# The Gathering Storm

## Metadata
- Author: [[R. Albert Mohler]]
- Full Title: The Gathering Storm
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- My main point in borrowing Churchill’s title is to borrow his main argument as well—the first task of faithfulness lies in understanding reality. Understanding the storm and seeing it for what it is turns out to be a necessary first step. ([Location 304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=304))
- The key issue is that the society is distanced from Christian theism as the fundamental explanation of the world and as the moral structure of human society. Christian truth claims have lost all binding authority in the culture, and the loss of that binding authority is the most important fact. Most secular people claim no aggressively secular identity, but biblical Christianity no longer binds their consciences or grounds their fundamental values. ([Location 320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=320))
- The secular age writes checks it cannot cash. It claims to uphold human rights even as it undercuts any argument for human dignity and natural rights. It invents new rights (like same-sex marriage) at the expense of fundamental rights (such as religious liberty). It claims a high view of human dignity, but aborts millions of unborn human beings in the womb. The pattern goes on and on. ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=341))
- Are evangelicals and other conservative Christians in the United States prepared to be considered enemies of the regime? ([Location 361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=361))
- That is the challenge faced by Christians in the United States today—to see the storm and to understand it, and then to demonstrate the courage to face the storm. We must see the storm and understand it, if we are to be faithful to Christ in this secular age. ([Location 367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=367))
- Secular, in terms of contemporary sociological and intellectual conversation, refers to the absence of any binding theistic authority or belief. ([Location 425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=425))
- In 1983, theologian Carl F. H. Henry prophetically warned, If modern culture is to escape the oblivion that has engulfed the earlier civilizations of man, the recovery of the will of the self-revealed God in the realm of justice and law is crucially imperative. Return to pagan misconceptions of divinized rulers, or a divinized cosmos, or a quasi-Christian conception of natural law or natural justice will bring inevitable disillusionment. Not all pleas for transcendent authority will truly serve God or man. By aggrandizing law and human rights and welfare to their sovereignty, all manner of earthly leaders eagerly preempt the role of the divine and obscure the living God of scriptural revelation. The alternatives are clear: we return to the God of the Bible or we perish in the pit of lawlessness.4 ([Location 525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=525))
- Rescue will not come by mere politics. We do not need a political movement. We need a theological protest. ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=556))
- Christians must not retreat nor find our salvation in a false hope. We must, with every fiber of our God-given strength, with full dependence upon the power of the Holy Spirit, with every ounce of conviction we can muster through prayer, with unwavering courage, protest this secular moment. ([Location 572](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=572))
- We are those who confess, along with the faithful throughout the centuries, that when Scripture speaks, God speaks. Scripture alone is the ultimate authority for life and doctrine. In a sense, a Christian theology hangs on the accuracy of that singular proposition. ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=586))
- By the end of the twentieth century, the impact of theological liberalism was seen in almost every denomination. The demands for an updated theology and morality—for Christianity to be redefined for a secular age—were reshaping seminaries, congregations, Christian schools, and denominations. ([Location 625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=625))
- J. Gresham Machen, the great Presbyterian theologian from the early decades of the twentieth century, brilliantly assessed the state of modern Christianity and the rise of Protestant liberalism. Rather than seeing liberal theology as a variant of the Christian faith, Machen labeled it as a totally new religion that merely poses as Christianity. For Machen, nothing unified orthodox Christianity with Protestant liberalism—the former pursued theological fidelity to the God of the Bible, while the latter morphed into an entirely new religion. He titled his famous book Christianity and Liberalism, and made it clear that liberalism was an entirely new and separate religion altogether. ([Location 634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=634))
- because of secularization’s effect, liberal theology sometimes even infiltrates churches that think themselves to be committed to theological orthodoxy. Secularism has desensitized many people sitting in the pews of faithful, gospel-preaching churches, leading them to unwittingly hold even heretical doctrines. ([Location 643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=643))
- The secular spirit—treating religion as a mere hobby—redefines essential Christian beliefs in subtle ways. ([Location 649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=649))
- Moralistic Therapeutic Deism consists of believing in some god who exists and created the world; a god who wants people to be simply congenial and kind; and that the goal of life is happiness and self-fulfillment. Perhaps most devastating is the general belief that good works secure a person’s place in heaven. ([Location 651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=651))
- Secularization exerts upon the church both passive and active pressure. The pressure is passive in that as society turns away from any semblance of a biblical morality, churches sacrifice confessional conviction on the altar of cultural relevance. But the pressure is also active in that it often makes explicit demands on the church to surrender its essential theological claims. ([Location 656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=656))
- The secular demand is eventually for the abandonment of all doctrines and teachings that conflict with the Spirit of the Age. But where churches abandon these teachings, the larger society does not. ([Location 661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=661))
- The great threat we face is not to the church’s existence, but to its faithfulness. ([Location 665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=665))
- If not careful, churches will look less and less like churches and more and more like the secular world around them. In a sense, liberal theology begins to slowly replace orthodox faith. Or, in other cases, churches simply stop talking about or teaching important truths revealed in the Bible. The demand is to just be quiet. This is what happened to the doctrine of hell, which is clearly revealed in the Bible. As history revealed, hell just disappeared from the preaching of many churches, and no one seemed to notice. The same is true when it comes to many biblical teachings, ranging from divorse to the exclusivity of the gospel. In this respect, silence is decidedly not golden. ([Location 676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=676))
- The failure to teach truth eventually leads to failure of Christ’s people even to know the truth. ([Location 681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=681))
- This explanation reveals an extremely important and harrowing reality and points to the devastation of secular ideology on a church. The United Church of Canada conducted a cost benefit analysis and decided that heresy was the lesser of two evils. The denomination weighed faith in God against “inclusivity” and valued inclusivism higher than theological fidelity. For the sake of the church, belief in God had to go. ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=704))
- In 2015, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision that legalized same-sex marriage across all fifty states. In its wake, there are clearly moments where the new sexual orthodoxy issues uncompromising demands upon what it defines as deviant worldviews, especially the biblical worldview. Yet, the legalization of same-sex marriage has also had an impact on churches and denominations trying to navigate these strange, new waters. What we find is similar to the secularization of the United Church of Canada—where one denomination now accepts the validity of an atheist pastor with other churches sending confusing signals on the clear, biblical teachings regarding marriage, gender, and sexuality. ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=716))
- That last line encapsulates the modern secular orthodoxy—“Everyone is entitled to love who they want free from the judgment of their fellow man.” ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=739))
- Pratt’s response reveals at least two consequences of seductive secularization. First, pressure led Pratt to try and hold both a Christian commitment (of some sort) in one hand while simultaneously holding in his other hand a congeniality with the sexual revolution. To be clear, these are mutually exclusive worldviews, but such is the consequence of seductive secularization, which attempts to marry incompatible worldviews. ([Location 741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=741))
- Pratt claimed that “no church defines me or my life.” According to the Bible, however, the church does define us. Whereas Pratt denies that his church defines him, the Scriptures teach that the church founded by Christ is the family of the living God, bought by the blood of Christ, in covenant together for the cause of the gospel. That is the vision of a biblical church. Such a church, bound together in obedience to Christ, absolutely defines a member’s life. ([Location 750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=750))
- Discipleship to Christ makes objective demands on conduct, virtue, and morality. The God revealed in holy Scripture issues commands to his people, and God calls his children to live in obedience to his commands and statutes. Indeed, as the apostle John wrote, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” (1 John 5:3). Where you find a church, you find a community of believers striving for holy obedience to God. Conversely, a church that doesn’t tell people how to live in obedience to Christ isn’t a church at all. ([Location 761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=761))
- active secularization directly confronts the authority of the church and explicitly demands theological capitulation. ([Location 775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=775))
- Indeed, the hostility of secularism against the Christian worldview surfaced in an article from the Guardian with the headline “If We Reject Gender Discrimination in Every Other Arena, Why Do We Accept It in Religion?” Beatrice Alba, the author of the article, chillingly argued that parents, regardless of their religious beliefs, do not have the right to teach those beliefs to their children if those beliefs are hostile to the LGBTQ agenda. ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=777))
- Abortion looms as a great moral scar on the modern age—a singular symbol of the embrace of the culture of death in the most technologically advanced nations on earth. ([Location 909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=909))
