October 6, 2025
@NeilShenvi – I understand the desire to “not mix Christianity and politics.” But open, vigorous debate about which policies *actually* align with biblical values seems vastly preferable to platitudes that endlessly dodge these questions.
@howertonjosh – Evangelicalism discipled people for the last 30 years to “stay out of the culture wars,” resulting in Team Satan fighting it very aggressively while Team Jesus felt noble surrendering and avoiding it… with predictable results.
@nathancreitz – I’ll continue to speak biblical truth to power regardless of whether those who hold power are conservative or progressive. Thanks.
The murder of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, raised an important question with which most churches are wrestling: should your minister, pastor, or church be discussing Kirk, or politics, or even, for that matter, culture in general?
However your church handled the Kirk assassination, the short answer to the bigger question is this: the church absolutely must discuss culture, government, and politics. After all, these things have an enormous influence over the people God has entrusted to your church. Further, the dominant ideology of many of America’s institutions, progressivism, has become increasingly hostile toward your church members’ faith—questioning it, reshaping it, attacking it, and subverting it in a thousand ways.
How can a church ignore these trends and still be a faithful guide to its members?
For believers in the twenty-first century to stand firm, we need strong leadership with the moral authority to speak to the issues of today. We need churches that boldly present a cultural apologetic for the Christian faith.
There are many ideologies which oppose biblical Christianity, but in light of its escalation of anti-Christian hostility, we must particularly help our people understand and respond to progressivism.
The Threat of Progressivism
There are many ideologies and systems that threaten the Christian. Secularism has undermined the West’s ability to see the spiritual architecture of the world. Increasingly, Islam threatens to dominate the West (especially in Europe). Everywhere Islam goes, Christians are mistreated. Streams within the American right threaten to subvert the Christian faith by encouraging a confusion between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. But in the West, progressivism is the greatest rival ideology to the Christian faith, and progressivism is openly hostile towards Christians: seeking to subvert it, to proscribe it, even to punish it. So a cultural apologetic must address progressivism.
Progressivism is the dominant ideology of the West’s left. Progressivism is not liberalism. Liberalism, as its name implies, argues for freedom in the public square (the liber in liberalism). It was the dominant view of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and was famously reflected in the American Constitution’s refusal to endorse any particular religion. Progressivism, on the other hand, is an ideology that arose in the mid to late-twentieth century which conglomerates grievances and resentments around two social movements: cultural Marxism and the sexual revolution.
From cultural Marxism, progressivism derives its view that the entire world is essentially divided into two groups: oppressors and oppressed. The driving mandate of humanity in this schema is for the oppressed to seize power from the oppressors. Knowing that the left truly believes this will help you understand much of what is happening in the world, such as the left’s constant need to divide America into social groups and then to condemn any perceived slight against the presumed oppressed groups: racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, biphobia, xenophobia, acephobia, ableism, and on and on. And who is the class of oppressors needing to be toppled? In progressivism it includes Christians, with our view of sexuality, family, truth, and freedom. And so, progressivism seeks to undermine Christian faith—including the faith of your church members.
“Progressivism seeks to undermine Christian faith—including the faith of your church members.”
From the sexual revolution, progressivism derives its view that the goal of humanity is what social scientist Philip Rieff called “expressive individualism”—the belief that the point of life is to discover and express one’s authentic inner feelings and desires, finding meaning and purpose through self-realization (Carl Trueman’s words). The sexual revolution not only undermined the family in the West, creating vast amounts of poverty, a pandemic of mental illnesses, and a variety of social contagions. Perhaps worse, the sexual revolution destroyed the West’s view that the goal of life is to be a good person—to live a good life, rather than to have a good life.
Progressivism believes, deep in its soul, that the goal of life is to discover who one wants to be, and then to have the full freedom—even state support—to be that person. This explains the left’s obsession with the anti-reality claims of transgenderism. Progressivism’s views of sex and what it means to be human are incompatible with the Christian faith, but they have subverted the convictions of millions of Western Christians, including Christians in your church.
Progressivism is an ideological rival to the Christian faith. Progressivism knows this. Do you?
“Progressivism is an ideological rival to the Christian faith. Progressivism knows this. Do you?”
Progressivism has a different view of truth than does Christianity. In progressivism, there is no fixed truth, there are only truth claims, which are actually claims to power, progressives believe. This explains why the state of Oregon’s Department of Education can say that math—not the teaching of math, but math itself—is racist.[1] It’s why CNN can say with a straight face that there is no way to know a child’s gender at birth.[2] It’s why the former head of Wikipedia and now the head of NPR can say that the pursuit of truth gets in the way of what? Of getting things done.[3] Since Christians believe there is absolute truth and that it is found in Jesus Christ, progressivism’s views of truth undermine Christian faith.
