Cultural Free-Fall

Author:

Hank Hanegraaff

Article ID:

eNL160725

Updated: 

Mar 8, 2023

Published:

Jul 24, 2016

Cultural Issues


Our culture is in free-fall. Having long become acclimated to divorce, premarital sex, and cohabitation, we are finally witnessing the mainstreaming of homosexuality—fruition of the sexual revolution. The gay-rights juggernaut has advanced through film, television characters, sympathetic journalists, the American Psychiatric Association, the educational system, and antidiscrimination laws. Confirming the triumph of what was once considered unthinkable, only one year ago the U.S. Supreme Court declared a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The massive aftershocks of this moral earthquake have created a deafening rhetorical roar that is drowning out rational inquiry and stifling free speech with suffocating political correctness. No longer are we permitted to ask, Is homosexual activity normal? Increasingly, the question is becoming, Are objections to homosexual activity anything more than the self-righteous homophobic rants of the Religious Right?

And note how the movement cleverly seeks to disguise the absurdity of its positions by draping the obvious and commonsensical with pseudo-academic jargon and semantic sleights of hand. Before, we used to talk about gender identity disorder, but now it’s gender “dysphoria”—the idea that our subjective feelings (not the objective facts of biology) determine our sex.

As if that weren’t alarming enough, consider that as free love of the 1960s morphed into “friends with benefits” in the modern epic, 40 percent of births in the United States are out of wedlock. Worse still, there are the nearly one million abortions annually in the United States. To those who have eyes to see, we are witnessing the disintegration of the family, the very foundation of society. Lamentably, the average Christian is hard-pressed to defend the objective nature of marriage: the unique, permanent, and comprehensive union of two people—one man, one woman—the natural end of which is the bearing and rearing of children.

Is all lost, then? Well, not quite. Despite appearances.

For example, consider the darkest chapters in human history, when a small group of people, or even one person, decided to be a light and altered the course of history. Think of William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King, Jr. Clearly, one person can make an enormous difference. As can a small passionate, focused, and disciplined group.

You see, although we may vehemently disagree with their positions, we must grudgingly give credit to the LGBTQ community. Despite their relatively miniscule numbers, they have succeeded in transforming a culture while massively outnumbered by those of us who share different values. And because they had a ferocious will and disciplined and persistent organization, a tiny minority now wears iron boots and intends to crush all opposition.

Clearly, the problem is not pagans doing what comes naturally to unregenerate pagan nature. Rather, the greater problem is Christians failing to do what comes supernaturally to those with redeemed minds and sanctified wills. Put succinctly, our culture is in free-fall largely because Christians have failed to think and to live Christianly!

As Christians called to tread the way of the cross, we must never covet iron boots to crush opposition. Rather, we are called by our Lord to model a radical new way of being and living in which the light of truth and the beauty of the gospel beckon us toward higher ground, rather than mandating unquestioned obedience to a misguided narrative that, if unchecked, could well lead us into a Dark Age.

 

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