- As the late columnist Charles Krauthammer noted: “Of all the major social issues, abortion is the only one that has not moved towards increasing liberalization.” ([Location 914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=914))
- The inevitable outcome of the pro-abortion worldview leads to abortion on demand at any moment of the pregnancy. States should, according to this radical dogma, protect a woman’s right to abort at any time for any reason related to her health—health being defined not only as life and death, but emotional and mental. ([Location 927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=927))
- Indeed, in 2018, the United States Senate attempted to reverse this pervasive culture of death through a resolution banning infanticide—legally defined as the taking of a living child. The move, however, failed to muster enough votes to protect the lives of children born alive after an attempted abortion. ([Location 934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=934))
- Leana Wen, former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said, “We must call out today’s vote for what it is: a direct attack on women’s health and rights. This legislation is based on lies and a misinformation campaign, aimed at shaming women and criminalizing doctors for a practice that doesn’t exist in medicine or reality.”2 ([Location 965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=965))
- The senator has erected a structure of one incompatible argument on another. If the bill set out to make something illegal that is already illegal, then why oppose the bill? If it is already illegal, then how would this law do anything to deny a woman’s right to choose? ([Location 976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=976))
- Sadly, the developments in New York would be emulated by other states, including Illinois. The picture of abortion in the United States is now clear—a map of states that are increasingly pro-life and states that are even more abundantly pro-abortion. This great moral divide is now a political divide. ([Location 996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=996))
- Indeed, in the United States, the most powerful engine of cultural production and influence is arguably Hollywood, and the response of Hollywood to pro-life laws reveals the troubling vector of America’s most powerful manufacturer of culture and morality. ([Location 1007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1007))
- Make no mistake: this is an act of overt coercion. The cultural elites issued a threat against the state of Georgia—if the state does not surrender and depart from its current course to protect the lives of unborn children, Hollywood will respond with the full force of its fury. Hollywood will pull out of Georgia, which would amount to an estimated loss of $2.7 billion for the state. ([Location 1014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1014))
- Yet again, the moral revolutionaries have made the issue about the right of a woman with no regard to the child in her womb. They have erased the child from the moral equation. The only significant moral question is the woman and her autonomy over her body. For Hollywood, and for others of like mind, the baby doesn’t exist. ([Location 1023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1023))
- What morally atrocious age have we slipped into where we sacrifice babies on the altar of “women’s health, autonomy, and their right to the pursuit of happiness”? ([Location 1037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1037))
- The New York Times, reporting on the re-election of John Bill Edwards as governor of Louisiana, noted that he had signed a bill “banning abortion after the pulsing of what becomes the fetus’s heart.”5 In the same article covering the Louisiana law, the article referred to “embryonic pulsing.” The secular media will do anything it can to avoid using the term “heartbeat”—that’s the telling pattern. Yet again, the humanity of the unborn child is derided. ([Location 1046](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1046))
- Senator Kirsten Gillibrand made that fact clear when she made a campaign stop in Georgia shortly after the heartbeat bill became law. During a panel discussion on abortion in light of this new law, theologian Gillibrand said that laws banning or restricting abortion are “against Christian faith.” That’s a statement that bears scrutiny. ([Location 1056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1056))
- Apparently, her argument is rooted in the doctrine of free will. She said, “If you are a person of the Christian faith, one of the tenets of our faith is free will. One of the tenets of our democracy is that we have a separation of church and state, and under no circumstances are we supposed to be imposing our faith on other people.” That is theological nonsense. ([Location 1069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1069))
- For Senator Gillibrand, the freedom of a woman to consider and choose abortion is an absolute freedom that no one should be able to restrict in any way. She essentially said that it is against the Christian faith to put any boundaries upon the decision-making of a woman considering abortion. This argument is theological gibberish that leads to a deadly confusion. Embedded within the senator’s argument is the claim that you can’t legislate morality. She referred to the separation of church and state and said that abortion restrictions are an example of faith being imposed on other people. But there is always deep moral motivation behind every law. The question is, “Whose morality are we legislating?” ([Location 1081](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1081))
- Alabama, however, took an unprecedented leap by banning abortions outright. The proponents of the legislation strategically and intentionally positioned this sweeping ban on abortion as a challenge to the infamous 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade. This is a constitutional battle over the central question: Does the United States Constitution grant women the right to kill an unborn baby? ([Location 1095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1095))
- Traditionally, three exemptions usually make their way into legislation that restricts abortions: risk to a woman’s life, pregnancy caused by rape, or pregnancy caused by incest. ([Location 1106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1106))
- An important caveat needs to be added, namely, that the woman’s physical life must be at risk and not her health. The pro-abortion movement has strategically labeled abortive care as health care—thus, opposition to abortion amounts to opposing women’s access to health-care services. The meaning, however, of health can include any number of definitions to suit the pro-abortion agenda. Health can refer to psychological or emotional health, which means that a woman, for any reason whatsoever, can abort her pregnancy. ([Location 1113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1113))
- If, after the moment of conception, a human life begins and develops, then at that very moment that life demands protection and care. That is the moral issue at stake, namely, the protection of unborn lives in the mother’s womb. The ontological status of the unborn child is a paramount issue, and the personhood of the child is essential to human dignity—a dignity that cannot be erased or eroded by the pro-abortion movement. Inside the mother’s womb from the moment of conception is a human life. That life should not and must not be destroyed. ([Location 1121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1121))
- The Christian worldview, therefore, understands that there are no illegitimate children. All life is precious. All life is worthy of protection. Not even the most ardent pro-abortionist would dare argue that a child is illegitimate once born because of the circumstances of conception. The circumstances of conception, as horrifying and sinful as they are, in no way negate the ontological dignity and moral significance of the unborn child. ([Location 1128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1128))
- Moreover, in the wake of laws from states like Georgia and Alabama, Americans watched as Democrats took the stage in their first televised debate, where former HUD secretary Julián Castro stated, “I don’t believe in only reproductive freedom, I believe in reproductive justice. All women—and that includes the trans community—have the right to an abortion.” Apparently, the right to an abortion is so pervasive that it must now be guaranteed to a transgender woman—who, by the way, is biologically a male and utterly incapable of having children. ([Location 1138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1138))
- We now stand at a watershed moment in American history. The year 2020 will go down in the books as a decisive year when the United States of America dealt with the challenge of abortion and the question of the sanctity of human life. These days, every national election is, in effect, a referendum or an abstention. Christians should note the troubling trends and pay careful attention to the deadly rhetoric of the pro-abortion movement. The culture of death seems to advance hour by hour in the United States—this is no mere political issue or policy debate; this is an issue dealing with real lives, real human beings, legally murdered on a massive scale. ([Location 1146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1146))
- This much is clear: American Christians must not only work and argue for the preservation of unborn life, but we must also pray for it. This is a defining moment for the moral character of the nation. It demands not only the attention of the finest intellectual and legal minds the nation has to offer but also the prayers of every Christian. May God have mercy and reverse the culture of death that has plagued this nation. May God help us to preserve and protect the life of every single human being—born and unborn. ([Location 1152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1152))
- To do this, Christians must first and foremost pray. We pray for God to intervene, change hearts, and shed his mercy on a nation lost in the seas of secularism. We pray for ourselves: that God would grant us courage, conviction, and compassion—not only for the aborted children, but for many women who feel trapped, who see their only viable option as abortion. ([Location 1165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1165))
- Secondly, Christians must equip themselves with the Word of God to preach and proclaim the glory of humanity enshrined in God’s creative mandate. Human beings at every stage of life, bear the image of God. To destroy image bearers intentionally is an act of high treason against the glory of our God who made man and woman in his image—an image that begins at conception. Christians need to contend for the sanctity of human life by equipping themselves with the powerful Word of the living God. ([Location 1167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1167))
- Finally, if all life is sacred, then Christians must champion adoption and foster care, and willingly step in to take on children who would have otherwise been aborted. Believers in Jesus Christ ought to be the leaders in the care of children. If we desire to see abortions end, then we must equally provide the necessary care to survivors of this abortion crisis. ([Location 1171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1171))
- That familiar language from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, recited thousands of times each week in various forms, presents a vision of marriage as a deeply Christian institution—even a necessary portrait of the love that unites Christ and his church. As marriage signifies this “mystical union,” it points to an understanding that takes us far beyond the relationship of the husband and wife. ([Location 1183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1183))
