In attempting to survey the cultural landscape in which the church resides with as much scrutiny as I can muster, I have come to believe, in spite of natural constraints on both time and ability, there are four urgent issues that every Christian church must now address without fail. Not only must churches address these four issues, they must do so with moral gravity, spiritual fervor, intellectual rigor and, most of all, with personal courage.
While I live in America and am speaking primarily to an American church context, the cultural battles I am speaking about go far beyond the borders of this nation. They are truly global issues and they are issues that are being addressed globally. Culture itself has grown expansive and increasingly homogeneous. Globalism and our new technology have seen to it there are fewer and fewer distinct ‘cultures’ and more and more one, interconnected and looming ‘Culture’ (at least in the western world). As Theodor Adorno pointed out decades ago, with the rise of mass media and the dominance of exchange economies, the web of socialization grows ever tighter. So in speaking to these issues in American one is speaking to them in the world.
By pointing out these four moral battlegrounds, I am not saying there are not other moral dilemmas we face or that one could dedicate one’s time and energy to. We all have our ‘pet projects’ and some pet projects are profoundly important. Nevertheless, these four issues are the most significant right now in that they possess a tremendous geographical scope and incredible potential for affecting human flourishing. Moreover, they are also issues that will demand the greatest amount of sacrifice and highest degree of courage on the part of Christians in the world.
The Four Big Moral Battles of Our Times
The four moral issues of our times we must engage with right now are:
- Covid Totalitarianism
- LGBTQ+ Ideology
- Abortion
- Critical Social Justice
Again, while there are other projects for the church to engage in and that demand exercising the virtue of courage, these are currently most central to the life of the Church and the health of all God’s children. With the exception of abortion, all of these movements are funded by a deep repository and long history of intellectual thought. They are powerful philosophical and social movements that have and will continue to affect humanity for the worse if not countered by enlightened moral reasoning.
Fighting against things like vaccine passports or queer ideology in piecemeal fashion will not serve humanity, nor will it allow the Church to fulfill its call to disciple the nations. A comprehensive response to these issues must begin now, and it must start in local churches. We do this knowing as Christians that it is not the Church’s role to fix society. The Church’s answer to the problem of sin is not to endlessly toy around with the structure of human institutions, hoping that if we only get the right arrangement we will ultimately save ourselves.
However, it is the Church’s role to not participate in evil and resist and reveal it when present, especially when evil rises to the level of institutions. Accountability has to happen not only at the level of revealing individual evils, like particular pastoral abuses, but at the level of culture itself. There is a lot of work, most of it necessary (not all of it), being done on exposing the sins of particular personalities. What is not being done is the work of exposing the sins of our institutions. Here the Church has capitulated all authority to secular social justice movements, complacent to take a backseat role.
These four areas of moral engagement are, as such, rife with spiritual significance. Each touches on a fundamental aspect of human nature: human freedom, love, sanctity and identity. Any church in America that cannot, or will not, speak directly to each of these issues, resisting the cultural flow that is pushing them ever forward, is a church that should reconsider its calling and its membership in the Body of Christ. To those in congregations that either speak in favor of these movements or that remains silent on them, I say simply: “leave.”
Battle 1: COVID Totalitarianism and Human Freedom
John West as the Discovery Institute has written a harrowing piece giving evidence for the rise of what can only be called “COVID Totalitarianism.” More precisely it is, as West terms it, “totalitarian science.” COVID-19 and its variants being merely occasions for a much more hideous strength to flex its muscle, one that has been growing for quite some time. Christians must confront the reality that COVID has been used by an already corrupted system, a worldly principality, to exert unnecessary and unjustified control over people’s lives. This belies basic human freedom, which only the dumbest and most arrogant in our society see as worthy of being “fornicated with.”
The main weapon in the arsenal of this new politicized science is not the virus itself, a notion which devolves quickly into conspiratorial thinking. Viruses are viruses–they can and do kill us (or, at least, they kill our bodies). Rather, the main weapon wielded by the new scientific oligarchy and its political spokespersons is fear of the virus or, more specifically, fear of dying from the virus. This is the more fundamental philosophical and psychological antagonism the Church must confront.
Science and medical experts have convinced us slowly over time that we are all meant to live for as many years as science and medicine can sustain us. The idol that has been waved before our eyes is that of “extended life.” The confusion, naturally, being that quality of life relates directly to number of days lived (a sentiment that William Wallace would have balked at, and then chopped to bits with his Scottish claymore). This is the grand lie.
