The Christian and The Culture War

As Christians seek to be ‘salt and light’ in our American society, we have become in engaged in a political story which we have written our own part.
This story which we Christians have written involves us in the much touted “Culture War.” We Christians (Republicans) composed a life and death struggle to re-capture our culture. Proponents of this idea have scripted ‘Christians’ in political activism that aims to ‘Christianize’ our nation through the political system through instituting values-based legislation.
As happens in many stories, our part is a thread of a larger history. “The term culture war is a literal translation of the German Kulturekampf, the name given the struggle between the governments of the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church.” (Wikipedia, “Culture war”, 11 May 2007). However, it is Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) that provides the theoretical framework of the current political struggle in the United States:

“Gramsci argued that the failure of the workers to make an anti-capitalist revolution was due to the successful capture of the workers' ideology, self-understanding, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling) culture. In other words, the perspective of the ruling class had been absorbed by the masses of workers. In "advanced" industrial societies hegemonic cultural innovations such as compulsory schooling, mass media, and popular culture had indoctrinated workers to a false consciousness. Instead of working towards a revolution that would truly serve their collective needs, workers in "advanced" societies were listening to the rhetoric of nationalist leaders, seeking consumer opportunities and middle-class status, embracing an individualist ethos of success through competition, and/or accepting the guidance of bourgeois religious leaders.” (Wikipedia, “Cultural hegemony”, 21 May 2007)”

James Davison Hunter’s book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, identified some defining themes of the current culture war in the United States: abortion, gun politics, and separation of church and state, privacy, homosexuality, and censorship issues.
Our society’s Mass Communications are very real danger to our society because of the influence on culture that the news media, movies, and advertising are having on our minds. The prevailing control of the liberal-radical movement in these media is seen the practical outworking of Gramsci’s theories. However, it is not right for Christian leaders to blaze the way for a new American political Promised Land. John MacArthur observes:

“God simply is not calling us to wage a culture war that would seek to transform
our countries into ‘Christian nations.’ To devote all, or even most, of our
time, energy, money, and strategy to putting a façade of morality on the world
or the appearance of ‘rightness’ over our governmental and political
institutions, is to badly misunderstand our roles as Christians in a spiritually
lost world.”

Also, MacArthur quotes, John Seel from The Evangelical Pulpit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993):

“A politicized faith not only blurs our priorities, but weakens our loyalties.
Our primary citizenship is not on earth but in heaven. . . . Though few
evangelicals would deny this truth in theory, the language of our spiritual
citizenship frequently gets wrapped in the red, white and blue. Rather than
acting as resident aliens of a heavenly kingdom, too often we sound [and act]
like resident apologists for a Christian America. . . . Unless we reject the
false reliance on the illusion of Christian America, evangelicalism will
continue to distort the gospel and thwart a genuine biblical identity.
American evangelicalism is now covered by layers and layers of historically
shaped attitudes that obscure our original biblical core,”

As the church continues to listen to the voices calling it to ‘re-capture’ our society for Christ, it will regress to a place where it is no longer the church, but an unholy interest group engaged in ‘cultural renewal’ instead of individual New Birth.