Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my eighty fourth episode. Tonight I want to put forward a proposition. I want to do my best to keep it out of the domain of complaint and in the domain of nuanced argument. I’m going to keep this focused on American churches although it probably applies to many other churches as well. Primarily, it is a proposition regarding attitude. It’s not so much about the active humanitarian work of the church. I want to preface this by saying that it does not apply to every single church. God knows there are bright spots out there. We actually can’t know how bright they are – it’s impossible to tell how terrible the world would be if the Spirit-filled churches didn’t exist. This is because a tragedy averted always goes unnoticed. So don’t misunderstand me by thinking that this message is for every church everywhere.
The proposition is this: American churches are painfully unaware of the cost they are going to pay for prioritizing themselves against the broader society. Congregations all across America are too busy playing at church while the pillars of society are eroded away. Congregations all across America are stubbornly refusing to be in the world and to understand the world because being in the world and understanding the world takes them outside of their church. Now remember I’m not addressing outreach activities here. I’m specifically focused on the church not taking the world seriously and not attempting to understand it. The consequence of this inattentiveness is that huge portions of the population are being deceived by propagandists who are peddling a fatal worldview.
It’s not that the secularists have the better argument. It’s not that the truth is on their side. It’s that they are the only ones doing the job. They are the only ones providing a conceptual framework of life for the youth. They are the only ones among the adults who are bold enough to stand firm in the arena of ideas. They are the only ones who know why they believe what they believe – and thus they are the only ones who believe with conviction and zeal. Far too many churches are readily accepting the trade of turning a blind eye to the culture as long as they are free to hide in their sanctuaries. They are protected by laws that provide for freedom of religion. But they don’t realize that a law is only as good as the population’s willingness to follow it. The Constitution ceases to be the supreme law of the land when enough citizens cease to believe that it ever was. Belief structures are not instantiated from the top down. You can’t change collective belief by winning elections and making laws. Beliefs emerge from the bottom up – out of individual influence.
The church is there to complain and to put up resistance when the culture shifts away from them. But by then it’s already too late. Abortion is not a hot button issue because of it’s legality. Abortion is a hot button issue because so many individuals want to get abortions. Marxism isn’t reemerging because of its conceptual superiority – it’s reemerging because so many individuals want Marxism. Half of all marriages aren’t ending in divorce because marriage is obsolete – half of all marriages are ending in divorce because so many individuals want divorces. Congregations all across America outsource the the blame for these cultural shifts on to the malignancy of a fallen world. But I say to them at this moment: if you want to know who to blame for the loss of your society – you need only look in the mirror.
How do I know this is true? Because I’ve looked at many, many churches. And I’ve also been to secular universities. I’ve experienced both territories and I can tell you that the desire to shape and train individuals is hyper-collected at the universities. They are activist factories. But not the churches. The churches are more interested in how they can build and maintain an organization that serves themselves. They’ve put all of their faith in the church and their church family instead of in God and His mission. Their mission is to gossip and form alliances inside of the political microcosm of the small town American church instead of going out into the world and shaping individuals. They do not desire to hear messages that challenge them to learn and to grow – they want messages that reaffirm their misapprehensions about themselves and the world. They don’t want to be told that their future depends on them having the faith to sacrifice. They want to be told that because of Christ’s sacrifice they are free to depart from Him without consequence. They don’t want to be told that each new generation imparts the responsibility of preserving the truths of the previous generation. They want to be told that because of God’s sovereignty, the Great Commission was never actually their commission.
What is causing this? Is it laziness? Is it malevolence? It might be some combination of those two things. But I think the major cause is bad teaching. The church has utterly failed in teaching the congregation how to love their neighbor as themselves. Political correctness is the natural consequence. We go on and on about individual sovereignty and the dangers of group identity. But when church members see an individual with minority characteristics, how often to do they impose a group identity onto that individual? And if you’re that person, what happens if everywhere you go people are refusing to look at you as a unique individual and instead insist on categorizing you into a group? It’s no wonder you would push for political correctness. The church has been plagued with the misbegotten idea that maintaining moral absolutes is equivalent to shunning individuals who fail to meet those absolutes. Did Jesus shun them or did he dine with them? Furthermore, If you want to see someone who fails to meet those absolutes – go look in the mirror.