Progressivism has a different view of the good than does Christianity: in progressivism, being a good person is being tolerant even of the intolerant, being inclusive of all claims of oppression, even when harmful, and being affirming of all progressive ideas. Progressives are much less interested in actual morality and ethics, and much more interested in their social theories of oppression. This is why progressives in the U.K. cannot bring themselves to deal with the Muslim/Pakistani rape gangs—it would feel intolerant to progressives to condemn oppressed Muslims—even those who raped children. It explains why various U.S. authorities keep passing bills that try to force Christians to accept same-sex and transgender behavior: in the state of California, you cannot operate a large toy store unless you have a transgender section.[4]
Since Christians know that there are things we shouldn’t tolerate, and things we shouldn’t be inclusive toward, progressivism seeks to shame, silence, and even punish Christians for our views.
“Since Christians know that there are things we shouldn’t tolerate, and things we shouldn’t be inclusive toward, progressivism seeks to shame, silence, and even punish Christians for our views.”
Progressivism has a different view of human destiny than does Christianity. In progressivism, cultural Marxism demands a constant, unending struggle for some imagined utopia here in this life. Knowing this is important to your church, for it explains why there is a constant rage in progressivism and why every progressive sees him/herself as an activist. Why was Charlie Kirk assassinated—and why did so many progressives celebrate it—school teachers, politicians, doctors, and community leaders? Because Kirk was a threat to progressivism’s social project. Rage and activism justify it, in the mind of progressivism. This constant progressive rage explains why transgendered people have shot up schools, and why Antifa, with the support of progressive politicians, riots unendingly, 24/7, in places like Portland, and why progressive politicians seek to silence Christians and coerce them into compliance. At its heart, progressivism is about grievances, anger, and rage. President Obama sums it up, when, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, he commissioned his audience to stay angry.[5] Since Christians believe in a different destiny than do progressives, and are motivated by love rather than rage, we find ourselves the victims of progressive hostility: culturally, institutionally, and politically.
Following Jesus in a Progressive Culture
Now this post is not really about progressivism. It is about leading disciples of Jesus in an increasingly hostile culture. For those of you who are leaders of the church: your members are facing a steady stream of challenges from progressivism, and who, in your opinion, is responsible for leading them to faithfulness?
Consider just this. During my years as a senior minister at a church outside of Nashville, we had a staff member’s Facebook post celebrating a person rediscovering her actual gender through the gospel forcibly deleted from Facebook (perhaps under pressure from Biden’s FBI). We had a member whose daughter was transitioned by her school against her will. We had a college professor who couldn’t get a job because she was too conservative. We had students threatened in our local university because they are Christian. We had a Christian counselor who was told that he couldn’t counsel against same-sex activity. We had students who were taught at their high school that, because they were Christians, they were oppressors. We had an HR representative from a large corporation told he had to participate in a so-called pride parade. And much more. Who is going to help these believers? Who is going to address their problems?
And more generally, all of our members watched progressive entertainment (virtually all entertainment leans progressive). All of them went to progressive schools, colleges, and universities (every public university in America leans progressive). All of them faced progressive pressure at work, from family members, and from their government. Progressivism was a constant pressure on all of the members of my congregation.
“Progressivism was a constant pressure on all of the members of my congregation.”
My question is this: who is responsible for guiding believers through these challenges? Who is responsible for speaking clearly about our cultural moment?
The answer is, of course, the church and its leaders. This is why we need a cultural apologetic—a robust defense of the Christian faith against progressivism and its beliefs. We need this apologetic in our churches, our Bible classes, our small groups, and in our pulpits. And this cultural apologetic begins with the senior pastor/minister. Who else has the training and the position to lead the church through troubled waters?
Cultural apologetics is a function of disciple making. It is not a distraction from disciple making; it is a function of it. And it starts in the pulpit.
Citizens of a Democratic Republic
But there’s more. We in the West, including in the United States, have been entrusted by God with a democratic republic. This means that we are responsible for our own government. And so believers in Jesus must exercise our God-given civic responsibility to uphold a righteous and a just government, locally and nationally. We cannot give this responsibility to others, for God gave it to us. And we cannot avoid politics and government because we naively believe that, if Christians avoid politics, non-Christians will do the right thing. To shirk our civic responsibilities, because we wrongly believe we’re “above the fray,” because we think Jesus doesn’t care about nations, or because we’re afraid of being called “Christian nationalists,” is to invite tyranny, poverty, and injustice—the very things we are to fight against.
