Responding to the conclusion of my series In Defense of Marriage, there were some who expressed concern that I was advocating capitulation or withdrawal from the culture, which, of course, I am not. I appreciated the thoughtfulness with which many of you responded and the gracious manner in which you expressed your disagreements. This is healthy and—let’s be honest—we’re not dealing with essential doctrines of the Christian faith, so there should be room for disagreement, debate, and discussion. That is precisely what I hope to encourage. Otherwise, we can remain blindly entrenched in old patterns of thinking and conduct that render the church and its message irrelevant as the culture around us changes. The faithful Christian will always wrestle with the execution of his calling in a changing cultural context (see 1 Cor. 9:22).

Let me say up front, I offer no absolutes on this point. Hopefully you’ll see mine as a thoughtful opinion, but again, I am not dealing with Christian orthodoxy as much as I am methodology. More specifically, I am grappling with the church’s posture when addressing difficult moral and social issues in a post-Christian cultural context.

As one who lives on the forefront of pressing Christ in the culture, I am wrestling with my own understanding as I seek to balance challenging the moribund morality of the culture with proclaiming the gospel. (I believe this, too, is healthy.) I simply think we need to carefully reconsider our approach to these moral and social issues, given our rapidly changing context. So I search the Scriptures, putting aside my own cultural assumptions, biases, and opinions. I know better than to trust in my own understanding. Believe me, my nature is to go to war (teeth, hair, eyeballs!), but I know better than to put confidence in the flesh and rely upon my nature.

One problem, as I see it, is that we tend to look to the past—namely our American past. We long for the time when America was nobler and its citizenry more virtuous. It is from there we seek to reclaim what is being lost: the glory days of our founding, for example, when people weren’t as selfish and narcissistic, when morality was not mocked, and civility was the norm. Debates over homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research, and the like would have been inconceivable. However, we should also be careful not to romanticize the past into something it wasn’t.

Nonetheless, this attempt to restore what once was fails to consider the unprecedented post-Christendom reality of today. The cultural hegemony of the last 1600 years that the church once enjoyed is no longer present anywhere in the West. This twenty-first century condition presents never before seen challenges to the American church that demand serious thought. In light of this, we are moving more toward similarities with the church in China more so than the church of eighteenth-century America. I think this is the first paradigm that must be overcome.

Our tendency, it seems, is to recall the prior social and cultural impact of Christianity and the profoundly positive influence it has had on the formation of the nation, our government, culture, and society. Even when the church was weak, the social and cultural consensus, or worldview, was still largely Christian up until the Enlightenment. This does not mean that everyone in America was individually Christian; they weren’t. But Christianity was the consensus worldview. However, this was prior to Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and others, not to mention modernity, the sexual revolution, rampant consumerism, and postmodernism.

Ideologically speaking, the world was a very different place from the one that confronts us today, and these factors must be considered when trying to understand how to effectively engage the culture. Although this past influence is undeniable, it occurred under very different circumstances and thus the manner and means by which former Christians engaged culture may not be relevant to today. While knowing this historic influence is important to knowing where we came from, I would argue it offers little in the way of where we are going and how the Christian community is to live in these emerging conditions. The cultural changes that now confront us are not abstract and minor; they are very real and monumental. I fear we have been slow to either recognize or accept this fact. 

Under Christendom, the church held a position of cultural and social authority, which went largely unquestioned. But over time this has changed. Our culture no longer labors under a Christian worldview. Pluralism, radical individualism, relativism, multiculturalism, and the like have destroyed any notion of a single overarching truth available for discovery. The church has no authority in the culture; we’re not welcome in the public square and more and more we are finding Christian ideas barred from our most influential cultural institutions. However, we tend to speak and act as if we still posses this authority, as if the people to whom we’re speaking still believe in truth—and this, it appears, has proven harmful to the mission of the church. Our “conquering spirit” materializes and the love of Christ is obscured, at best, and at worst, we are seen as anything but Christlike.

The fundamental question is this: is the “problem” in America spiritual or political? Of course, the answer is spiritual—so why do we continue to put so much stock in political solutions? It may be that the political route appeals to our desire for power and control. However, as Christians, we must remember that power and control are left to God; we trust in Him to dispense these according to His good will and pleasure. This does not mean that we become passive and withdraw from society, politics, and cultural engagement. Again, the issue is one of posture and method. In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus draws a sharp contrast between the methods of the world and those of the kingdom of God. Throughout, Jesus is addressing the attitude and disposition of those who would follow Him. As followers of Jesus, we function in almost complete contradiction to what the world understands and expects. Jesus exalts the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. Jesus forbids retaliation, calling on those who are oppressed to “not resist the one who is evil,” and to love our enemies.

