How we can fight back
We need to reclaim the family and reclaim the church
Over the last few years on Sacred Musings, I’ve been exploring many of the things which have gone wrong in our society. It’s clear to pretty much everyone that things across the UK are not in good shape — there are problems in every single area. Housing, the economy and cost of living, education, government — you name it, there are problems. For those of us who want to do something about it, it’s hard to know where to start. This is why it’s important for us to prioritise — to not waste time and energy fighting battles which do not need to be won, but to focus on the most important things.
The other day I was watching this excellent lecture by Os Guinness:
If you have the time, please do watch it as it is excellent and encouraging.
The thing that struck me most about it was what he says the aim of ‘cultural marxism’ was (it has many different names, but he identifies it as one of the primary things wrong with the West at the moment). He says that the aim was to destroy the family and the church. I’ve heard this before, but it struck me forcefully this time how if we as Christians want to fight back (and I hope we all do), then we need to be focussing our efforts on the family and the church. What I’d like to do in this piece is outline what that might look like, starting with the family.
Families
One of the things which has come up repeatedly over the last few years is the devastating impact of the sexual revolution. Writers such as Louise Perry have written explicitly about this. There are so many ways that society has changed as a result of it, and its effects have been almost entirely negative. In fact, I think it’s actually worse than we imagine. To give you an example: I was thinking yesterday about the grooming gangs scandal, and whether such a thing would have happened without the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution opened the door to sexual violence and rape at a scale which is beyond anything we could have imagined a hundred years ago.
But the sexual revolution, bad though it is, is not the only thing that’s gone wrong. Let me outline a few ways in which families need to be recovered.
Recovering true equality between men and women
Through the course of the twentieth century, the role of women changed almost beyond recognition. This started to change well before the sexual revolution with the suffragettes, and continued during two world wars as women were needed to work at home while men were fighting.
The problem is, we have ended up in a situation now where the differences between men and women have all but been erased. It’s something of a running joke that some politicians can’t give a straight answer to the question, “what is a woman?” But the truth is, almost everybody is confused at the moment as to what a woman and man is — beyond the basic biological differences. Men and women have been blurred into generic ‘people’: they all do the same things, they all want the same things… it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman. Part of the problem is the modern view of ‘equality’, which basically says that for two people to be truly equal they have to be identical.
There is a particular revulsion to the idea that one person — a man — could have authority over another — a woman, while at the same time remaining equal. The Biblical view of the wife submitting to her husband who is the head of the family (Ephesians 5:22-23) is seen as anathema.
Note: I’ve been re-reading Mike Ovey’s book Your Will be Done, which is about debates on subordination within the Trinity. One of the things which struck me is how so much of the debate proceeds with modern assumptions about equality — many modern writers simply assume that to be ‘equal’ means there cannot be an authority dynamic in the relationship. We don’t realise just how deep this thinking goes.
Practically speaking, this means that men’s traditional role as the head of the family, the protector and leader, has been undermined. Men are told they are not necessary for that any more — in fact men are frequently told their masculinity is toxic.
Nancy Pearcey wrote about this in The Toxic War on Masculinity, which is a great book exploring this issue.
Women’s traditional role as a wife and mother has been undermined, and most women now are expected to go out and work. (It doesn’t help that the cost of living is now so great that families cannot survive on a single income).
I believe that an important step for us to rebuild as a society is to recover what it means to be men and women, made equally in God’s image, and therefore made to complement one another. What this means for us is that we need to embody in our own lives what it means to be a man or woman. We need to demonstrate the goodness of God in making us male and female by embracing our masculinity or feminity, and in the way that we relate to the opposite sex. If God’s ways are truly good, and lead to human flourishing, then we need have no fear of embracing them — and we should ask for his help in doing so.
One of the side effects of embracing this teaching is that we may end up with politicians who understand what it means to put the needs and desires of others above one’s own personal success and ambition. Fathers who have learned to love their families sacrificially will make much better leaders in other areas of life. You could say that the family is the incubator for a healthy society.
Reassociating sex and love
One of the most pernicious things which has happened since the sexual revolution is the way that sex has become isolated from love. People see sex as something which can be enjoyed outside of a loving relationship. This has been aided by the rise of internet pornography and even AI relationships: people don’t even see it necessary to have a real person any more!