- Marriage is about our happiness, our holiness, and our wholeness—but it is supremely about the glory of God. When marriage is entered rightly, when marriage vows are kept with purity, when all the goods of marriage are enjoyed in their proper place, God is glorified. ([Location 1191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1191))
- Marriage is not greatly respected in our postmodern culture. For many, the covenant of marriage has been discarded in favor of a contract of cohabitation. An ethic of personal autonomy has produced successive generations who think of the world as the arena of their own personal fulfillment and of marriage as an outdated relic of an outgrown culture of obligation. ([Location 1196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1196))
- Ours is an era of self-expression. Individuals express themselves through marriage, and then express themselves through divorce—as if all of life is nothing more than a succession of acts of self-expression. ([Location 1199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1199))
- Some feminists have lambasted marriage as a domestic prison, a patriarchal and oppressive institution foisted upon unsuspecting men and women in order to deny them freedom, autonomy, fulfillment, and liberation. And, for a post-Christian culture, there is that nagging problem of the essential character of marriage as a sacred institution. A society that disbelieves in God will eventually disbelieve in marriage. ([Location 1205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1205))
- Christian couples who are committed to this high conception of marriage must see themselves as counter-revolutionaries. ([Location 1211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1211))
- Children are to be welcomed as gifts to the institution of marriage, transforming husband and wife into father and mother. In our anti-natalist age, some see children as impositions, or worse. The denial of a procreative orientation for marriage—every marriage genuinely open to the gift of children—is a denial of the biblical vision of marriage itself. ([Location 1218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1218))
- the US birth rate has hit a thirty-two-year low. During the period between 1960 and 2017, the US fertility rate (births per woman) was virtually cut in half. ([Location 1222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1222))
- Why is all of this so important? A stable and functional culture requires the establishment of stable marriages and the nurturing of families. Without a healthy marriage and family life as foundation, no lasting and healthy community can long survive. ([Location 1401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1401))
- God established the family unit from the beginning, commanding Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. God extends the familial language throughout the Scriptures, where it finds its fulfillment in the family of the living God, founded through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus’ atonement, he initiated a new family—an eternal family of brothers and sisters in Christ who will dwell with God for all eternity. ([Location 1430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1430))
- For an increasingly hostile secular culture to claim total dominance, it must eradicate any semblance or scent of a pre-modern or biblical worldview in the upbringing of the future generation. ([Location 1437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1437))
- The push of a secular worldview erodes the roles of parents in the upbringing of their children. Case after case, story after story, chronicles the downgrade of parental rights—secularism subverts the authority of parents who refuse to sing its seductive tune. If parents object to secularization, then they must be removed from the equation. ([Location 1440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1440))
- The following are examples of the moral calamities facing a Western civilization that no longer cherishes the family. ([Location 1443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1443))
- Keenan reported that while the mother accepted the idea of hormone injections, the girl’s father was “concerned about the permanent ramifications of cross-sex hormones.” ([Location 1451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1451))
- Keenan aptly reported that the majority of children diagnosed by sex change clinics with gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder have actually returned to identify with their gender assigned at birth. ([Location 1461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1461))
- The sexual revolutionaries are scandalously dishonest about the consequences or implications of their worldview. Indeed, the father reflected on transgender clinics in England that, due to enormous activist pressure, fast-track children into transition treatments. The father commented, “These activists are taking over and it’s not in the interest of our kids. It’s in the interest of self-promotion and the things that they want to do and accomplish.” ([Location 1463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1463))
- The LGBTQ revolutionaries have chipped away at the moral foundation of society—by opening the door to adult gender dysphoria, it would only be a matter of time before they extended their logic to young children who should have access to hormonal treatments and gender reversal medical procedures. ([Location 1467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1467))
- This story out of Canada reveals the deeply subversive aims of the sexual revolutionaries and their agenda—they now target the rights of parents; they disrupt the life of the home and subvert familial bonds. The court’s decision in British Columbia opened the door to the nullification of all parental rights—the child, no matter the age, is increasingly considered to be autonomous. Children and teenagers, guided and advised and even pushed by activists and medical authorities, can decide what to do with their bodies. ([Location 1472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1472))
- A moral reorientation of society occurs when the revolutionaries enact the logical and consistent implications of their worldview. For the sexual revolution, it began with claims that, for adults, gender is merely a social construct and gender identity is up to the individual. But if that logic applies to adults, it will inevitably apply to adolescents and children as well. The fluidity of gender and its deconstruction as a fixed, moral norm must extend to every person at every age. Every individual, they argue, even little children, must possess legally protected autonomy to decide their gender identity, declare it, and seek hormonal treatments and more. ([Location 1478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1478))
- When that logic infects a society, moral absolutes disappear. ([Location 1483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1483))
- Like a destructive tidal wave, the moral revolution crushes the norms and moral structures that have guided human civilization for thousands of years. In this secular moment, parents no longer serve as the responsible authorities for the nurturing of their children but are obstacles that must be removed. ([Location 1485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1485))
- The forces of secularism and the moral revolutionaries have pressed an agenda the logic of which is clear: parents who refuse to get on board must be severed from their children. A moral meltdown has occurred. ([Location 1495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1495))
- Callum Paton, reporter for Newsweek, wrote, “France’s National Assembly has voted in favor of an amendment removing the terms mother and father from forms in the nation schools. Instead using the terms ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2.’ The amendment which passed into law alongside a new school bill Tuesday has been seen by France’s majority party as a necessary step to bring France’s schools into line with the European Nations 2013 same sex marriage law.”5 ([Location 1506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1506))
- Secularism sets out to redefine humanity. This new law in France isn’t just the revision of a school form; it attempts to reconstruct humanity altogether. “Mother” and “father” are now artifacts in France—labels that must be dispensed with in the new moral order of the sexual revolution. And the revolution will not stop here. It will do all it can to bring every dimension of every society into consistency with its moral demands, no matter how costly those demands. ([Location 1536](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1536))
- Indeed, the cost of secularism’s demands erupted in England with the United Kingdom’s government-initiated plans to control the education of all children, particularly children homeschooled by their parents. Ruth Woodcraft of Evangelical Now reported, “The government is now consulting on new plans for a home education register. But this isn’t about home education; it’s about the right of any parent to teach their child anything.”6 ([Location 1541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1541))
- The right to educate our children is a fundamental parental right—a right now questioned by the moral and secular revolution. If the forces of secularization desire a worldview revolution, then it will endeavor to capture the minds of children and the coming generations. Secularism will not tolerate, by its estimation, parents “brainwashing” their children with nonsensical and harmful dogmas like a biblical worldview. This reality points to the reason secularization set its gaze on public education. Indeed, Americans need only to look in their own backyard to see the advances of the secular age in education. School districts in California and Colorado are considering a sex education regimen in lockstep with the LGBTQ revolutionaries. Moreover, some school districts now prohibit teachers and school employees from informing parents if their children decide to join LGBTQ clubs. The dissemination of secularization accelerates when it dominates the hearts and minds of children. ([Location 1556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1556))
- While many people in the UK appear to be seeing religion as increasingly less important and, in some cases, less of a force for good, for others religion is very important in their daily lives. Within this latter group there appear to be some who are keen to take religion backwards and away from 21st Century British values and laws on issues such as gender equality and sexual orientation; creating segregation and pulling communities apart. Right here, in a government report, readers find massively theological arguments. The report states that those who believe religion to play an important role in their daily lives hold to specious, backwards, and antiquated religious sentiments harmful for society. They are not in line with British values. ([Location 1589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1589))
- These cases from Canada, France, and England all represent the trajectory of this secular storm. The secular age will not tolerate worldviews that challenge its comprehensive vision for humanity. Parents who refuse to get in line with the moral revolutionaries will soon find themselves childless or displaced, as the state intervenes to rescue children from the dangerous and backward beliefs of their Christian parents. ([Location 1599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1599))
