Since at least Dr. Francis A Schaeffer’s work and others in the 1970s, philosophers have warned us about moral relativism, the idea there is no right or wrong. This view sounded good to a culture that wished to throw off all restraints, especially sexual.
But now into the 21stCentury we’re plagued by division, crudeness, lack of integrity and character in “leadership,” declining free speech, pornography, narcotics, racism, sexual harassment or assault, random shootings, alienation from not just politics but from the country itself (Celebrities vie for news saying they want to move to Canada), rancor and the new “hater” phenomenon...the list goes on.
None of this is a surprise. An emerging social dystopia is a direct result of a people deciding there’s no difference between right vs wrong and though many still say they believe in God most do not see how this is relevant to their everyday lives. We’re now grasping at any belief, even entirely irrational ones like an inability to define man vs woman, or politicians voting not to protect born-alive babies.
We’ve lost what scholars call our “sacred canopy,” which until the 1960s was a “Judeo-Christian consensus” about how society could operate freely and justly. Now we have a mishmash secularism and weak religion, but what we need is a revival of the idea of objective truth, and individual responsibility and accountability. Without this renewal of belief in truth, our mooring, centrifugal forces in our culture will continue to spin toward irrationality.
This is not an encouraging prognosis. Yet God is still there. He is still the definition of Truth, Love, Mercy, Justice.
Revival does not begin with the non-churched, “…judgment begins with God’s household” (1 Peter 4:17). Speaking truth to culture begins with us, the individual Christian believer and the Church.
Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2019
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