No, we believers have a responsibility to advocate for biblical principles in government, to advocate for justice and righteousness in public life, and to oppose injustice in the civic life. We do this knowing that God will hold nations responsible, not just individuals. The Son of Man is going to judge the nations (Matthew 25:32). Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be preached to the nations (Luke 24:47). God’s ideal is that the nations will honor the glory of God (Revelation 21:24). We are to disciple people of all nations (Matthew 28:19-20). And one day the nations will worship Christ (Revelation 15:4).
“To shirk our civic responsibilities, because we wrongly believe we’re ‘above the fray,’ because we think Jesus doesn’t care about nations, or because we’re afraid of being called ‘Christian nationalists,’ is to invite tyranny, poverty, and injustice.”
I am not arguing that churches and their leaders must become experts in the thousands of policy decisions made every year in the U.S. Even full-time politicians can’t master everything, and we can’t either. I am also not arguing that the church ought to exercise “temporal power,” as the Reformers called civil government. We the church have many other things that should be our focus. The church is not suited to govern state affairs. I am also not arguing that the church merge with the political right. The right has its own problems, failures, and betrayals.
But what I am advocating is this: we should disciple people into a Christian view of government, politics, and culture, and the church should advocate for a decent, moral, and safe culture. After all, it was we, the church, that stood united to end the violence of Rome, to build the orphanages and hospitals and to care for the aged, to start the universities and public education, to establish the concept of human rights, to end slavery in the West, to lead the Civil Rights Movement, and to advance the Pro-Life movement. Because the church rightly understood that it serves a critical role in public life, the world is a much better place.
A Cultural Apologetic
So, the church must present a healthy, balanced cultural apologetic that courageously guides its members through the troubled waters of our present moment. It’s very Christian to do so. When the church was threatened by Gnosticism in the late first and second centuries, Paul wrote Colossians, John wrote 1 John, and Irenaeus penned his fabulous work Against Heresies. They were offering a cultural apologetic for their times.
When Rome persecuted Christians and sought to lure them away from their faith, John wrote Revelation, a scathing rebuke of Rome and its decadent culture; Tertullian wrote The Apology; and Augustine penned the masterful City of God. They were offering a cultural apologetic for their times. In many ways, the Reformers can be seen as offering a cultural apologetic for their time—critiquing the unprincipled Catholicism of medieval Europe. And even the Great Awakenings were, in some sense, a cultural apologetic arguing against the formalized state versions of the Christian faith.
Charlie Kirk was offering a cultural apologetic with his work. He would go into the heart of progressivism, the universities, and seek to lead people out of this ideology and into faith in Jesus. Kirk used front-line methods: public debate, clear arguments, and a wide-open advocacy for conservative values and the Christian faith. In my opinion, Kirk did great work, but not the kind of work I would advocate from the pulpit, because Kirk blended conservative politics with the Christian faith.
“The church must present a healthy, balanced cultural apologetic that courageously guides its members through the troubled waters of our present moment.”
Even though I’m a conservative, I would try to avoid partisanship in the pulpit. Rather, from the pulpit I would argue for Christian principles in culture and politics without tying my convictions to a political party. If you tie your church’s values to a political party, you’ll have to defend all the compromising things politicians do. So, though I personally agree with many of Kirk’s beliefs, I am not suggesting we preach a blend of conservative politics and Christian principles in our pulpits. I am advocating we preach Christian principles as applied to culture and government while keeping a safe distance from any political party.
Tim Keller offered a different model of cultural apologetic, the so-called “third way.” Keller studiously avoided partisan politics, critiquing both parties, and winsomely arguing for justice for the poor and traditional views of marriage and sex. Keller has had an enormous, largely positive impact on the church, but he seemed unable to see that revival and renewal would likely come from his right—from people who were fed up with the country’s leftward drift and hungry for a complete break from the progressive agenda.
Further, as Aaron Wren[6] insightfully argues, Keller’s winsome model might have been more suited to the time when America was still relatively neutral toward the Christian faith. Under aggressive progressivism, however, much of America is now hostile toward the Christian faith, and Keller’s model seems naïve today; some would even say equivocating. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest Keller was equivocating, I would say that Third-Wayism seems to me to be a weak response to the level of threat facing both the church and the state. I would call for a bolder cultural apologetic than Keller’s, one that recognizes that progressivism poses a unique threat today. I believe we need more boldness.
“I am advocating we preach Christian principles as applied to culture and government while keeping a safe distance from any political party.”