Does this mean that all people who advocate for political correctness are virtuous and just want to be loved? Definitely not. Like all cultural movements, political correctness has attracted serpents whose sole interest is power at all costs. These are the ones who have commandeered the ship of compassion and loving your neighbor. They’ve created a false god out of equality and they are willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to advance their designs. You know, Himmler rationalized the mass murder of Jewish children by saying that letting them live would allow them to turn into vengeful adults who would in turn threaten German children. Himmler’s quote “compassion” permitted him to give the order that put bullets into the heads of children age 14 and under. Listen to me very carefully: you can rationalize anything that comes into your dark imagination by claiming to do it for love and compassion.
What kind of response do I get when I talk about these things to American churches? They say: We don’t want to talk about that. Your sermons are too complicated for us. I don’t think I can get anything from you. This is not what I’m used to hearing in church. We’ve decided to listen to someone who meets our needs better than you do. Now I realize I’m getting dangerously close to the territory of complaining, but hear me out. Of course you never want to leave people behind by failing to explain complex ideas properly. But I’m not sure explanation is the problem here. Sometimes I’ll ask these churches to do a thought experiment. I say to imagine if I announced at the beginning of the message that I have $30,000 that I will give to each person who accurately summarizes my sermon back to me when I’m finished. How many of these self-described “simple minded people” would immediately turn into scholars? I think many, if not most.
So why do people desire to remain dull and ignorant? Because when you play dumb nothing is expected from you. The Scripture says, to whom much is given much will also be expected. I think everyone knows this deep inside of their being. I think this terrifies them. But I would say that if they are terrified by this then they’ve missed the whole point of the gospel. Christ went the cross so we wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore. So we could love God with all of our mind, heart, soul, and strength and without fear of making the stupid mistakes we are guaranteed to commit along the way. Let me make this clear: I am a sinner. I struggle with sin. I am not a saint. And even so I wake up every day doing the best I can to hunt down God and understand His will for me. This is not about being perfect.
Many people inside and outside of the church are talking about tolerance and loving yourself just the way you are. But the people who say this have yet to even accept themselves the way they are. They haven’t even accepted the fact that they are malevolent, ignorant, full of bias, and have shameful vulnerabilities. You know they haven’t accepted this because their fundamental claim is based on being perfect just the way you are. And why do they need to believe they are perfect? Because they refuse to have faith in the One who forgives them for being imperfect. Their guilt prevents them from taking on the humility necessary to see that maybe they’re wrong about a lot of things and they need to make changes. Maybe they should drop their assumptions and start listening to every single person as if that person knows something they don’t. These are the churches who haven’t had a new member in years. These are the churches who can’t make even nominal moves toward advancing the Kingdom without turbulent infighting and resistance to change by constant recourse to the excuse of this is the way we’ve always done it.
Why are people so afraid of change? Why are people so afraid to learn and to grow? Because both of these things are painful. Both of these things are like little deaths and rebirths. Just think about this with me. You actually can’t learn anything new without putting to death the version of yourself who existed before you learned that new thing. You can’t march forward without saying a permanent goodbye to the past. This is where the faith to sacrifice comes in. You don’t like hearing the sermon that causes you to learn and to grow? Suffer it anyway on faith that your new understanding will protect you from what’s coming in the future. You don’t want to reach out into the neighborhood to bring new people into your same old church family? Do it anyway on faith that the person you bring inside will find Christ and be saved instead of one day finding you on the outside and committing armed robbery. Stop hiding from the world. Go out into the world and imitate your Creator in your attempts to redeem it.