- These stories also point to this tragic reality: faithfulness to Christian teaching now places parents outside the mainstream and could potentially lead to a termination of parental rights. Because Christians will not succumb to the demands of the sexual and secular revolution, the revolution now assaults the sacred bonds between a parent and a child. This is a zero-tolerance war that the moral revolutionaries will not surrender—the battle for the hearts and minds of children is too valuable for the revolutionaries to neglect. Christians need to understand what is at stake. The end of parental rights is the end of the family, and eventually, the end of human civilization as we know it. The logic of the secular age must be met with the full force of Christian conviction, witness, and worldview. ([Location 1609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1609))
- The citizen’s entire existence has now been subjected to social direction, increasingly unmediated by the family or other institutions to which the work of socialization was once confined. Society itself has taken over socialization or subjected family socialization to increasingly effective control. Having thereby weakened the capacity for self-direction and self-control, it has undermined one of the principal sources of social cohesion, only to create new ones more constricting than the old, and ultimately more devastating in their impact on personal freedom.7 ([Location 1620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1620))
- The church of Jesus Christ faces an unprecedented challenge: the collision between it and a new sexual ethic, a collision between revelation and revolution. The revolution is a sexual one, and it is indeed a revolution, demanding a complete reordering of society and civilization. Indeed, this revolution questions a fundamental grounding of what it means to be human—to be male and female. The sexual revolution usurps the very source and ground of human identity, right down to whether or not our creation determines, in any sense, who we are as humanity. Moreover, this revolution rejects the revelation of God and his creational mandates—the goodness with which he designed sex, maleness, and femaleness. ([Location 1632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1632))
- The sexual revolution was impossible until the advent of modern birth control. ([Location 1644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1644))
- Contraception, however, severed the union between sex and procreation, giving rise not only to a pandemic of sexual intercourse outside the boundaries of marriage but also to the reimagining of human sexuality and gender. For the sexual revolutionaries, contraception liberated humanity from the oppressive chains of the biblical worldview and morality, which guided much of Western civilization for centuries. As humanity began to alter the sacred, precious, and most intimate expression of love between husband and wife, it set the culture on a pathway to total sexual revolution. When children became an entirely avoidable option, then sexual expression radically expanded, multiplied, and overthrew all constraints. ([Location 1647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1647))
- When the solemnity and sacredness of sex was diminished, the lifelong covenant of marriage was downgraded to the temporary contract of marriage. Removing the possibility of pregnancy re-created marriage from a covenant relationship into just a really long date with residential benefits. ([Location 1653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1653))
- Not long after the introduction of contraception, the Supreme Court legalized abortion across the entire United States in 1973. If the pill separated sex and procreation, abortion separated pregnancy and responsibility. Now, not only could we prevent pregnancy, but unwanted children could easily be discarded and eliminated. ([Location 1657](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1657))
- On the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Moisés Kaufman, a gay literary figure in the United States, wrote an article for the New York Times reflecting on the gay rights movement. He wrote, One of the most important achievements of the Stonewall uprising was that it began a radical redefinition of the character of the LGBTQ person in the popular imagination. In 1969, homosexuality was still defined as a mental illness by the medical profession and same-sex relations were a crime in 49 states. The uprising showed the world a new image of our community. We were no longer willing to hide in closets in silence and shame. We would take to the streets and demand to be full citizens. Within months, several activist groups like the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance and the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries were formed.1 ([Location 1666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1666))
- “The greatest battle being fought in the hearts and minds of Americans is between the enlightenment ideals that gave birth to our democracy, and the autocratic repressive views that threaten progress.”3 ([Location 1687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1687))
- The LGBTQ revolution demands not only equality but also the suppression of divergent worldviews, namely, the Christian worldview. Any moral code that denies the new sexual rights must be silenced, for, in Kaufman’s words, the worldview is nothing more than the vestige of an authoritarian system of oppression. These words come not as friendly debate and discourse over moral issues—they are the words of revolution, and a revolution seeking nothing less than unconditional surrender from its enemies. ([Location 1691](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1691))
- If the last 50 years . . . have taught us anything, it is that we can indeed bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. This movement has changed the lives of the LGBTQ community, but it has also changed the way the entire nation thinks and feels about homosexuality, and about the entire spectrum of gender identity and sexual orientation. How can we use what we’ve learned in those 50 years to combat the current turn toward autocracy? ([Location 1695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1695))
- The strides of the gay rights movement over the last half century are not hardly enough to satisfy the revolutionaries. The LGBTQ movement utterly rejected and replaced the ontological realities of gender and sexuality—but it isn’t enough. The movement is far more revolutionary than many thought or believed. ([Location 1700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1700))
- Despite the advances of the LGBTQ agenda in American public policy, it turns out that marriage is not the goal for many of the upcoming generation of LGBTQ men and women. Why? Wasn’t marriage equality, after all, the hope of the LGBTQ movement and the zenith of its aspirations? Marriage cannot be the answer to this sexual revolution because marriage, as we will see, is still seen by many as a symbol of oppression—a system designed to suppress the sexual liberty championed by the LGBTQ movement. Marriage will not satisfy this revolution because its end result can only be total sexual anarchy. The movement succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court (and millions of Americans) to redefine marriage. But revolutions are never satisfied. ([Location 1709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1709))
- What may seem like a straightforward chance to celebrate progress actually masks a fault line that has divided our movement since its start: whether our goal is equality or liberation, a fight for the right to be treated like everyone else or the freedom to be authentically ourselves. Do we seek belonging in the world as it is or the chance to transform the world, by throwing off repressive norms, into a place where all of us—queer and non-queer alike—can be more free? ([Location 1716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1716))
- Frank continued his article, stating, “The LGBT movement, including the push for marriage equality, has also helped upend repressive attitudes about sex, establishing nonmarital sex—and sexual behavior once thought perverse—as largely uncontroversial.” This sentence encapsulates the scope of the sexual revolution. Not only did the sexual revolutionaries set out to legalize same-sex marriage; they actually sought a far more fundamental revolution, namely, a comprehensive upending of the entire moral system of sexuality. ([Location 1727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1727))
- But now, it is abundantly clear that the most radical and revolutionary letter in the LGBTQ anacronym is the “T” for transgender. More than any other component of the LGBTQ revolution, the transgender movement represents an attempt to redefine humanity itself—not just human sexuality. Indeed, many gay and lesbian activists, who ought to celebrate transgenderism, now find themselves on the wrong side of history as the sexual revolution continues to spiral out of their control. ([Location 1735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1735))
- Navratilova’s argument is quite simple: a transgender woman, rightly understood, is not a woman. A transgender woman, regardless of self-conscious identity or feeling, does not possess the biological structure of a female body. This is true even after so-called gender reassignment surgery. This presents an unfair advantage for transgender women who, despite hormone treatments, still possess at least some of the physical qualities and attributes of a male body. A female transgender athlete benefits from the bone density, muscle mass, skeletal structure, and circulatory system of a man, even if hormones are adjusted. According to Navratilova, hundreds of trans-athletes, specifically transgender women, ride the waves of the moral revolution into the realm of competitive sports and, through their unfair advantage, win sporting contests against women. ([Location 1770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1770))
- The LGBTQ agenda takes the objective distinctions “male” and “female” and reorients it around subjective, individual experience and identity. This presents an enormous problem even for liberal, feminist women’s schools who receive applications for admission from transgender women. Make no mistake, you cannot remain a historic women’s college and join the transgender revolution, but most of these historic colleges are trying to live the contradiction. They insist that they remain for women only, but openly accept biological males as students. ([Location 1784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1784))
- This is a complete meltdown of moral order, and this is exactly what the revolutionaries have set loose. The headlines will continue down this trend—we will see not only liberals versus conservatives but revolutionaries versus revolutionaries; feminist ideology versus transgender ideology; gay and lesbian activism against transgender activism. This recent controversy surrounding Martina Navratilova shows the utter inconsistencies inherent in the sexual revolution’s ideology. ([Location 1788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1788))
- During the tumultuous 1970s, comedienne Lily Tomlin famously quipped, “I’m trying to be cynical, but it’s hard to keep up.” ([Location 1795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1795))