So, I’m advocating for a cultural apologetic from the pulpit that defends a Christian worldview against progressivism and all other threats to believers and which promotes a Christian view of culture and politics. I believe this needs to be done today with boldness and confidence, as part of a holistic discipling of believers.
Such a cultural apologetic in today’s world would deal with challenges such as these:
- Secularism’s loss of transcendence. The materialistic view of much of the West denies that there is anything genuinely spiritual at all. A Christian apologetic today would seek to make credible again the biblical view that the world is inhabited by spirits, both good and evil, and that life should be lived interacting with these spirits.
- The sexual revolution’s view that human goodness is found in expressive individualism. A Christian apologetic today would seek to demonstrate that our feelings are unreliable, that the goal of life is virtue rather than feeling, and that God’s way is the path to self-realization.
- Marxism’s view that truth is only politics. A Christian apologetic would restore truth as the genuine description of reality. Truth is real, truth itself as an object to be sought, and truth stands above all ideologies, criticizing them and correcting them. A Christian apologetic would boldly speak of The Truth.
- Marxism’s view that justice is relative to one’s social group. A Christian apologetic would seek to restore the classic view of justice going back to Aquinas and Scripture: justice is done when righteous laws are established, and when they are applied equally—that is, when each person receives what he is due—without consideration of skin color, social group, and the like. Since God is a just God, and since justice is important to the Christian faith, we should advocate for a biblical view of justice.
“Since God is a just God, and since justice is important to the Christian faith, we should advocate for a biblical view of justice.”
- The sexual revolution’s hedonist sexual ethic. The Christian faith has developed, through the centuries, the highest sexual ethic in the world: one man, one woman, in a covenanted married relationship for life. The Christian faith knows that this view of sexuality built the West: its institutions, its ethics, its values. The Christian view knows that deviations from its ethic have led to the undermining of the West, to massive poverty, to a pandemic of mental health problems, and to a multitude of social contagions. A cultural apologetic can make strong, bold arguments for what the scriptures say about sex.
- Marxism’s activist theory of government. Marxism sees government as an activist tool for achieving Marxism’s goals, but the Christian knows that the role of government is to promote what is good and to punish what is bad (as per Romans 13). Activist governments often punish good behavior and excuse bad behavior to align with their ideology. Christian views of government promote and support good behavior, while applying blind justice to bad behavior.
- And much more.
Standing Firm in Our Cultural Moment
Whether you mentioned Charlie Kirk at church, or not, I’m not taking a position on that question because it depends on your church’s context. But I will say that your church is facing serious threats in the West, not only from sin and unfaithfulness, but increasingly also from a rival ideology, progressivism. Your members don’t need to obsess over this danger; after all, you don’t need to watch the news to be a Christian. But they do need to know how to stand in the face of this escalating challenge to the Christian faith. And they need good theology about cultural and political matters. After all, these greatly affect believers in the West.
The truth is, your church is probably hungry for good biblical teaching on culture and government. Whether or not the leadership knows it, the membership knows that it is facing challenges. They know that they are being called intolerant and bigots. They know that there are certain jobs that are likely off-limits to them because of their faith. They know what it’s like to have their children lured into the decadence of progressivism’s sexual deviances. And they know that Western civilization feels like it’s unraveling under the influence of progressivism. They know these things, even if the church’s leadership does not. They are looking to the church for help.
“Whether or not the leadership knows it, the membership knows that it is facing challenges.”
So, this is our time to present a courageous, Jesus-like apologetic that defends the faith and nurtures the church. This is a time for solid cultural apologetics. This is a time for strong moral leadership that leads the people of God forward with joy and confidence.
[1] “Math Suffers From White Supremacy, According to a Bill Gates-Funded Course,” Newsweek (February 23, 2021), https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-according-bill-gates-funded-course-1571511
[2] Brian Flood, “CNN raises eyebrows by claiming ‘there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth’ in news report,’” Fox News, March 31, 2021, foxnews.com/media/cnn-raises-eyebrows claiming-consensus-assigning-sex-at-birth-in-news-report (accessed April 2, 2021).
[3] Rachel Bowman, “NPR President who said truth is a ‘distraction’ Daily Mail (October 3, 2025), NPR president who said truth is a ‘distraction’ is summoned by DOGE to sing for her supper | Daily Mail Online
[4] J. R. Stone, “New CA law requires gender-neutral toy sections at large retail stores,” ABC7 News, December 21, 2023, https://abc7news.com/post/new-ca-law-gender-neutral-toy-sections-retail-kids/14209705/
[5] “COP26: Obama tells young people to stay angry on climate fight, BBC News, November 8, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59210395
[6] Aaron Wren, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” First Things (February 1, 2022).