God designed sex to be a deep expression of love between a man and a woman. In its proper context, it is life-giving and healing. Out of its proper context, it destroys. Someone once said: “Sex is like fire. In the fireplace, it warms the house. Out of the fireplace, it burns the house down.”
Note: I did a video a few years ago about what Song of Songs (the book of the Bible) teaches about love which you might find helpful.
I think we are witnessing what happens when sex and love are separated, and it’s not pretty. I think many people are desperate for someone to love them in that most intimate way, and yet they are unable to find anyone.
If we wish to reclaim the family, we need to reclaim sex in its proper, God-given place. And isn’t it wonderful to imagine a world where people see one another not as objects to be used for our own gratification, but people to be loved?
Reclaim parenting
The final thing I want to say on families is that we need to reclaim parenting. I say ‘parenting,’ but the truth is I am particularly thinking of mothers (see my point about men and women above).
I believe that it is not healthy for the raising of children to continually be ‘outsourced’: outsourced to the state (via schools) or to businesses such as nurseries. As I have written about before, I believe there are many problems within education at the moment. A big part of the problem is that the system is set up to serve the interests of almost everybody EXCEPT families.
If you’ve been reading Sacred Musings for a while, you’ll know that I started to develop a real interest in education last year. But I wonder whether the solution is not to change education itself, but to encourage stronger families. Perhaps what we need is not a reform of the state school system, but to take power away from it. Perhaps what we need to do is empower parents (especially mums) to raise and education their own children. That’s not to say we should do away with schools, but simply put them in their proper place.
If I had money and the clout to do it, something I’d love to do would be to put money into supporting parents to educate their own children. Provide financial support so that one parent didn’t have to work full-time; provide educational resources; and provide a network to link them up with one another.
If parents were simply supported and encouraged to raise their own children, at a stroke that would take power away from the State and give it back to families. It strikes me that this is a good and biblical solution to the problem — after all, the family is the foundational building block of society: it was created prior to the fall. Schooling in the way that we know it today is a modern invention.
I appreciate that all of the things I’ve mentioned so far could do with being expanded much further. However, time marches on and I think it’s time to move on. I hope that this piece, rather than providing you with all the answers, helps to develop your own thinking. I do not wish simply to provide a ‘cookie cutter’ approach but rather outline the issues and see what that provokes in your minds.
I believe that the bigger issue is actually the church, and if this is recovered then the family will start to take care of itself. It is to the church that I will now turn.
The Church
Yesterday I was watching a Catholic podcast discussion with Calvin Robinson. (I don’t usually watch such things but there had been a bit of a fracas on social media with the ‘reformed protestant’ community, and I was interested to hear about it.) The actual content of the interview is irrelevant for our purposes here; the thing which interested me was the introduction to the podcast which said something like, “We are going to reclaim this world for Christ”. I found myself thinking, “Are you?… does Christ know that?”
It seems to me that, if we are to see any change in the world, it needs to come from God and not from us. This is not to say that we can only sit around twiddling our thumbs, but rather we need to earnestly pray to God to lead us and guide us. So often the way that God chooses to work in us and through us is different to what we might choose. Saying, “we’re going to reclaim this world for Christ” actually looks like pride to me. I think it would be better to say “We want Christ to claim this world, and we put ourselves totally at his service” (although that may work less well in a podcast).
This is one of the things I really liked about Os Guinness’ talk: he spoke of how the thing we need the most is a Christian Revival, and this is something we need to seek the Lord for. We can’t make it happen, we can only ask God for it in prayerful hope and expectation, and we can ask him to use us as we wait.
Earlier this week, as I was preparing my video for Understand the Bible on the Apostle’s Creed (“I Believe in God”), I came across a passage from Francis Schaeffer’s book True Spirituality. It struck me then, as it always does, how challenging it is — but how much we Christians in the West need to hear it right now. It seems to me that the recovery of the church will involve a recovery of true spirituality. Let me quote from the book to illustrate.