- Here is the sad tale of the sexual revolution’s consequences on a society. We once thought that transgender meant a person who was born anatomically male or female but wanted to present themselves and be considered as the opposite gender. We thought that’s what it meant. How wrong we were. It turns out that the transgender activists demand far more than perhaps even the earlier sexual revolutionaries could have imagined. Indeed, Ev Even, the director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, said in the article, “He [the Republican representative] articulated an anxiety that many people, even folks from the left, have: that there’s this slippery slope of identity, and ‘Where will it stop?’” If the left is now asking this question, we face a moral revolution out of control. ([Location 1814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1814))
- The New York Times goes on to report, The wave of proposed gender-neutral legislation has prompted debate over whether extending legal recognition to a category of people still unknown to many Americans could undermine support for other groups vulnerable to discrimination. It has also highlighted how disorienting it can be to lose the gendered cues, like pronouns, names, appearance, and mannerisms, that shape so much of social interaction. ([Location 1825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1825))
- If being female is not grounded in biology, but is relegated to subjectivism and the internal mind, then you cannot have feminism. The New York Times cites a leader with the Women’s Liberation Front who stated, “To deny the reality of sex means we’re not able to name, address, and fix systemic sex-based oppression and exploitation.” ([Location 1833](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1833))
- The gender revolutionaries have set a trap for themselves. They have said that individual autonomy is the ultimate source of meaning when it comes to sexuality, marriage, relationships, gender, personal identity, you name it. And if individual autonomy is the only determining issue, then every individual gets to be autonomous and categories such as male and female or even LGBTQ are out the window. ([Location 1857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1857))
- The revolution itself cannot keep up with its own consequences. When the transgender movement jettisoned objective truth and reality, they opened the door to a dizzying array of flux, autonomous gender-labels; and new labels appear about every fifteen minutes. No one can keep up. No one can keep count—not even the revolutionaries. ([Location 1863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1863))
- This line of reasoning shows that the transgender movement offers false and dangerous promises. It is looking for freedom in all the wrong places. It is offering all the wrong answers to life’s most important questions. Transgenderism writes checks that bounce. It offers a lie veiled in truth and happiness. It will only end in more brokenness and pain, devastation and destruction. ([Location 1876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1876))
- The secular age can only sow greater confusion on issues of gender and sexuality. Though the United States and other Western nations were not “Christian” in the sense that everyone was a believing Christian, they were at least governed by a biblical worldview that upheld the dignity of gender and sexuality. That worldview has now been displaced, and a new sexual ethic governed by the LGBTQ movement has replaced the biblical vision of gender and sexuality. The stability and communal understandings central to social cohesion are now undermined, often by the coercive power of the state apparatus. This much is clear: when societies reject the natural, creational order that God put in place, chaos and confusion follow. ([Location 1895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1895))
- We must pay close attention to renewed efforts to redefine and recast the evangelical concept of sexuality and gender. Evangelicalism does not hold to a distinctively evangelical view of sexual morality and personal identity. Instead, evangelical Christians have maintained the framework of morality, marriage, and gender that has been common to all Christians throughout time. The evangelical distinctive is to hold these convictions based on the authority of Scripture, not merely because their convictions are deeply ingrained in the tradition of the church. But, as it turns out, evangelicals may stand virtually alone in affirming and teaching what the Christian church has taught for two thousand years. For this reason, we must look very carefully at any attempt to reshape how evangelicals think about these issues. ([Location 1909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1909))
- The principal organizer of the conference, Nate Collins, told Christianity Today: “We all believe that the Bible teaches a traditional, historic understanding of sexuality in marriage, and so we are not attempting in any way to redefine any of those doctrines. We’re trying to live within the bounds of historic Christian teaching about sexuality and gender. But we find difficulty doing that for a lot of reasons.”12 ([Location 1939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1939))
- In recent years, some in the evangelical world have proposed the categories of “Side A” and “Side B” Christians who identify as LGBTQ. Side A refers to those who have abandoned the historic Christian teaching about sexuality and marriage and now affirm same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage. The Side A advocates are associated more with liberal Protestant denominations that long ago abandoned biblical orthodoxy and now preach the sexual revolution. Side B refers to those who identify as both LGBTQ and Christian, and who affirm the traditional Christian ethic on sexuality and marriage. Revoice seems clearly to identify as Side B, but some of the main organizers and speakers gladly join in common efforts with Side A advocates. LGBTQ identity binds Side A and Side B advocates together. ([Location 1944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1944))
- Several issues press for immediate attention. One is the identification of people as “LGBT Christians” or “gay Christians.” This language implies that Christians can be identified in an ongoing manner with a sexual identity that is contrary to Scripture. Behind the language is the modern conception of identity theory that is, in the end, fundamentally unbiblical. The use of the language of “sexual minorities” is a further extension of identity theory and modern critical theory and analysis. In this context, “sexual minority” simultaneously implies permanent identity and a demand for recognition as a minority. As pastor and author Kevin DeYoung rightly noted, the use of this language implies a political status. ([Location 1963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=1963))
- Why not just join the revolution? This question seems obvious to many people who look at conservative Christians and honestly wonder why we cannot just change our views on homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and the entire LGBTQ constellation of issues. We are constantly told that we must abandon the clear teachings of the Bible in order to get “on the right side of history.” It’s not that we don’t understand the argument—we simply do not accept it. ([Location 2077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2077))
- Christians today not only face the aftermath of this revolution, but are presented daily with horrifyingly new challenges amid a storm that seeks to destroy any semblance of our creational identity—the glorious reality of being man and woman created in the imago Dei, the very image of God. The challenges the church faces multiply day by day and increase in complexity and danger. ([Location 2080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2080))
- The biblical worldview, however, leaves no room for capitulation nor any room for surrender. The theological issues that surround gender and sexuality are not subsidiary questions—the questions surrounding gender and sexuality gravitate around our very identity as human beings and our view of the character of God. We will not surrender because we cannot. Unlike those who embrace liberal theology, we do not see Christianity as a system of beliefs that we can just change as we see fit. We do not see the Bible as a mere collection of ancient religious writings that can be disregarded or reinterpreted to mean something other than what it says. ([Location 2091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2091))
- Indeed, as noted earlier, the battle that rages is between revolution and revelation. This is why the church cannot recede or diminish its commitments on gender and sexuality. Either we engage in active revolution against God, or we hold fast to the verbal revelation God granted us in his Word and in Jesus Christ. The sexual revolution—now undermining the very structure of humanity as male and female—represents a direct challenge to what Christians believe and teach and preach. The LGBTQ revolution is just the latest representation of the perennial human temptation to reject God’s creational ordinances and humanity’s identity and purpose. ([Location 2100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2100))
- In response to the storm gathering over gender and sexuality, Christians must do at least two things: preach true gospel liberty in the face of erotic liberty and stand ready to receive the refugees of the sexual revolution. ([Location 2138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2138))
- The trends among young people, even within the walls of evangelicalism, will only accelerate the pace of secularization in the years to come. The question remains, how did we get here? ([Location 2173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2173))
- As described by Smith and his team, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) consists of beliefs like these: A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth; that god wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about one’s self, and God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when needed to resolve a problem. Finally, good people go to heaven when they die. ([Location 2179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2179))
- The casual “whatever” that marks so much of the American moral and theological landscapes—adolescent and otherwise—is a substitute for serious and responsible thinking. More importantly, it is a verbal cover for an embrace of relativism. Accordingly, “most religious teenager’s opinions and views—one can hardly call them worldviews—are vague, limited, and often quite at variance with the actual teachings of their own religion.” ([Location 2195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2195))
- One other aspect of this study deserves attention at this point: the researchers, who conducted thousands of hours of interviews with a carefully identified spectrum of teenagers, discovered that for many of these teens, the interview itself was the first time they had ever discussed a theological question with an adult. What does this say about our churches? What does this say about this generation of parents? What does this tell us about the gathering storm of secularism, already drenching the upcoming generations with ambivalent theological beliefs? ([Location 2203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2203))
- Yet paradoxically, these teenagers are unable to live with a full-blown relativism, for the researchers note that many responses fall along very moralistic lines—but teenagers reserve their most non-judgmental attitudes for matters of theological conviction and belief. Some go so far as to suggest that there are no “right” answers in matters of doctrine and theological conviction. ([Location 2209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2209))
