Over the first weekend of November I attended the Post Tenebras Lux conference in Tacoma, Washington. I wanted to unpack some of the major themes addressed at this conference, because they get at the heart of how I think Christians should fight the culture war. The conference was billed as a series of talks having to do with the Christian response to living in the Negative World. Different talks described how we got here, where we are headed, and how Christians can be MORE than just a bulwark against inevitable societal breakdown. Underscoring all of this was the time my mother, who attended the conference with me, and I spent with my uncle and his girlfriend at their residence in Tacoma. Neither of them are Christians, but through many table talk discussions over delicious food, it became clear that they recognized the moral rot of our society and the need for a different way. This different way was the theme of the conference.
Provoke them to jealousy
One recurrent theme that fell out of the talks was one that anyone in ministry to Jewish people will understand immediately, but that will be surprising to many others. Christians should provoke the culture to jealousy. This is a principle that comes from the book of Romans.
- in order somehow to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them.
Provoke them and not just with how great our concerts are compared to theirs. Like the child without parents who gets invited over to the whole family’s house for dinner. This implies one thing, there must be a Christian culture. We need a culture in order to fight a culture war. But we have surrendered too much ground to the enemy and therefore many of our organizations start under losing conditions. They are fighting battles that cannot be won.
Truth and the Universities
This idea came out most poignantly when the discussion turned to education. Universities were started by the Catholics, and much of the Prostestant Reformation would not have been possible without growing literacy in Europe, spurred in part by the invention of the printing press and the dissemination of the Bible throughout the continent. Education is the battleground where Christians constantly lose, even if they homeschool. A majority of teenagers who grow up in church leave the faith when they go to college according to some research. Universities are known as hotbeds of liberal ideology in America. This has been conclusively shown through studies of the political leanings of faculty, but if you’re not convinced, then you can simply walk around your local campus and look for preferred pronouns, Black Lives Matter stickers, and pride flags to prove the point.
Christians must take back education and center it on the special revelation of God’s word.
See Vishal Mangalwadi’s work for more on this.
Christianity and Science
There also were wonderful talks by Dr. John West about the influence of Christianity on the rise of science in the western world. As a data scientist who seeks to put the science back into data science, I ate this talk up. While I was vaguely aware that Christians were very much a part of the scientific revolution, the influence of the Intelligent Design worldview was less apparent to me and became more clear during the talk. Frankly, under neo-darwinian assumptions, it makes no sense why we should trust science at all.
A Reformed Surprise
Another time slot that stood out was one given by Dr. Glenn Sunshine, host of the Theology Pugcast. Glenn is in the Reformed camp of Christianity but spent his time talking about prayer, spiritual warfare, and the need to re-enchant our vision of the world because the spiritual reality is the reality of the Bible, and the way that most of humanity has seen the world since recorded time began. It touched me that he a Reformed guy, speaking in a Reformed church to mostly Reformed people, was bold enough to touch on realities like the gifts of the spirit or even phenomena like demonization. It was refreshing and gracious, and ultimately the point of it all was to encourage Christians to a deeper reliance on God. For some of the items touched in the talk, I will point you to an episode of their podcast that I think is a great companion here.
The battle can be won
For all of our strategies, “if the Lord does not build the house, the builders labor in vain.” (Psalm 127:1)
I will leave you with a few short quotes, some of which I heard at the conference, and while short in length contain wisdom to help us discern the times.
Worship is warfare
The church can’t win a culture war without a culture
Politics is downstream from culture
Salt preserves but it does so much more: it flavors
To win America back, we must win the universities