Living in the supernatural world
However, to be a true Bible-believing Christian, we must understand that the universe has these two halves, but not only that. It means living in the two halves of reality: the supernatural and the natural parts. I would suggest that it is perfectly possible for a Christian to be so infiltrated by twentieth-century thinking that he lives most of his life as though the supernatural were not there. Indeed, I would suggest that all of us do this to some extent. The supernatural does not touch the Christian only at the new birth and then at his death, or at the second coming of Christ: as though there is something supernatural at the new birth and something supernatural again when Jesus comes back or when I die, but in between I am on my own, in the naturalistic world. Nothing could be further from the biblical view. Being a biblical Christian means living in the supernatural now, not only theoretically but in practice. If a man sits in the one chair, and denies the existence of the supernatural portion of the world, we say he is an unbeliever. What shall we call ourselves when we sit in the other chair but live as though the supernatural were not there? Should not such an attitude be given the name ‘unfaith’? ‘Unfaith’ is the Christian not living in the light of the supernatural now.
Schaeffer says that the universe is made up of the natural part — the things we can see and touch — and the supernatural part. Our secular world believes only in the first of those, which is known as naturalism. We Christians, on the other hand, should believe in the reality of the supernatural — not only the existence of God in general, but the empowering of the Holy Spirit moment-by-moment.
The problem is, as Schaeffer says, that we in the Western world have lived so long in the secular West that naturalism is simply the air that we breathe. Most Christians don’t really live as if the supernatural was there in a tangible way on a day-to-day basis. And this is precisely the problem: the church is not living by faith. The church claims to believe in God, claims to believe in the Holy Spirit, but it lives as if those things were not true. (This is very much what Os Guinness is getting at in his book The Gravedigger Files, which I did a series about on the podcast last year).
If we are to reclaim the church, we need to reclaim what it means to live by faith — trusting that God is really there and able to accomplish “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).
There is a corresponding warning for those who continue to stay in ‘unfaith’, as he puts it.
A warning against ‘unfaith’
But if I am trying to live a Christian life while sitting in the chair of unfaith, certain things are true. First of all it is in the flesh. I do not care what my activity is, I do not care how much noise I make about soul-winning evangelism or exotic things, for example. It is still in the flesh. I have put myself, the creature, at the centre of the universe.
Secondly, if I am trying to live a Christian life while sitting in the chair of unfaith, I am only playing at it, rather than being in it, because the real battle is not against flesh and blood, but is in the ‘heavenlies’, and I cannot partake in that battle in the flesh… When I try to live a Christian life while sitting in the chair of unfaith, I am just playing at war. I am not in contact with the real battle at all. [My emphasis]
Thirdly, the Lord will not honour our weapons if we are sitting in the chair of unfaith, because they do not give Him any honour or glory. In fact, they steal the honour and glory from Him, even the honour and glory of being totally the Creator and the centre of the universe. Paul speaks of this when he says: “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin”. Hudson Taylor said, “The Lord’s work done in the Lord’s way will never fail to have the Lord’s provision.” He was thinking primarily of material provision, but surely he would also include the whole provision. I would paraphrase his saying like this: That the Lord’s work done in human energy is not the Lord’s work any longer [My emphasis]. It is something, but it is not the Lord’s work.
The point that Schaeffer is making here is that ‘unfaith’ will not yield good results. If we are to make a difference in the world, we must do the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way. God did not give us any other alternative — that is our only option.
If you and I, and our churches, seek to make a difference in the world, we have to seek God’s will rather than ours. And that means we need to put ourselves at his disposal, rather than simply saying that we need to “reclaim this world for Christ” and decide that means doing X, Y or Z. If God wants us to do X, Y or Z he will show us — but the things he might want us to do are very different to the things we might imagine. I never thought I would end up with an internet video ministry, but God had other ideas!
The main thing I want to underline here is that reclaiming the church means reclaiming living by faith. When we put God at the centre, when we look to him to accomplish revival and reformation, then we open ourselves up to the possibility that God will act in ways that we could never imagine. We remove our own human limitations and open up the possibility of God’s power.
This is what has been so sorely lacking in the church since the latter part of the twentieth century. I believe that many churches — probably the majority — are simply going about their business and expecting God to bless it, without really seeking the Lord as to what he wants them to do. Churches are operating as if the supernatural were not there. Is it any surprise that God does not seem to be blessing those churches?
Final encouragement
Earlier on I quoted from Ephesians 3, which is one of my favourite prayers in the Bible. Let me quote the it in full as we finish here, as I believe this could sum up everything we need as a church right now:
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Ephesians 3:14-21
Amen and amen.
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