Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

by Russell D. Moore

The shaking of American culture is no sign that God has given up on American Christianity. In fact, it may be a sign that God is rescuing American Christianity from itself.

A friend of mine told me about a “parenting fail” that I could immediately identify with. His son stubbed his toe and squealed with tears. My friend tried to toughen him up, by telling him he ought not to cry like that. The next day my friend’s son came home, talking about another playground injury. The son, with pride, announced that he had found a strategy to keep from crying. He just got very angry and blamed the person standing closest to him. I saw myself in the parenting fail. How often have I tried to correct some behavior, only to have my own instruction backfire on me? But the more I thought of it, the more I identified with the son too. How often do I rage rather than lament?

The goal of history is not, after all, escape to heaven, but the merger of heaven and earth—when the dwelling place of God transforms the material creation (Rev. 21:1–4).

God’s kingdom triumph is proven not by our electoral success or our cultural influence—as

The child with Down syndrome on the fifth row from the back in your church, he’s not a “ministry project.” He’s a future king of the universe. The immigrant woman who scrubs toilets every day on hands and knees, and can barely speak enough English to sing along with your praise choruses, she’s not a problem to be solved. She’s a future queen of the cosmos, a joint-heir with Christ.

We tend to do the exact reverse. We rail against the culture outside, and speak in muted and ambiguous terms about what is common among us. We lambaste political and cultural heresies on the outside, but sit silently in the face of doctrinal heresies on the inside. That’s because we are seeking the wrong kingdom first.

We do not simply advocate for the agenda of the kingdom;

we embody it.

He knew that sometimes patriotism for one’s country seems easier than patriotism for the New Jerusalem because it’s so experientially immediate.

The “conquering” here though is not about subduing enemies on the outside, but about holding fast to the gospel and following the discipleship of Jesus to the end (Rev. 2:25–26). We are not yet kings over the world (1 Cor. 4:8), but are instead ambassadors bearing persuasive witness to the kingdom we have entered (2 Cor. 5:11, 20).

Years ago, when I was serving as a preaching pastor in a church, I was approached by an eleven-year-old in our congregation who wanted to introduce me to his friend, Jared. Jared was on his soccer team, and had never been to church before. After a few minutes of talking, Jared told me that he needed prayer, that his dad had left, and he didn’t know what his family was going to do. He wondered if I might pray that God would “put my mom and dad back together.” I prayed with him, and he turned to go back to his seat. He was wearing a shirt celebrating the inauguration of a President who was unpopular with most of the people in my mostly white, blue-collar congregation. As I watched this young man walk down his first-ever church aisle, to hear the gospel perhaps for the first time, a middle-aged man walked past him and huffed, “We need to get you a better shirt.”

A boycott, after all, is a display of power, particularly of economic power. We seek to hurt a company by depriving it of revenue. It is a contest of who has the more buying power, and therefore who is of more value to the company. And it assumes that the “rightness” of a position is constituted by a majority with power. But isn’t that precisely what the church is to be a sign to speak against? Isn’t this the “Gentile” view of power that our Lord warned us against (Luke 22:25)?

When we don’t oppose demons, we demonize opponents.

A gloomy view of culture leads to meanness. If we believe we are on the losing side of history, we slide into the rage of those who know their time is short. We have no reason to be fearful or sullen or mean. We’re not the losers of history. We are not slouching toward Gomorrah; we are marching to Zion. The worst thing that can possibly happen to us has already happened: we’re dead. We were crucified at Skull Place, under the wrath of God. And the best thing that could happen to us has already happened; we’re alive, in Christ, and our future is seated at the right hand of God, and he’s feeling just fine. Jesus is marching onward, with us or without us, and if the gates of hell cannot hold him back, why on earth would he be panicked by Hollywood or Capitol Hill? Times may grow dark indeed, but times have always been dark, since the insurrection of Eden. Nonetheless, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not, the darkness will not, the darkness cannot overcome it. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward Jesus.

Many of our neighbors around us will be burned over by the unkept, and unkeepable, promises of the sexual revolution and of Faustian individualism. Short term, these things will ravage communities and families and churches. But long-term, they will leave people wanting.

It may be that America is not “post-Christian” at all. It may be that America is instead pre-Christian, a land that though often Christ-haunted has never known the power of the gospel, yet.