The church is not a revolutionary instrument (this would be the extreme politicization of Christianity) but a transformative instrument that draws its strength from the Living God. We trust in Him, giving thanks in all things, including persecution. First Peter is filled with statements that challenge the church to this effect. In fact, when chapter three speaks of “the end of all things” being near, Peter encourages the church to be “clear-minded and self-controlled so that you can pray.” He doesn’t say organize and fight. He doesn’t even say resist. Instead he goes on to say, “Above all, love each other deeply…offer hospitality…without grumbling…serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in various forms.” He is describing the contradictory kingdom life of the church. He follows this with his passage on “rejoicing in suffering.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean we stop sharing Christian truth with those we meet. We most certainly do. But this is different than politicizing Christian values and trying to press them through collective political coercion.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

When I began this series, I said the battle to define marriage is not over—and I’m still convinced that is true. However, the issue in America has clearly passed the eleventh hour and I fear the clock has already begun to toll. The outcome of California’s Proposition 8 this November, which seeks to amend the state constitution in order to establish that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”—thus reversing the state Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex marriage in May—will figure prominently in the future of marriage in America. If the measure is defeated (and barring any intervention by God), I predict it will be nearly impossible to halt the homosexual movement and with it the radical redefinition of sexual morality.

This raises the important question of “What then?” How should the church respond in the wake of such profound moral and social revision? Should we continue to battle with homosexual activists? Will doing so distract us from our true calling and thus undermine the church’s mission and purpose? Should we persist in pressing the point even unto arrest and imprisonment? Is this how we are called to live in a pagan culture? These are the questions we must face. I wrestle with these, as I continue to address the church’s relationship to culture. I suggest that we all need to wrestle with these questions in an effort to find the most biblical answers, given our very real and possible future in America.

In his classic book Christ and Culture, Richard Niebuhr suggests that there are only a handful of postures the Christian can take toward culture. For example, we can emphasize the opposition between Christ and culture, what Niebuhr calls the Christ against culture position. This view sees the customs and advances of the day as inevitable affronts to Christ. Predictably, this position results in a withdrawal or separation from culture—a move that only renders Christianity less relevant and neglects to press Christ’s kingdom in the world. I certainly do not recommend this approach.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who feel there is a fundamental agreement between Christ and culture, in which Christ is equated with the apex of human achievement. Niebuhr labeled this the Christ of culture group. Far from simply identifying Christ with culture, it is more the alignment of certain aspects of culture with Christ—such as Western civilization, American nationalism, or conservative politics. With this position, Christ is recast in the guise of that culture’s predominant values. Rather than Christ standing over and against culture as judge and challenge, Christ is absorbed into the culture and appropriated for its ends. So you end up less with Christ than you do with culture. This appears to have been a dominant trend within the American church over the last fifty years, to the point that Christianity has been narrowed to the political realm as best seen in the “culture wars.”

This position has tended to neglect the whole missio Dei, or mission of God, in that it seeks primarily to promote and preserve certain values through civil or political means. While these values may be consistent with Christianity and their advocates may be well-meaning, there is no eternal value in morality apart from faith in Jesus Christ. The values of the Christian faith flow from conversion; they do not convert the lost. Furthermore, this response tends toward an “us versus them” mentality that all too easily operates “out of a conquering spirit or urge to control, vestiges of a former Christendom that no longer lives anywhere but in the impulses of our minds,” according to George Hunsberger (Hunsberger and Van Gelder, eds., The Church Between Gospel & Culture, [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996] 290).

But there is a third stance that can be taken, one that is neither a Christ of culture nor a Christ against culture position. It is a “conversionist” (and, I believe, the biblical) response that sees Christ as the transformer of culture. Yes, human nature is fallen, and culture not only reflects this perversion but often transmits it. Thus the opposition between Christ and culture is real and must be recognized. Yet rather than separation from culture, or accommodation and reliance upon the institutions of culture (such as politics), Christ in this scenario becomes the converter of humanity. This is the role of the church as Christ’s body. This distinct and called community of God’s people therefore lives as God’s instrument and witness to the redemptive work of God—the kingdom. It is from here that we go forth to express the values of the kingdom of God, sometimes by proclamation and at all times by demonstration.

This is precisely what the apostle Peter urged the Christians who were living among non-Christians to do. “Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Peter 2:11–12, NIV). That last phrase, “on the day he visits us,” is not a reference to Christ’s return but to God’s intervention in the world through blessing or judgment. Peter follows this by saying “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution … For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people (1 Peter 2:13–15, ESV). Peter later equates this to a believing wife who wins her unbelieving husband over “without a word” by the way she lives (see 1 Peter 3:1). Matthew underscores this in 5:16: “In the same way, let your light shine before men people, so that they can see your good deeds and give honor to your Father in heaven (NET).

