What You’ve Been Searching For

A Message From A Cold Warrior in Hot Water

So what’s my message today to you young people, who’ve been doing the searching here on What You’ve Been Searching For was basically this. Whatever the world, or even our leaders say, we aren’t the bad guys. We don’t suck. What do I mean? Stay tuned.

As I said in our last podcast, we’re focusing now not on what you’ve been searching for, but who’s doing the searching. Our research has told us that we have a lot of younger people, people younger than me, at least, which is probably most, a large portion of our audience. Most people are younger than me. What is our message today? If you caught last time, you know that I related my experience as a young person with communism, going behind the Iron Curtain to smuggle Bibles and being caught by the communists. And the lesson I learned, that the war was pretty much already over, God was not concerned, or was not… Communism was not something that was too big for God. I learned that lesson, but I also learned the lesson recently that people told me even 40 years ago.

That they had been praying, those communist Christians who were living under oppression, were praying for us in the West, that we would experience persecution so we would know what it means to be a true Christian, and suffer for Christ. And how through all those decades, those prayers may be coming true. And for you young people out there, it probably will be a part of your reality growing up, that you will experience persecution and resistance for being a Christian. Well, today… that was in a societal, a general political, societal context. Today I want to get a little more specific and talk about what it may be like within Christianity itself. Between, for you young people, as you’re moving along in your Christian faith, what is the dynamic going to be between you and other Christians? And thinking about this, I thought about this because I came across an article online in the American Reformer by a guy named John Ehrett and it’s called The Embarrassment Reflex: Evangelicals in Culture.

Now this is written kind of in a higher theological style. It’s a very intellectual style. It doesn’t really lend itself to the type of podcast I like to do, but he makes some very good points and his points dovetail with what I’ve always said in my podcast, or in my teachings online. One of the things I’ve always said is that evangelicals or Christians, we’re going to get a lot of bad press from the world. Our message is offensive to the world. The Bible tells us the gospel is offensive to the world and people aren’t going to like it and they’re going to accuse us of a lot of different things. That doesn’t mean it’s true. And it doesn’t mean we have to accept it, and it doesn’t have to mean we have to believe our own bad press. We should always have an answer, but we don’t have to actually believe it. Well, the author of this article makes this point, but he kind of takes a aspect of it that I hadn’t really considered before. And it dovetails also into our current political and cultural state in this way.

 

The cultural conflict we’re having right now in this country can basically, one of the ways it can be broken down is, the difference of worldview between people who think that we should be ruled by an elite class, that it should be a top down, authoritarian society, versus the traditional American idea of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The different opinion is, do ordinary people know enough to govern themselves, or do they need an elite to tell them what to do? Well, that has crept into Christianity and evangelicalism, according to this author, and I think he’s right. He says we have a evangelical elite forming, Christian leaders, thought leaders, educators, people in colleges, people in places like online think tanks in Christianity, that have taken the cultural ideas that are being pushed today by progressives, by socialists, by Marxists, by the left, things like intersectionality and critical race theory, white supremacy, toxic masculinity, you name it. All of these things that our culture is throwing at us, accusing us of because we’re Christians.

Somehow we’ve been a part of this oppression. We’ve been a part of this victimization of certain groups, or we’ve been part of these injustices that have been done. And because of that, we’ve abandoned somehow true Christianity. And we need to refocus our Christianity on these things. We need to start talking about identity politics, and critical race theory, or whatever else it is, whatever the flavor of the day is. And there’s a lot of new flavors out there. So this kind of cultural elite among evangelicals, a lot of young Christian leaders are falling for this because this is very prevalent in colleges, universities, youth ministry. It’s very much a youth culture. Social media is full of this kind of stuff, influencing our children this way, so a lot of younger Christian leaders and even some older ones think we need to move this way.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of people in the pews, quote, in the pews, that are very concerned about this movement. They have more of a traditional Christian belief that’s more firmly bound by the gospel of the Bible than it is our cultural moment, our cultural thoughts of the moment. So this is what it’s talking about. And he makes the same point. He says the people that are pushing this and saying, “Hey, as evangelicals, we can’t cling to these traditional beliefs because they’re too oppressive, or they’re too white supremacists or whatever it is,” they’re assuming that the people leveling these accusations are actually right. They never bothered to question whether or not they may be right or not. It’s the flavor of the day. It’s what our society is pressuring us to do. If we’re going to stay relevant in our society, we need to adopt these, at least try and mollify them, try and speak to them in a way that won’t make it appear so much.

And when you start doing that, when you start trying to integrate basically bad ideas into your theology, or into what you’re presenting, you invariably start moving towards that ideology. And I think that’s what he’s saying here. By not even questioning whether these critiques, these societal critiques are true, a lot of the Christian leaders are starting to even adopt them and see them as true. And they’re starting to lead their flocks that way, lead their movements, lead their organizations or their churches themselves, or their colleges, Christian colleges. This is happening a lot in Christian colleges. They’re starting to move their institutions that way. And a lot of what’d you say normal, regular Christians, who are not in leadership, who are not part of this elite, are having a lot of trouble with it. And it’s a divide that’s growing within Christianity. So how does this relate to young people?

Well, obviously I said it, this is very prevalent among younger Christians. I’ve seen it in my own dealings with younger Christians. And as I said in my previous podcast, this is going to be a reality more and more for younger Christians as they move on in their Christian walk within our society. You’re going to be under a lot of pressure to abandon traditional, biblically based beliefs in your Christianity, not only in your society, but also in your Christianity. And a lot of it will come from Christian leaders and other Christians, your peers. So you need to decide what your faith is, what it’s based on. Is your faith based on the truths of the word of God, or is it subject to whatever the political flavor of the month is, coming from our society, and coming from people who don’t have a Christian worldview, and who would love nothing more than to see Christianity and evangelicals especially bend to their will, and modify its beliefs to conform to theirs. And that way, we’re less of a threat to their power and influence in the culture.

So young people, again, this is going to be a reality. There’s going to be a lot of things coming your way that will be your realities as you move on in your Christian life, that I’m going to continue to speak to. Stay tuned for next week’s. If you like these podcasts, like. The button’s right down there. If you think other people would like it, share. Share these videos with your friends. If you want to see more of them, subscribe. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and if you want even to see even more great content, go to ChristianPodcastCentral.com. Thanks for listening.