My proposition is that the American churches better wake up. Make no mistake, we are all standing on the bloody sacrifices of our ancestors. Before 1895, the average person lived on less than a $1.00 per day in today’s money. Everyone was poor. And not the same kind of poor as modern people who send tweets about being oppressed from their iPhone X. These people didn’t have toilets. These people didn’t have refrigerators. These people used the same dirty bath water over and over. These people died long and painful deaths because they had no anesthetics. Why does that matter to you? Because half of the country is ready to dispose of the economic system that brought you all of these luxuries.
Move forward into the 20th century and you have 18 year old soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy even though they knew they were charging into near certain death. Why did they do this? Was it just out of necessity? Or was their worldview different than ours is today? After the towers fell in 2001 America stood united in an effort to defeat terrorism. Do you think the same response would happen now? Or do you think one side would lay it at the feet of the other – and use the death to jockey for power? People keep saying that the world is changing – but it’s not the world that is changing – it’s us. Where does this road go? If you believe Scripture, self-indulgent societies who had become too powerful to have anything to do with God faced judgment. Are you sure you want to place your bet on us not being subject to those rules?
So far I’ve done a lot in this episode to identify problems. I never like to point out problems unless I can also suggest solutions. I think the solution to all of these problems is actually quite simple. Let me tell you a story first. I spent several weeks laying out all of these propositions to a church once. I discovered that people were getting exceedingly frustrated because the issues were cutting them deep but they just didn’t know what to do about them. It was at that point that I reassured them that we are doing what we need to do right now. We are having a conversation about the things of God and the things of the world.
You only need to know two things in order to be salt and light and preserve a society. You need to know God and you need to know the world. You cannot begin to act properly in the world if you aren’t operating on an accurate understanding of the world. Too many churches think that if they just blind-cast religion into secular society people will latch on. This is not true. If you don’t care to understand secular people, do you really love them? And if you don’t really love secular people, can you blame them when they reject your leadership? Every church in America should be having deep dialogues about culture and politics. And you’ll hear church leaders say, I stay way from the world and from politics. But there’s a problem with that. The problem is that culture is downstream from belief and politics is downstream from culture. The Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher said, Allow me to write the songs of a nation – I don’t care who writes it’s laws. He understood that politics follows the culture. Laws are worth nothing if the people aren’t willing to respect them.
The culture is powerful but the culture is predicated on belief. A culture really is just abstract patterns of people acting out their belief system. So issues of culture and politics are not cultural and political – they are theological. For example, most people in America say God bless you when someone sneezes. Why do they do this? Because the culture has marked it as polite. But that’s not why people first started doing it. Saying God bless you when someone sneezes is a custom that reaches at least as far back as Pope Gregory I of Rome. During the bubonic plague, the Pope ordered people to bless and pray for others if they sneezed in the belief that it would prevent them from being overcome by the plague. So it started as a belief, then it got instantiated in culture – and now most of us do it without knowing why we do it. This is true of most of our societal norms. We practice them without really knowing why they are there.
Then along comes a generation who asks why we need to practice these norms at all. This was a good question that should have lead to growth but alas, the church was sleeping when the questions were asked. But you know who wasn’t sleeping? The activist professors at the secular universities. They saw their opportunity and the propaganda began to flow. You only follow these norms because the patriarchal establishment wants to keep you under their boot. You’re going to graduate with a mountain of debt and no job not because of bloated administrations and useless majors – but because the evil capitalist is taking advantage of you. Marxism failed all over the world every time it was attempted but that was only because we weren’t the ones in charge of it. None of that was real socialism. We are the saviors and we can perfect the world if we tear down civilization and rebuild it in our own image.
The church fell behind on this generation and when they awoke from their complacent slumber – they looked on shocked and confused. What is the world coming to? How could it ever get this confused? What is wrong with these people? Surely, it can’t get any worse than this. Oh it can and it will unless we reform the way we think about the outside world. I can forgive the church for these mistakes – we must forgive the church for these mistakes. These mistakes are in the past. But we exist in the present moment and if we fail to learn from our mistakes we are in great danger.