I know this goes against our nature but that is precisely the point: kingdom living always goes against our nature, which is why we require God’s grace to persevere in the faith. The time may be soon approaching when we are forced to abandon our “conquering spirit” and submit to “human institutions” that, while they may suppress our proclamation of kingdom values (i.e., opposition to sexual immorality), can never stop the demonstration of these values (i.e., living sexually moral lives) within and among the faithful community of God’s people. Furthermore, the bearing of hardship because of conscience toward God is pleasing to the Lord (see 1 Peter 2:19–23).

America, under the sovereign hand of God, may be given over to sexual anarchy, immorality, and debauchery but the faithful church will endure in spite of the culture and may, by its life and witness, be the instrument God uses to bring a generation to repentance. This is the mission of God and therefore the mission of His people; I am concerned that our persistence in a moral battle lost may distract us from our true purpose—and this I personally do not want to do. 

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

Soviet communism attempted to construct a society under a new social and ethical system, which subverted the natural moral order. In doing so, people were compelled to live in contradiction to their conscience. Without the influence of the conscience, moral governance shifts from the self to the state. The lesson here is this: when the society demands conduct that is in contradiction to what mankind knows in his heart to be right and true, the state will coerce such conduct. This principle is summed up in “Colson’s Law,” which essentially states that the more a society is governed by conscience, the less it requires outside enforcement or police. The less conscience, or self-governance, the more police will be required (i.e. totalitarianism). 

This same pattern accompanies activist efforts, which seek to legitimize homosexual acts through the imposition of same-sex marriage (SSM). Unable to rely on the democratic process to advance their agenda, gay-rights advocates have instead employed activist judges, propaganda campaigns, indoctrination of youth, and intimidation tactics to impose their moral vision.

The essence of the homosexual agenda and its demand for legal marriage is not about the expansion of civil rights. It is, instead, committed to the complete reordering of our society. Paula Ettlebrick, the former legal director of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, as much as confirmed this when she said:

Being queer is more than setting up house, sleeping with a person of the same gender, and seeking state approval for doing so . . . Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process transforming the very fabric of society (quoted in William B. Rubenstein, Since When is Marriage a Path to Liberation? Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Law [NY: New York Press, 1993], 398, 400.).

In the minds of such, it is Christianity (and religion, in general) that stands in the way of this social transformation. Therefore, it is only natural that as SSM gains traction, there will follow a suppression of religion and persecution of the religious. Harvard professor of law Mary Ann Glendon acknowledged this real consequence of legalizing same-sex marriage. She writes:

Religious freedom, too, is at stake…. Every person and every religion that disagrees will be labeled as bigoted and openly discriminated against. The ax must fall most heavily on religious persons and groups that don’t go along. Religious institutions will be hit with lawsuits if they refuse to compromise their principles (Mary Ann Glendon, “For Better or for Worse? The federal marriage amendment would strike a blow for freedom,” opinion post to online editorial page, The Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2004).

Under unrelenting pressure from this despotic minority, Western nations have already begun to criminalize and suppress any public criticism of homosexuality, encroaching upon our most fundamental rights of conscience and free speech.

In British Columbia, Dr. Chris Kempling, a school counselor, was suspended without pay for three months in 2005 for writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper criticizing the Liberal government’s same-sex marriage legislation. In 2006, Canadian professor David Mullan was fined $2,100 by Cape Breton University, after he told a student homosexuality was “unnatural.”

In January of last year, Christian Vanneste, a member of France’s ruling party, was fined almost $4,000 under French hate speech law for comments opposing homosexuality. What was so egregious? Vanneste dared to suggest that homosexuality was “inferior” to heterosexuality and said the practice would be “dangerous for humanity if it was pushed to the limit.”

Last year, the Brazilian Association of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transvestites, and Transsexuals (ABGLT) filed a criminal complaint against Christian activist Julio Severo and the National Vision for Christian Awareness for inciting “hatred” against homosexuals, and “homophobia.” The complaint was made because Severo regularly denounces homosexual behavior as immoral on his Web site, and opposes the goals of the homosexual movement. Severo and his ministry were successfully prosecuted simply for denouncing homosexual behavior as sinful during a campaign to promote family values. As a result, the ministry was ordered to cancel its campaign and all related events.

In America—the land of the free—a Christian photographer who declined to photograph a same-sex “commitment ceremony” was hauled before the New Mexico Human Rights Division (NMHRD) in January of this year. Elane Photography turned down the job because their beliefs were in conflict with the message communicated by the ceremony. The same-sex couple filed a complaint with the NMHRD, which is now trying Elane Photography under state antidiscrimination laws for sexual orientation discrimination.

