity used to be mostly a thing on the Left. Now the Left wing antivaxxers are silent because they don’t want to be associated with the Right. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if many of them aren’t antivaxxers anymore.)
Let’s bring it back to Christian warfare against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Simply stated: ideas, claims, and beliefs are “the world” to the degree they’re opposed to truth and, therefore, God. In the same way, values, desires, and aspirations are “the world” to the degree they’re opposed to what God intends and therefore opposed to Him.
The works of the flesh are obvious (if we look at them honestly, Gal 5:19) and are interwoven with beliefs, desires, and actions all across the spectrum of social and political identities.
As for the devil, his work is subtle and often not what it seems, arguably more likely to occur among those who seem to be on our side than among those who clearly aren’t (see 2 Cor 11:14).
It’s probably fair to say that where beliefs are even important anymore on the Right, more of them are still in agreement with what Christians know to be true from Scripture and general revelation (i.e., natural law). But that’s been changing. Regardless, if we’re at war with the world, the flesh, and the devil in ourselves, our families and our churches, we’re certainly at war with it in the social/political Right as well as the Left.
Aaron Blumer 2016 Bio
Aaron Blumer is a Michigan native and graduate of Bob Jones University and Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). He and his family live in small-town western Wisconsin, not far from where he pastored for thirteen years. In his full time job, he is content manager for a law-enforcement digital library service. (Views expressed are the author's own and not his employer's, church's, etc.)
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Was doing some research today, so thought I might want to back the assertion that vaccine negativity used to be mainly a phenomenon on the Left. The history of vaccine hesitance/negativity is complex, but in the U.S. it has had a lot of energy from the Left.
One interesting read on the topic (from 2015)…
The rise of environmentalism and feminism, and particularly the rise of the women’s health movement, had a marked effect on how parents began to view vaccines. In parenting magazines and advice columns of the 1970s, parents, particularly mothers, began to ask the same questions about vaccines that feminists had begun asking about drugs such as the birth control pill in the 1960s: namely, are they necessary, and are they safe? Some parents questioned whether the polio vaccine was necessary since no one contracted the disease anymore. Others asked whether measles and mumps vaccines were safe, since they seemed to increase the chances that children might get the diseases later in life, when they would pose more serious risks. Still others began to seek out information on vaccine side effects and asked that doctors show them vaccine package inserts before vaccinating—heeding, as they did so, health feminists who urged women to become informed medical consumers in every doctor-patient interaction. https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2015/august/vaccination-resistance/
More relevant stuff in that story if you read on.
Looks, though, like it would be more precise to say the movement has been driven by folk medicine proponents (also this on Mercola) of varying—or at least unclear—political perspectives… with a few famous left wingers in the mix.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Aaron, your seem to have taken a superb analytical approach to the struggles between the Christian and the left, and I have to agree with your analysis (not that I could have come up with it myself). I especially appreciated the three sets of beliefs that define the right and left, and how their priority of them is now reverse. In some cases, the new lower priorities only exist to bolster the new top priority. That bring clarity to how things have changed.
It has been interesting to see former free-marketers backing Trump on tariffs, for example. It use to be that those same conservatives criticized the left for protectionist policies. When Clinton had his Monica Lewinsky fling, the right condemned him for his poor character; Trump pays off a porn-star to keep his affair secret and boasts about all the beautiful women he loved, and not much is said. This is all part of the package that you have defined. Good job.
"The Midrash Detective"
I hope it’s helpful.
Some days I look ahead at where we’re going to be soon if both right and left continue to mostly define themselves by contrast and reactionist distancing rather than by principles. It doesn’t look good for USA but also doesn’t look good at all for Christianity because of our now very confused relationship with the politics of the right.
There are rays of hope here and there, though.
And also I keep stubbornly returning to this undeniable fact: most of the worst-case scenarios I think about (whether it’s cultural trends or auto repair or the dentist) never even come close to happening.
I think I’m, on the whole, far less worried about the current state of affairs in the US and the world than most Christians I know… judging from how conversations tend to go. I don’t see the world or the west as on a path of unmitigated decline. There’s a lot of good going on amid all the bad.
And the “perilous times” prophecy has already been fulfilled many times over. There’s no reason to think it has to be fulfilled again now, worse than ever before. As messed up as things are, I’m just not a doom and gloomer.
Maybe it’s just because I don’t watch Tucker Carlson. I endured 16 minutes of him the other day for a piece I’m writing, and I still haven’t completely rid myself ot the odor of disrespect, paranoia, hostility, and resentment. The stuff clings to you.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
“most of the worst-case scenarios I think about (whether it’s cultural trends or auto repair or the dentist) never even come close to happening.”
I’m reading Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror” and she noted this which I think is absolutely true.
“Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).”
I never quite made it to the end, but learned a ton from that one. Need to unbury it and finish it.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Yeah it’s a good book. I have a few hours left (it’s on Audible). Very thankful that I was not born in that time period. I also read a couple of Norman Cantor books recently which are informative.
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