Christians must care about life in a very different way than the world does, and the world must know it. Sheer existence, quantity of days lived, means nothing to the Christian. The Christian who kneels before God only to pray for a long duration to his life has been too infected by culture to live for Christ in a genuine and empowered way. Part of the Christian witness to the world is just this: one need not fear physical death, at least, so long as one comes to know Christ. If Christians display the same fear of death, the same angst over not living a “long” life as the culture that surrounds it, then our witness to Christ’s conquering of death is severely compromised. We appear hypocritical with regard to one of the most fundamental tenets of our creedal faith: everlasting life.
Thus, any disciple of Jesus more concerned about the “when” they die as opposed to the “how” they die has already lost the power of their testimony. After all, Christ Himself prayed this prayer of “when” and “how” to die in the garden of Gethsemane on our behalf (Luke 22:39-46). We all know how the Father answered the Son’s prayer and we all know how the Son responded. And so too must we respond like Christ, if we are to be called worthy of Him. Concern over the longevity of life is a sure sign of a decadent and flabby Christian culture. And we are obese in America.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it best when he said, “when Christ calls a man, he bids him ‘Come and die.'” On the one hand, Bonhoeffer is certainly referring to our inner man here, with all our wanton lusts and desires. However, at the same time, Bonhoeffer, martyr of the faith at the cruel hands of tyrants, could hardly approve of the emerging COVID totalitarianism were are seeing today. Vaccine passports? The saint of Flossenbürg could hardly but grieve over such categorizing of persons as “clean” or “unclean.”
Vaccine mandates, lockdowns and mask wear can, in certain contexts and in certain times, be morally appropriate. There is no question about this. I am a vaccinated person, after all. However, when wielded as tools of oppression and as mechanisms to divide people into the “righteous” and “unrighteous,” they lose their ethical credibility.
Moreover, when it becomes clear to a populous that such regulations only apply to certain classes, that indeed there are those who sit “above the law,” then a response by Christians who call themselves ambassadors of truth and prophets of justice must be forthcoming. And that response must come forth regardless of what the counter-response by the culture will be. It must be made in spite of the fear of being called names like “racist” or “hater,” “narcissist” or “killer” or, God forbid, “science denier.”
Worshipping The Idol of Health
In his classic Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis already warned about the danger of seeing health as a goal in itself. Health as an ultimate good is part of the underlying ideology of COVID Totalitarianism, a necessary ingredient in the poisonous stew of population control. It is something that Lewis, prescient in his concerns about the rising Scientism of our times, considered a serious problem. Health is only truly a blessing, Lewis says, as it provides us with the opportunity to pursue other goods: “food, games, work, fun, open air.” As soon as one makes health itself the end of one’s endeavors, and to the expense of these other goods, “you start to become a crank.”
Lewis puts it mildly here. I think one becomes far more than just a “crank,” if one is willing to make that which is clearly instrumental, good health, primary to that which are intrinsic goods. “Work,” “play,” “fresh air”– these are what good health is for. Communing with each other and with God’s creation are intrinsically good things, they are the reasons for staying healthy to begin with. And what did COVID-Totalitarianism do except take away these very things we are meant to live for.
Who can forget the use of drones to survey British hikers attempting to escape COVID restriction by talking a stroll through the countryside? Or the threatening and even arrest of pastors and priests who dared to allow their congregants meet in person to praise and worship God? This is health idolatry. But we have lived with it for so long that few were able to see beyond the immediate danger of the actual virus to the greater danger of our reaction to things like viruses.
More drastic ways to preserve physical health can easily be imagined. Will the attempt be made to also instantiate them through force of law? Is mandatory mask wear during the flu season too hard to imagine given what we see on our streets? What about visible markings for the un-vaccinated? The conditions for COVID tyranny have been set for decades as health has been dangled before us as the one, great good among goods. Further, if the body has not only become primary, but exclusive to our consideration of what is moral, then even greater evils loom.
Eliminating Free Speech and Inquiry
One of the first things that must go in any totalitarian push is the elimination of free speech. West highlights in his article how the curbing of so-called “misinformation” by governmental entities and social media empires has belied the scientific project itself. This censorship seems to suggest that science is no longer the open-ended, ever-questioning, free process of fact finding and reanalysis that modernists once touted it to be–the supposed answer to irrational, religious dogma, or so we were told. Yet now our anointed experts in science appear no better at safeguarding free thought and inquiry than the medieval Popes. In fact, the Popes were probably better.