Let me lay out just one example. Take a look around you right now. How many items are in your surroundings that you can remember once costing a fortune to purchase? For some of these things it seems like you couldn’t even give them away today. They are certainly inexpensive enough for the common person to enjoy. But they only got that way because there was once a wealthy person who was willing to pay top dollar to buy it. This person’s top dollar went into funding the research and development of yet more advanced items.
Rich people paying a lot of money for the latest and greatest has provided incentive for manufacturers to produce new things. This huge initial influx of money allows them to build mass production. Combine this mass production with the fact that these items become dated when newer versions come out and all of a sudden you have cars, air conditioning, iPhones, refrigerators, laptops, and many other luxuries that the common person now has access to. Because of this process, a modern person who has an entry-level middle class income has access to more luxury than John Rockefeller did.
This process will not work without wealthy people. And yet, there are legions of young activist types in the United States who want nothing more than to bring down the upper class. They’ve been deceived into thinking that the best mode of being is within an economic system that has no wealth inequality. They don’t realize that the reason Marxism eliminates wealth inequality is because it eliminates wealth altogether. This is just one example of a political ideology that has its roots in theological misapprehensions. If you don’t believe me that Marx was thinking theologically – let me read you a little poem that he wrote called Invocation of One in Despair:
So a god has snatched from me my all
In the curse and rack of Destiny.
All his worlds are gone beyond recall!
Nothing but revenge is left to me!
On myself revenge I’ll proudly wreak,
On that being, that enthroned Lord,
Make my strength a patchwork of what’s weak,
Leave my better self without reward!
I shall build my throne high overhead,
Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.
For its bulwark– superstitious dread,
For its Marshall–blackest agony.
Who looks on it with a healthy eye,
Shall turn back, struck deathly pale and dumb;
Clutched by blind and chill Mortality
May his happiness prepare its tomb.
And the Almighty’s lightning shall rebound
From that massive iron giant.
If he bring my walls and towers down,
Eternity shall raise them up, defiant.
If that’s not religious language I don’t know what is. It’s time for the American churches to wake up. We are not going to arrive at the solutions to these problems by way of elections. Theocracy will never work. It has to be bottom up – one individual at a time. It’s also true that the average person does not need to become an expert in all of the nuanced areas I’m talking about. All that we need to do is start having conversations. We need to use our churches as centers where we can delve into these issues together and try to make sense of them. Every individual is influenced by the people who are closest to him or her. This means they are influenced across time by thousands of conversations. Our population is losing the art of conversation. We are forgetting how to do it because we are more interested in pointing out how the straw man version of our opponent’s arguments is wrong and then running back to our hiding places. If we keep doing this then there is nothing left to prevent collective psychosis and a repeat of the tragedies of the 20th century.
Having deep dialogues and nuanced conversations is how we undo all of the pathological beliefs that are manifesting themselves as corrupt culture and politics. Prayer is powerful, but not when we are using it as an excuse to prevent learning and growing as individuals. In Scripture, every person who prayed to God also had to walk a path of development and maturation. They were able to accept themselves for who they were because they knew that by God’s grace they could march forward into who God meant for them to be. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, after Jesus sent a heartfelt prayer to the Father – He walked forward bravely to His own death. A death and a resurrection. The same thing that happens to us when we have the humility to enter into conversation knowing that we don’t know.
We live in a time where we can worship God freely and comfortably. We live in a time where amazing church buildings and organizations are possible. We live in the most free, most prosperous, safest nation the world has ever known. We are blessed beyond comprehension. Our world can stay this way if we have the humility to recognize it and maintain it – if we take up the responsibility of being good stewards. It’s not too late to prevent collapse if we will acknowledge that He has given us everything we need to do well. It’s not too late if we will accept that we are vastly ignorant and that we need to have conversations in an effort to figure this thing out. It’s not too late if we will suffer the discomfort of stepping out into the unknown because we have the faith that He is stepping out alongside us. I implore the American churches – we need to wake up, because it is not too late.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at http://www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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