- MTD is also about “providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents.” As the researchers explained, This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divinity, of steadfastly saying one’s prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering, of basking in God’s love and grace, of spending oneself in gratitude and love for the cause of social justice, et cetera. Rather, what appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people. ([Location 2218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2218))
- “In short, God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.” ([Location 2226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2226))
- Moving to even deeper issues, these researches claim that MTD is “colonizing” Christianity itself, ([Location 2236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2236))
- They argue that this distortion of Christianity has taken root not only in the minds of individuals but also “within the structures of at least some Christian organizations and institutions.” ([Location 2243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2243))
- This radical transformation of Christian theology and Christian belief replaces the sovereignty of God with the sovereignty of the self. In this therapeutic age, human problems are reduced to pathologies in need of a treatment plan. Sin is simply excluded from the picture, and doctrines as central as the wrath and justice of God are discarded as out of step with the times and unhelpful to the project of self-actualization. ([Location 2245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2245))
- All this means is that teenagers have been listening carefully. They have been observing their parents in the larger culture with diligence and insight. They understand just how little their parents really believe and just how much many of their churches and Christian institutions have accommodated themselves to the dominant culture. They sense the degree to which theological conviction has been sacrificed on the altar of individualism and a relativistic understanding of truth. They have learned from their elders that self-improvement is the one great moral imperative to which all are accountable, and they have observed the fact that the highest aspiration of those who shape this culture is to find happiness, security, and meaning in life. ([Location 2248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2248))
- Indeed, it seems that every generation of teenagers becomes a consuming concern of adults, as well as a target population for sociologists, psychologists, and other researchers. ([Location 2261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2261))
- In the first place, they really do represent something new in life stage experience. Their emergence into full adulthood is coming, in the main, considerably later than it did for their parents and virtually every earlier generation after the dawn of modernity. Their emergence into adulthood has been delayed by higher education, by the delay of marriage, by economic instability, and by the continued financial support of their parents. Thus, this generation of young adults has experienced “a historically unparalleled freedom to roam, experiment, learn, move on, and try again.” ([Location 2269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2269))
- this generation actually has difficulty imagining any objective reality beyond the self. As he explained, “Most have great difficulty grasping the idea that a reality that is objective to their own awareness or construction of it may exist that could have a significant bearing on their lives.” To all this he adds that these emerging adults are actually soft ontological antirealists, epistemological skeptics, and perspectivalists, “although few have any conscious idea what those terms mean.”3 ([Location 2282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2282))
- These emerging adults are not hardened ideological postmodernists, but their belief systems reveal that a soft form of postmodern antirealism has become part of mainstream culture. Indeed, ([Location 2287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2287))
- They are postponing marriage and family formation but definitely not postponing sex. They are playing around, hooking up, and cohabiting. They know that the Bible condemns these behaviors, and they promise themselves that they will one day settle down and adopt a more conservative sexual morality. Like Augustine in his early years, they want chastity, just not yet. ([Location 2295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2295))
- Smith explained how this tension between sexual behavior and moral expectation actually distances these young people from their religious and spiritual roots: ([Location 2298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2298))
- sociologist James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia warned in Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation that the generation then in young adulthood—the parents of the generation profiled in Souls in Transition—was moving away from the belief that only those who believe in Christ will go to heaven. As he explained, “In the face of intense religious and cultural pluralism in the past century, the pressures to deny Christianity’s exclusive claims to truth have been fantastic.”8 Among today’s emerging adults, accommodation to that pressure is the rule rather than the exception. ([Location 2311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2311))
- Put simply, this is a generation of emerging adults who are struggling to reach full adulthood in the culture of late modernity. They see themselves as needing older adults as allies, mentors, and friends. They know they need help, and they see themselves as facing greater challenges than those faced by their parents. They are not hostile to the faith of their parents, but they are swimming in a very different cultural sea. They are indeed souls in transition, and they seem to know that they are. ([Location 2320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2320))
- Regrettably, the generational storm only intensifies and the trends among Smith’s research group and the next wave of young “emerging adults” only reveals far more devastating issues facing Western civilization. Indeed, this generation has become even more self-absorbed, delaying marriage, putting off having children, and rejecting not just Christianity but any religion. What we are witnessing is cultural Christianity in retreat, with radical implications on American public life. ([Location 2326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2326))
- Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal wrote about the generational trends in a 2019 article titled “Cradles, Pews and the Societal Shifts Coming to Politics: Consequences are big as church attendance declines and the birthrate drops.”9 Seib wrote, Sometimes the most important trends—the ones with enormous social and political consequences—are unfolding in plain sight. New data show two of them are under way right now: Americans are going to church less often, and are having fewer babies. Those two trend lines receive relatively little notice, but their social and economic significance is so broad they are worthy of a discussion at this week’s Democratic presidential debates and beyond. ([Location 2330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2330))
- “The steady, long-term decline in church attendance is confirmed in the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. Just 29% of Americans now say they attend religious services once a week or more often. That is down from 41% in 2000.” ([Location 2338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2338))
- Seib argues that these trends will cause seismic social changes in the United States. He wrote, “For generations, churches and synagogues were among the main institutions around which Americans organized their lives. More than just houses of worship, they have been places where Americans unite, find identity and often educate their children. The decline of such communal bonds alters how many Americans identify themselves.” ([Location 2345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2345))
- The main evacuation from churches and denominations are casual church members, with thin ecclesiology, little theological conviction, and typically associated with churches in liberal or mainstream Protestantism. Traditionally, people still associated with churches for social, cultural, or even political reasons—those reasons, however, have disappeared. The culture no longer values religious identity. ([Location 2349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2349))
- In 2019, Gallup released a major report that included this bottom line: “U.S. church members was 70% or higher from 1937 through 1976, falling modestly to an average of 68% in the 1970s through the 1990s. The past 20 years have seen an acceleration in the drop-off, with a 20-percentage point decline since 1999 and more than half of that change occurring since the start of the last decade.” ([Location 2353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2353))
- During the period between 1960 and 2017, the US fertility rate (births per woman) was virtually cut in half. ([Location 2377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2377))
- The dramatic fall in the fertility rate began with the development of the oral contraceptive and accelerated with millennials, who delay starting families into their thirties. ([Location 2378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2378))
- Culture is the product of a vast array of influences including language and traditions and fundamental worldviews. But cultures are not static, and in the context of hyper-modernism, cultures can change fast—indeed faster than humans have ever experienced. ([Location 2472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2472))
- the main drivers of cultural production are the crafters of cultural messaging, and the drivers of the culture are powerful indeed. They produce the entertainment we watch, the media coverage we see, the clothes we wear, the technologies we use, and the education that shapes the minds of young people. ([Location 2482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2482))
- Entertainment drives the culture and possesses enormous sway over American society. It tells the stories that shape the American minds and reach the American heart. Hollywood serves as a cultural factory that mass produces what appears on television and the big screen—and the new screens. But entertainment is never merely entertainment. The cultural products we watch and read and listen to are sending moral messages, constantly. Hollywood controls the narrative, and if you can manipulate the narrative, you govern the mentality, worldview, and character of a culture. ([Location 2491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2491))
- The power of Hollywood rests in this troubling trend: celebrities have a strong grip on the American conversation. They have the social capital that allows them to influence others—and they are driven by a celebrity culture that now requires them to signal their moral precepts and politics, constantly. These celebrities usually have no expertise nor experience in the complex issues to which they speak. Driven largely by the political left, the American cinematic experience has evolved into a highly political event, which attempts to persuade through artistic expression and reveals a very clear moral and political agenda. ([Location 2506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2506))