That modernist creed of free inquiry has apparently undergone something like a deformation (not a reformation). Apparently the scientific elite can now, like Torquemada’s inquisition, dogmatically end debates, today’s scientists serving to please the appetites of post-modern society as opposed to aiding in the quest for objective truth.
But tweaking science to fit cultural narratives and ideological sensibilities is just as bad as tweaking science to fit biblical narratives and religious sensibilities. Both are acts of concordism, and neither has its place in the Church or culture. Yet, we have had calls for censorship from everyone from the former director of the NIH Francis Collins to former rocker Neil Young. One, an actual expert, should know better about trying to curb debate over always tentative scientific data and analysis. The other simply typifies the kind of emotion-based judgmentalism we have come to accept as the favored means of dialogue in our culture.
Detractors will suggest I am aiming to spread false or dangerous information. But that is just a propagandized reaction, as I have said nothing about the technical data on the virus itself, the efficiency of vaccines or masks, etc. The data is what the data is. It is what we do with that data that I am addressing. Those who claim that people with a different attitude toward the data are dangerous or liars are themselves dangerous and, in a way, liars.
Such claims are spewed by people who in their hearts want to control and be controlled. This temptation toward a spirit of legalism and moral self-righteousness exists in all of us, and exists in especially pernicious ways in the Church. It is the same spirit of moral legalism that Christians have invoked over the years to quash authentic discussion on issues like human sexuality. It is ultimately born out of a spirit of fear, which can never be part of the Christian witness or the grounds for making our moral decisions.
Turning our Kids into KGB
But there is a far greater evil lurking in the spandrels of COVID regulations. One worse than censorship across the airwaves and the internet waves (although those facilitate its evil). The greatest threat of COVID-totalitarianism, like any totalitarianism, is in its capacity to shape a new type of citizen. A type of citizen that, until today, was almost unheard of in America. That new citizen is what I will call for rhetorical effect “the KGB kid.”
If we thought, as Solzhenitsyn said we should not, that it couldn’t happen here, that it couldn’t happen “to us in the West,” then we thought wrongly. The same human nature that allowed the most advanced country in the world at the time to invent the gas chamber and motivated that country’s enemy to keep half the population of a major city behind a wall for over 30 years, is the same nature that each and every American today possesses.
It is the same nature that can easily turn against its neighbor if an authority tells us to. This ability to control and be controlled by figures a culture deems authoritative has been demonstrated empirically in experiments like that of Milgram and Zimbardo. Even if these experiments cannot tell the whole story of how socialization and situational ethics might work, history provides us with enough detail to see that we are all susceptible to the powers of suggestion. As one former seminary professor of mine was accustomed to point out: “we all are born ‘Auschwitz enabled.‘” It only takes a bit of tweaking to get us all the way there.
The exhortation to “snitch” on one’s neighbor is a sociological phenomenon that should terrify us all. Turning each other into full-blown informants may not work on a population older than 30+ years. However, this new mindset of “observe and report” can and is being instilled in the hearts and minds of the very young. It feeds into our natural predilection to feel that we are right (or good) by shaming or showing someone else that they are wrong.
Kids especially can be encouraged to “be good” by pointing out the failures of others. Being overly interested in other’s “alleged” wrongdoings is a necessary step in the program of totalitarian control. An excellent film that speaks poignantly to the reality of living in a snitch-infested world is the 2006 German movie, Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). Consider watching it after you read this post.
A Final Word on Masks
The aim of our lives as Christians should not be to extend their physical duration. Jesus’ untimely death, as well as those of many of his followers, tell us as much. What the aim of our lives as Christians should be, is enriching each moment of embodied existence we are allowed to live. Our aim should be greater awareness of and engagement with the given of our experiences. It should not be in maniacal attempts to simply multiply experiences.
This is the better framework through which to assess issues like mask wear, especially for children. Is our goal to facilitate a long life for our kids, or is it to get them to see the goodness of life? And, if the latter, can one see life’s goodness if one cannot see the face of one’s neighbor? God forbid we participate in any culture that would keep children perpetually masked and that would turn those who do mask into KGB kids willing to rat out their non-conformist friends.
For further evidence that COVID-Totalitarianism is not “alarmism” see Nate Hochman’s detailed analysis here.
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