Q&A: Call to renewal

Os Guinness is an astute cultural commentator and author or editor of more than 30 books, including Our Civilizational Moment. He is also co-host of Truth Rising, a documentary released on Sept. 5 online for free—with the intention of maximizing reach. In the first few days, more than 95,000 people viewed the 90-minute film. I spoke with Os about the themes in the film, as well as current challenges for American evangelicals. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.

Your film describes how you spent formative years at L’Abri in Switzerland under Francis Schaeffer. How did that shape you? L’Abri was truly revolutionary for me. I came to faith in January 1960, and there was a huge shock in evangelical circles in 1963 with Harry Blamires’ book The Christian Mind. He said the chief thing about the Christian mind was that there was no Christian mind. I was a student at the University of London. We were schizophrenic: We had wonderful teaching—Martyn Lloyd-Jones, John Stott, Michael Green—rich, deep blocks of theology. And then here was Swinging London: the Beatles, film director Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, the free speech movement. There was no link between them. Then came this unusual little man with a high voice and knickers and strange pronunciation of English words. But he connected all the dots. Francis Schaeffer taught us to think about anything and everything from a Christian viewpoint. I lived with him for three years, and I owe him an immense debt.

Speaking of shocks, we’ve seen ­dramatic changes in American politics. Is another shock coming? I think we’re in the middle of a profound crisis. There are a number of tectonic shifts happening. One is the modern and postmodern subversion of the Christian subversion of the pagan notion of power—the idea that power is all. You see this in Friedrich Nietzsche, whose last words in his last book were, “Do you want a name for this world? … [it’s] the will to power—and nothing besides.” Worldwide today you see the shift to authoritarianism and totalitarianism, to the so-called Eurasian landmass. We just saw Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un getting together—you can see there’s an anti-Western alliance. But the same crisis is in the West itself.

On the left or on the right? The obvious part of it is the left, where you have power in the state and cultural Marxism. But Christians need to be aware of the examples on the right in America too. Take, say, the present administration saying, “We want to make America great again.” They never say what made it great in the first place. Again and again, they’re trying to reassert American strength through power. That’s dangerous. We’re in a generation with a love for the strongman and therefore, eventually, for the strong state.

How instead should we reassert American strength? We need to go back, as followers of Jesus, to the Biblical, Jewish-Christian understanding. The Bible has a different view of power. The supreme example is the cross. What the Romans saw as a symbol of shame, utter degradation—the punishment reserved for criminals and rebels—Christians turned that inside out, upside down, made it a matter of glory. Why? Because God’s way of dealing with the world is not from a position of power. We need to understand the deep Biblical theology of power so that we are faithful to our Lord and not captured by the spirit of the age.

You say we are in a “cut-flower civilization”—we’re cut from our roots. When that happens, the flower eventually shrivels and dies. Unless there’s renewal. Take the American experiment. Go back to John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and many of the Founders. There’s a tie among faith, virtue, and freedom. I call it the Golden Triangle of Freedom: freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith, and faith requires freedom. Today, the Framers’ republic is on its last legs. The challenge is to restore it, but no one’s talking about that. “Make America Great Again” is always a matter of economy or the military. But America didn’t become great through economics or the military.

But you’re still an optimist? Secular historians have a cyclical view of history—decline always leads to fall. But decline and fall is not the Biblical pairing. The Biblical pairing is exile and return. Reject the way of the Lord, and there will be displacement, dislocation, exile. Adam and Eve were east of Eden. Israel was under Babylon. The Church, again and again, has been corrupt and decadent. I love G.K. Chesterton’s line: Looking at history, he said five times the Church has gone to the dogs, and in each case “it was the dog that died.” So, we have the grounds for renewal. Will there be renewal? Only the Lord knows. I’m wary of announcing revivals, but we cannot be pessimists.

Where are evangelicals today not having the influence they ought to? I think evangelicals are in a sad crisis today. There’s a huge part of evangelicalism that’s been politicized. The maxim is true: The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing. It’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the left that tried to make everything political. Evangelicals have now become toxic in the public eye because we’re seen as purely political. But we are the people of the good news—the best news ever. We’ve got to go back to exploring the greatness of that good news, and not tie it down just to politics. Politics is important, but we mustn’t make it more than it should be. That’s the way of being acculturated into oblivion.

Politics is not the first thing, but you would say it’s a thing? Yes, it’s incredibly important. But you’ve got to get churches, families, and schools right first—that’s where freedom is won and preserved. Then you’ll have a healthy politics.

The 2022 Dobbs Supreme Court decision overturned Roe v. Wade, yet individual states still allow the killing of unborn children. What charge would you leave with evangelicals tempted either to a wrongheaded triumphalism or a wrongheaded despair? Consider the difference between abolition of slavery and Prohibition. Abolition took nearly 50 years of intense prayer, apologetics, and political action—in other words, 50 years of persuasion. And then they passed a law that enshrined it. With Prohibition, Christians had the numbers, so they rammed it through. It was disastrous. There was no persuasion, only legislation. Dobbs should have called us back to persuasion. It wasn’t so much the question of states versus federal government—that’s a matter of American governance, important for freedom. The real thing is, we’ve got to do the persuading. We’re increasingly in a culture of death: We’ve got to make arguments for the sanctity of life. We’ve got to become persuasive voices again.