Last year, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course at San Jose City College, was fired for answering a student’s in-class question about heredity and homosexual behavior. Apparently professor Sheldon did not offer the student the “right” answer. Marcia Walden, a licensed counselor at Computer Sciences Corporation in Atlanta, was fired after she chose to refer a person seeking counsel in a same-sex relationship to another colleague. The New Jersey Division on Civil Rights threatened to prosecute the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association of the United Methodist Church after it refused to allow a same-sex civil union ceremony at one of its worship facilities. Students in Boyd County, Kentucky, were threatened with “suspension” and the “possibility of court referral” if they publicly voiced moral objections to the school’s diversity training, which normalized homosexual behavior. A Christian high school student in Michigan was suspended for refusing to remove an “I’m Straight” sticker from his t-shirt when other students were wearing duct tape over their mouths to show support for the pro-homosexual National Day of Silence.

And in a most ludicrous act, Christian publishers Zondervan and Thomas Nelson are facing a $60 million federal lawsuit for publishing “homophobic and prejudicial” translations of the Bible, from a man who claims he and other homosexuals have suffered based on what the suit claims is a misinterpretation of the Bible.

These are just a minuscule sampling of the many actions emerging as the push for SSM gains momentum. This is nothing less than tyranny and injustice under the banner of tolerance and acceptance. With the advance of the SSM movement there has followed an increased tyranny of the state—a concept unthinkable in America—and yet this is one predictable consequence of imposing a moral value that is in contrast to moral truth and the human conscience.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

All right, you say, so cohabitation is a poor substitute for marriage and may even undermine those marriages preceded by cohabitation. But how does allowing persons of the same sex to marry harm the institution of marriage? As advocates of same-sex marriage (SSM) are quick to point out, “the sky hasn’t fallen” since SSM became legal in Massachusetts in 2004, apparently convinced that four short years is adequate to produce the predictable and deleterious public consequence of redefining marriage. Remember, however, that Unwin’s research demonstrated that the effects of such modification would occur over generations and not be immediate. Nonetheless, there is some empirical evidence already emerging that indicates the acceptance of SSM will, in fact, harm the institution of marriage and, subsequently, society.

Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, reported in April of 2004 before the House Judiciary Committee that there is ample evidence available in Scandinavia demonstrating the effect of devolving marriage to include couples of the same sex. Dr. Kurtz holds a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University and is regarded as both an excellent scholar and expert in this area. Commenting on the situation in Sweden, Kurtz writes:


Indeed, in Sweden the out-of-wedlock birthrate is 55 percent, Norway is 50 percent, Iceland is approaching 70 percent, and in Denmark 60 percent of firstborn children are born out of wedlock. So what? you ask. So cohabitation has replaced marriage, big deal; men and women are still having children, only without the formality of a marriage certificate. What’s the problem? According to Dr. Kurtz, studies in these countries demonstrate that these unmarried families break up at a rate two to three times that of married couples. This has only exacerbated the welfare state that is unparalleled in Scandinavia. Kurtz points out that “no western nation has a higher percentage of public employees, public expenditures, or higher tax rates than Sweden.”

And what does this have to do with SSM? All of the Scandinavian countries mentioned embraced de facto same-sex marriage, beginning with Denmark in 1989. The out-of-wedlock birth rates mentioned experienced their most dramatic increases in the decade following the acceptance of SSM in these countries. The separation of marriage from procreation and parenting was already increasing, as it is here; SSM only widened the separation. “In Scandinavia, gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood is acceptable” (Kurtz, “The End of Marriage”). 

Dr. Kurtz offers further insight into the connection between cohabitation, rising out-of-wedlock birthrates, and same-sex marriage:


Kurtz concludes by saying, “This suggests that gay marriage is both an effect and a cause of the increasing separation between marriage and parenthood. As rising out-of-wedlock birthrates disassociate heterosexual marriage from parenting, gay marriage becomes conceivable” In essence, SSM is simply the extreme and final step in a culture’s descent from absolute monogamy.  

Again, if marriage is only about a relationship between two people, and is not intrinsically connected to procreation and parenthood, why shouldn’t same-sex couples be allowed to marry? As Kurtz points out, “it quite naturally follows that once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage, procreation and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with.” The die will be cast and the effects inevitable.

Furthermore, gay marriage has not strengthened the institution of marriage by promoting fidelity and commitment among gays in Scandinavia, as some suggest it will do here. In fact, take-up rates on gay marriage are exceedingly small. Yale law professor William Eskridge (an advocate for gay marriage) acknowledged this when “he reported in 2000 that only 2372 couples had registered after nine years of the Danish law going into effect, 674 after four years in Norway, and only 749 couples after four years in Sweden” (Kurtz, “The End of Marriage”). Here again, Kurtz is helpful in illuminating our understanding:


While the sky may not have fallen, effects that have historically taken generations to produce have already begun to manifest within just twenty years of the acceptance of SSM in Scandinavia, the first nations to risk their future on this perilous social experiment.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

Comment on this article here

Subscribe to Michael's weekly commentary here

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.