Politics are never sufficient for cultural change. Tragically, many Christians have been preoccupied with politics and, therefore, have ignored other facets of culture. This has led to a lack of discernment and a misunderstanding of all that Christians should care about. In short, they’ve often wrongly interpreted political victories as cultural victories. This can be tempting, but a little historical background can help open our eyes.
For a century in the West, the church purchased heavy stock in political pietism: that the Christian obligation to God is limited to private piety, personal evangelism, world missions, church-building, and, at most, Christian schools. Large segments of the Christian population recoiled at the idea of applying our Faith in the area of politics (much less other areas of culture like science and media, technology, architecture, and entertainment). They saw it as a distraction from our exclusive calling of personal and churchly piety. They concluded that concern for the culture is a rabbit trail that pulls us from white-hot devotion to Jesus Christ. That’s the reality of pietism.
They forgot the Cultural Mandate in Genesis (Gen. 1:26-28; cf. Gen 2:15) and the truth that Jesus came to redeem all things (Colossians 1:15-20). Pietism fails to acknowledge that all Christians are called to be ambassadors for Christ, and called to be salt and light in the world. It presumes that either God is done redeeming things, or that God is done using His people as ambassadors. But God’s word never commands us to retreat into pietistic, spiritual ghettos.
This pietism created a social vacuum. Without Christians creating culture and working in cultural institutions, that vacuum was filled by cultural apostasy, including a political apostasy marked by secular politics: legalized abortion-on-demand, the expulsion of prayer from public schools, the pervasiveness of porn, leveling taxes to engineer a god-less social vision, and so on. In the 70’s a reaction set in, led by groups like Moral Majority and Christian Voice. Many Christians awakened from their pietistic slumbers and aggressively applied God’s word to pressing political issues. This reversal was effective in leading to political victories, and even contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The problem is this: The earlier Christian political engagement did not address the cultural apostasy. By 2016, the scene had changed yet again. The Obergefell decision legalized same-sex “marriage”; cultural Marxism marginalized manliness and lionized feminism; and porn was ubiquitous due to the digital revolution. Christians should have woken up further from their pietism and recognized the need to raise their children to be salt and light in the entertainment industry, journalism, architecture, and other arenas through which they could influence the culture.
Politics alone is insufficient for cultural change. Christians must also lead in music, architecture, cinema, economics, education, and other vital cultural dimensions.
However, in desperation, many Christians sidestepped the priority of a larger view of cultural redemption and fixated on politics alone. To be fair, we can acknowledge this can be tempting. You can install a politician or enact a political policy in a single election, but changing culture takes time. Time isn’t what most Christians were willing to consider. Instead, they kicked culture out the back door and moved power politics into the mansion. This resulted in a pursuit of creating laws without any aroma of Christ within the culture. Such an aroma creates a desire for a healthy, just, and good nation that seeks human flourishing in the context of the Judeo-Christian context.
Recent power politics have largely been driven by the millennials and Gen Z. But if you’re in your mid-40s or older, you’ve lived long enough to know that as conservative political victories have mounted, so have conservative cultural losses. One lever does not solve the problem.
Conservative political victories did nothing whatsoever to stem the tide of the Sexual Revolution. It bulldozed Christianity and traditional standards all over the United States and everywhere else in the West. With smartphones, pornography has become ubiquitous.
And if we are to be honest, we must recognize that conservative victories at the ballot box did not deescalate radical feminism. Feminism was bred into the culture while Christians were absent. Even more obvious was the emerging transgender revolution, with damaging policies of having boys playing in girls’ sports, and changing in girls’ bathrooms. Whichever party held the White House, whichever party had control of Congress, whichever party dominated state houses, the cultural rot grew worse and worse.
There’s one seeming, striking, exception to these cultural losses, and that is the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a staggering and spectacular victory that was not initiated by political victories, but by the long-game cultural strategy of the Federalist Society and the Alliance Defending Freedom and other groups and individuals working behind the scenes for many years to influence legal philosophy.
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It should not escape our notice, however, that in almost every place abortion has finally been put on the ballot, the Christian view of pro-life has lost, with Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota as gratifying exceptions. We must take note that these are not primarily political losses but rather reflections of cultural losses.
Most of the country, and this includes red states, are simply not where Christians are at on the pro-life issue — including Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota. This is the obvious reason Donald Trump was willing to strip pro-life language out of the party platform and boldly declare that “reproductive freedom” would be defended in his administration. Trump departed from the orthodox, Christian position here. This was not a principled decision one way or the other. It was fully pragmatic.
This means that if abortion is to be correctly seen for the tragedy it is around the country, it’ll be necessary to change the culture, not simply get people elected or even pass propositions. Abortion was a criminal act in most of U. S. history simply because it was unthinkable that it would not be. Criminalization was simply the legal expression of the conviction that abortion is the taking of another human life; that was not a debate. Throughout the mid-20th century, the culture changed, and therefore in 1973, the law changed. When we are tempted to trust in political answers, we must remember that political change is usually subsequent to, and a consequence of, cultural change.
All of this means that if Christians wish to influence the culture, it is critical that we stay in the political game, but we must never assume politics is the chief engine for change. It is a single-engine, and it is a comparatively secondary one. Until Christians take the lead in popular music, architecture, cinema, media, economics, education, and other vital cultural dimensions of society, they will lose, no matter how many political victories they pile up.
Christians are called to care about all of life and culture, because our God cares about all of life and culture. We cannot simply pick what seems expedient. We are called to be faithful, and to be salt and light throughout the culture. In the end, we need to learn a vital lesson: you don’t win social wars on political battlegrounds. You win social wars on cultural battlegrounds.
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