- Marxist ideology understood long ago the power of cultural production. By gaining control over the major mechanisms of cultural production, Marxists could coax the masses into adopting its worldview and morality. In the United States, the political left got the message, and even as they were often stymied in bringing about the economic change they desired, they put renewed energy into bringing about massive change through the culture. ([Location 2516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2516))
- Indeed, many of the companies joining the moral revolution want to live on the “right side of history,” a phrase we hear repeatedly from individuals and institutions who surrender to the demands of the sexual revolution. ([Location 2553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2553))
- Corporate America’s desire to build its brand has moved many companies to engage in virtue signaling—a show of support through advertisement or company policies that tilts its hat toward the LGBTQ movement. By sending this signal, companies reveal to the larger culture their place on the “right side of history,” and their desire to live as part of the future rather than a now discredited past. ([Location 2555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2555))
- The torrent of the sexual revolution has swept up many companies who will protect their brands at all cost—they will do anything to stay on the right side of history. ([Location 2567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2567))
- companies like Amazon look for “net approval of same-sex relationships.” In other words, companies will judge cities and communities on their approval of same-sex relationships. If a city is seen to largely celebrate LGBTQ people, then companies will choose those cities for new ventures, conferences, and meetings because those cities serve as the hubs of innovation and competitiveness. As Shortall argued, “LGBTQ inclusion is good for the economy.” ([Location 2577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2577))
- By ending this way, the article shows its true colors: Shortall does not merely offer management advice or offer dispassionate analysis of corporate America—she has moved into advocacy. ([Location 2591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2591))
- Two other factors demand our attention. Over and over again we are now told that businesses must promote this kind of moral messaging if they want credibility and brand traction with young Americans. ([Location 2602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2602))
- Second, the leaders of the most powerful corporations emerge from the same social environment as the leaders of other cultural sectors—including politics, entertainment, and higher education. They increasingly share the same worldview aims, and they watch each other carefully. ([Location 2603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2603))
- Facebook described the evicted users as purveyors of hate whose words had incendiary consequences that potentially could cause violence. ([Location 2613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2613))
- That was the major story; but what is hiding in the shadows of Facebook’s announcement? The New York Times report hinted at it in its lead paragraph. Reporters Mike Isaac and Kevin Roose stated that Facebook had for years wrestled with the intersection of free speech and hate speech, concluding that it needed to ban these extreme voices. The key phrase of the Times article was the label of these censured voices: “Many of whom are conservatives.” This raises a host of questions, namely, why did Facebook almost exclusively ban conservative voices while leaving many incendiary liberal voices untouched? The issue gravitates around the word “conservative”—what does the New York Times mean when it uses the word in this context? The definition of a conservative refers to a principle commitment to conservation—to conserving the long-standing institutions and traditions that must be protected and conserved because they are essential to human happiness, health, and flourishing. That represents a classical understanding of “conservative.” The Times, however, did not employ the word “conservative” in the classical sense. The paper used the word “conservative” but referred to a radical subset of the political right. ([Location 2619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2619))
- The “right” does not equate with conservative. Indeed, the same principle applies to the difference between classical liberalism and the political “left.” Yet, the left, usually far left, controls the cultural and creative capital of societies—they possess the platforms, which decide who is allowed in a public forum and who is not. The same is true for ideas. The control officers of modern culture are generally liberal. To them, the left fringe looks far less frightening than the right fringe. ([Location 2630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2630))
- But the reality is actually worse than just described. Liberalism often fails to distinguish between conservatives and the extremists of the right. This can be driven by intention or by carelessness, but the result is the same. ([Location 2634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2634))
- It was more than one hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the Great War, the war that did not end all wars, that William Butler Yeats sounded the warning in his famous poem “The Second Coming”: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. That poem was written in 1919 and it voiced for millions a loss of innocence and the evaporation of hope. We can now see that Yeats’s words have grown only more prophetic over the last one hundred years. Things are falling apart. The center cannot hold. ([Location 2760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2760))
- Speaking thirty years ago, Attorney General Meese warned that “there are ideas which have gained influence in some parts of our society, particularly in some important and sophisticated areas that are opposed to religious freedom and freedom in general. In some areas there are some people that have espoused a hostility to religion that must be recognized for what it is, and expressly countered.”1 ([Location 2776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2776))
- The very civilization that paid such an incalculable price through the centuries in order to defend and preserve human rights and human liberty, now grows hostile to the most basic liberty of all. History’s most courageous experiment in self-government, predicated upon unalienable rights, now seeks to alienate the unalienable. The cultural left in the United States now dares to use the term “religious liberty” only with scare quotes. ([Location 2782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2782))
- I believe that we have vastly underestimated the reality and comprehensiveness of the challenge we face. We all see parts, but it takes concentrated attention, a devotion to history, and a serious reckoning with ideas to see the whole—the vastness of our crisis. ([Location 2786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2786))
- Consider the fact that religious liberty is now described as religious privilege. By definition, a privilege is not a right. It can be revoked or redefined as circumstances may dictate. It can be withdrawn or subverted by the courts in the name of liberation and justice. And, in our day, privilege is suspect in the first place—an embarrassment to be identified and corrected. ([Location 2812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2812))
- In 2016 the chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Martin R. Castro, stated in an official report of the Commission: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”2 The commission’s report included both religious liberty and religious freedom in scare quotes as if they are merely terms of art—linguistic constructions without any objective reality. ([Location 2814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2814))
- The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty sponsored one of the most important of these events, which produced a major volume with essays by prominent legal experts on both sides of this revolution. The consensus of every single participant in the conference was that the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage would produce a head-on collision in the courts. As Marc D. Stern, of the American Jewish Congress, stated, “Same-sex marriage would work a sea change in American law.” He continued, “That change will reverberate across the legal and religious landscape in ways that are unpredictable today.”4 ([Location 2836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2836))
- “The legalization of same-sex marriage would represent the triumph of an egalitarian-based ethic over a faith-based one, and not just legally. The remaining question is whether champions of tolerance are prepared to tolerate proponents of the different ethical vision. I think the answer will be no.”5 ([Location 2845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2845))
- In other words, there must be no exceptions. Religious liberty simply evaporates as a fundamental right grounded in the US Constitution, and recedes into the background in the wake of what is now a higher social commitment—sexual freedom. ([Location 2860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2860))
- Secularization rebels against the transcendent, rejects the ontological, and subjectifies every claim to truth. As such, secularization, by its very nature, pits itself against pre-political liberties like religious freedom. ([Location 2864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2864))
- Europe, especially in the west and the north, has followed a faster trajectory of secularization as compared to the United States, but the velocity of secular change in our own nation is increasing. The distance between Europe and the United States as measured by secularization is shortening. Keep that ominous reality in mind when you consider that an advocate general for the European Court of Justice advised that religious employers in Europe would see their right to discriminate on grounds of religious belief curtailed. ([Location 2870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2870))
- The Economist, hardly a fringe publication, ran the headline: “A Court Ruling Makes It Harder for Faith-Based Employers to Discriminate.” The magazine opened the report with these words: It is a problem that arises in every liberal democracy that upholds religious belief (and hence, the freedom of religious bodies to manage their own affairs) while also aiming to defend citizens, including job-seekers, from unfair discrimination. As part of their entitlement to run their own show, faith groups often claim some exemption from equality laws when they are recruiting people. To take an extreme case, it would run counter to common sense if a church were judicially obliged to appoint a militant atheist as a priest, even if that candidate was well qualified on paper. But how generous should those exemptions be?9 Note the language of the report: “an extreme case,” “counter to common sense,” “judicially obliged,” “militant atheist,” “well qualified on paper,” “how generous.” ([Location 2875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2875))
- We are now down to the question of generosity. How generous will a secular society committed to worship at the altar of sexual liberty be, when deciding whether or to what extent religious liberty is to be respected and recognized? ([Location 2884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2884))
