The cultural situation

“God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of being a Christian, I warn you: you are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.”

— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Symptoms of a culture in trouble

If you make your home in the Anglosphere, you likely won’t think it an exaggeration to say that we live in a culture in deep trouble. Within a few generations we have witnessed what is proving to be a suicidal effort to dismantle the Judeo-Christian society and replace it with a multicultural society established upon moral and cultural relativism. Troubling symptoms vary from nation to nation, but common ones include the decline of trust and national cohesion, ancient freedoms being eroded by state power, the breakup of the family, a war on the unborn, falling birth rates, uncontrolled immigration, the accumulation of vast national debt, crime going unchallenged and addictions to consumerism and cheap entertainment. Unsurprisingly, we find lives characterised by emptiness, focused on the trivial, looking for the next purchase or experience to provide some momentary meaning. Knowing the peril the West is in, Islam stands ready, waiting in the wings. Sadly, and tragically, much of the church has opted for cowardice, made friends with the culture and abandoned the prophetic, fearless diagnosis and remedy that is required for such a time as this.

A century of mental destruction

One hundred years ago Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton spoke of the great march of mental destruction. His phrase perfectly captures the corruption in thought that has followed the abandoning of the Infinite-Personal God and the prostration of ourselves before men like Rousseau, Marx, Darwin, Freud and Foucault. At first, Chesterton’s mental destruction was largely confined to self-confessed Bohemians, but in time their ideas were picked up by the hippies of the 1960s and later spread into our universities. But it’s in the present generation that the destruction has gone mainstream as never before. The binaries that kept us sane and held us together are disintegrating: male and female; truth and error; good and evil; normal and abnormal; fact and fiction; human and animal; sense and non-sense.

The call to engage

The decline of nations once grounded in Biblical principles of human value, justice, righteousness and personal liberty should be of concern to all Christians. Around us rages a battle for the mind: mental destruction versus truth. Called to be salt and light, Christians are not allowed the luxury of settling into holy huddles, waiting for a Saviour from heaven to whisk them away. Certainly, Christians are called to pray, but we are also called to engage: to think, speak and act wisely and purposefully. Anything less is not an option for God’s faithful people. We are sent out into the world, not allowed to retreat from it. Our parenting must be intentional, our sermons must challenge rival narratives, and we must learn to engage better in the public square. We can survive the collapse of our Judeo-Christian heritage and must prepare now to one day rebuild from the ruins.

Why I am doing this

I am a pastor from the United Kingdom who seeks to play a part in raising up a generation of people who recover a Biblical mind. Teaching online during the last year has awakened me to the potential for teaching a much wider audience than previously. Over 25 years ago, after explaining to a friend what I’d learned about deconstructing unbelief and thinking Biblically about all of life, she commented, “There must be many people who would be interested in what you’re sharing with me”. On that day a seed was planted; this project is an attempt to make good on that suggestion. My aim is to help believers understand and challenge secular narratives and encourage them to think biblically about all of life.

“Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith.”

— William Lane Craig

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