- Or, Americans can ask the proponents of the Equality Act, a momentous piece of legislation, which represents one of the single greatest threats to religious liberty. The Equality Act, now passed by the United States House of Representatives, amends the 1964 Civil Rights Act by including sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes. In short, the Equality Act explicitly codifies the Christian worldview as hatred, bigotry, and no longer valid as seen by the American legal system. As a consequence, those views have no place in American public life and must only find expression in the most private places of an individual’s life—at least for now. ([Location 2887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2887))
- Lemon asked O’Rourke, “This is from your LGBTQ plan, this is what you wrote: ‘Freedom of religion is a fundamental right, but it should not be used to discriminate.’” Lemon then pressed the question: “Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities, should they lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?” Without skipping a beat or drawing a breath, O’Rourke answered, “Yes.” After that “Yes” came momentous applause from the studio audience. O’Rourke went on to say, “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us. So as president, we’re going to make that a priority and we’re going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.” ([Location 2903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2903))
- During the Town Hall, each candidate for the Democratic nomination was allowed thirty minutes, and the night’s charade began with New Jersey senator Cory Booker. Booker was asked, “How would you address the, at times, juxtaposing issues of religious freedom and LGBTQ rights?” Booker responded, “It’s a great question, and thank you very much. Look, this is something I’ve been dealing with all my life. . . . And so, for me, I cannot allow as a leader that people are going to use religion as a justification for discrimination. I can respect your religious freedoms but also protect people from discrimination.” ([Location 2929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2929))
- CNN’s Dana Bash asked Senator Booker, “Do you think that religious education institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose LGBTQ rights?” The senator responded, “We must stand up as a nation to say that religion cannot be an excuse to deny people health insurance, education and more.” Again, what must be noted is that “education and more,” affirms the stripping of tax-exempt status to any Christian institution that maintains biblical principles and holds fast to its theological conviction. ([Location 2940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2940))
- Mr. Biden did not support same-sex marriage until it was politically expedient to do so, and that was true for figures like former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as former secretary of state and the 2016 Democratic nominee for president of the United States, Hillary Clinton. All of them “evolved.” ([Location 2957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2957))
- During the Town Hall, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper asked him about religious liberty. Buttigieg stated, “Religious liberty is an important principle in this country, and we honor that. It’s also the case that any freedom that we honor in this country has limits when it comes to harming other people. We say that the right to free speech does not include the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. And the right to religious freedom ends where religion is being used as an excuse to harm other people.” ([Location 2965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=2965))
- Moreover, during Senator Klobuchar’s segment, an important issue came up for many Democrats: the distinction between good religion and bad religion. Good religion is liberal religion, a set of beliefs in lockstep with the LGBTQ revolution. Klobuchar identified with it personally, declaring that she identified with a United Church of Christ congregation and, “That is the faith that I raise my daughter in and what I grew up in the last few years.” ([Location 3014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3014))
- Nothing, however, competed with the candor of Beto O’Rourke. Must churches and institutions that will not adhere to the newly prescribed sexual orthodoxy lose their tax-exempt status? He was ready with the simple answer “Yes.” No equivocation. No “politically correct” veil of obscure rhetoric. The first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. That’s what is at stake in O’Rourke’s answer. On the left, O’Rourke met some opposition—not because they disagreed with his position, but because he let the cat out of the bag. ([Location 3030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3030))
- Michael McGough, senior editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, ran an article with the headline “Beto O’Rourke’s ‘Church Tax’ Idea Plays into Conservative Paranoia About Same-Sex Marriage.”11 Interestingly, McGough described conservative evangelicals as paranoid—probably because we actually listen to the words spoken by those who aspire to the highest office in the United States and the leaders of the Democratic Party. What McGough calls paranoia might otherwise be called reality. ([Location 3035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3035))
- Mark Tushnet, a Harvard Law professor, unabashedly declared, “The culture wars are over. They lost, we won.”12 ([Location 3045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3045))
- Tushnet continued, “For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking the hard line, you lost, live with it, is better than trying to accommodate the losers who, remember, defended and are defending positions the liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.” ([Location 3046](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3046))
- This statement appeared in an article by the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News. The article went on to report, O’Rourke’s stance invited accusations from the right that in his drive for tolerance, he would punish religious groups that disagree with him, and is therefore pushing intolerance. The outpouring from gay rights activists was enthusiastic, though some commentators warned that O’Rourke is only feeding into the suspicion some conservative Christians hold toward Democrats and their sense of persecution.13 ([Location 3055](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3055))
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once spoke of hearing older Russians explain the disasters their nation had experienced in the twentieth century. They stated, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” I remember older Americans citing these words of Solzhenitsyn, one of the bravest voices of any age, as they explained Soviet tyranny. But these words ring differently in my ears now. We are living in our own age of threatened liberties. Men have indeed forgotten God, and that is why all this has happened. ([Location 3090](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3090))
- But I fear—and fear is the right word—that we are witnessing the collapse and retreat of any secular notion of human rights and human dignity that would include religious liberty. ([Location 3105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3105))
- A defense of religious liberty (and all other self-evident liberties) is predicated upon an assertion of truth—not mere opinion, or judgment, much less “values.” The worldview that will alone sustain liberty is a worldview that is established upon a defense of truth—the objective existence of reality and the necessary correspondence of statement and objective truth. ([Location 3111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3111))
- The modern denial of truth as real and knowable reminds us of the prophetic warning of theologian Francis Schaeffer, who argued a half century ago that those who believe in objective truth would have to declare our belief in “true truth.” ([Location 3118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3118))
- The postmodern, social-constructivist, non-realist view of truth is hardly debated in mass culture any longer—not because it is so rare but because it is everywhere. Driven by academia and those who create the cultural capital, it has become the atmosphere of American life. But if there is no true truth, there are certainly no self-evident truths, and the foundation of the American experiment in liberty—including religious liberty—disappears. ([Location 3122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3122))
- Religious freedom is truly the First Freedom, for without this prior freedom all others become fragile and contingent. ([Location 3129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3129))
- God, truth, and liberty. We need to discipline ourselves to say these words together. We must teach them to our children and to our neighbors. We must cherish them in our schools and in our homes; and teach them in our churches. The great challenge to religious liberty in our times is no threat at all to liberal religion. Those churches and denominations have long ago surrendered to the moral revolutionaries, and they simply do not believe anything sufficiently theological to get any of them into trouble. They can afford to put quotation marks around religious liberty. ([Location 3140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3140))
- We must defend the right to believe in enough theology to get us into trouble with anyone, anywhere, in a secular age. We must defend the right of Christians, along with all other believers, to be faithful in the public square as well as in the privacy of our own homes, hearts, and churches. We must defend the right to teach our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We must defend the rights of Christian schools to be Christian—and to order our institutions around the Word of God without fearing the crushing power of the state. We must defend the right of generations of those yet unborn, to know the liberties we have known and now defend. ([Location 3145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3145))
- The First Amendment will not save us, but it now falls to us to save the First Amendment. ([Location 3172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3172))
- Winston Churchill’s prophetic warnings were ignored in the 1930s, where he walked alone through what have been called his “wilderness years.” By the end of the same decade, Churchill would be proved right and Europe had plunged madly into another horrifying war—the war more horrifying and deadly than all previous wars in human history. The great tragedy of the 1930s was that so many failed to take the threats seriously. The democratic nations of Europe had allowed themselves to become deluded, yet again. When the reality dawned on them, it was too late. ([Location 3176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3176))
- By now it is clear that this storm is real and that it cannot be avoided. The one true God is Lord over history, and he has now called Christians in this generation into the storm. ([Location 3183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3183))
- Christians must realize that the more enduring contest is not between rival candidates but between rival worldviews. A clash of worldviews reveals all the fault lines of a society, from education and economics, to arts and entertainment. Eventually, everything is at stake. Over time, every culture conforms in general terms to one worldview, not to more than one. One morality, one fundamental picture of the world, one vision of humanity prevails. One central challenge for Christians is to maintain hope and joy and full faith when the culture appears to be hardening against us. ([Location 3190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081MWKPNF&location=3190))