Christian cultural dominance through weakness

The political arena is an angry place, where people contend with each other, for themselves and for their friends, over competitive goods like wealth, power, and honor. It is interesting, however, that Christians, the people whose Lord frees them from worry over these things (what we shall eat and what we shall wear) seem just as angry in their politics. Christians in America have been witnessing the loss of our historic cultural dominance, and we’re upset. But the political fury of the faithful is not in keeping with the faith we profess.

Signs of this declining influence have been with us for decades at least. In the 1980s, organizations like the Moral Majority and the American Family Association attempted to reverse the decline. But these efforts failed completely, as seen for example in last month’s Obergefell Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. Every “Keep Christ in Christmas” car magnet is a sign of this de-Christianizing culture.

By “Christian cultural dominance,” I do not mean a society in perfect conformity with the perfectly biblical faith. I mean only a people that assumes various things about what is above us, beneath us, and within us—God, heaven, hell, the eternal soul—and certain ethical norms, regardless of how often they are violated, and all this consciously understood as deriving from the Christian tradition. In a Christian culture, biblical motifs find natural expression in art and literature. Except in rare cases, when someone becomes religious, he starts going to church. It’s assumed. Evangelism Explosion with its diagnostic questions makes sense only in a context of Christian cultural dominance.

And cultural dominance is not a bad thing. We evangelize in the hope of many coming to know Christ. As God blesses those efforts, a predominantly Christian culture will naturally develop.

But we have been fighting to regain that cultural dominance as though it developed through political struggle in the first place. But it didn’t. It came by God’s gracious work in Christian witness: turning hearts to Christ one-by-one.

Perhaps God is positioning his church to rediscover the day of small things (Zechariah 4:10). God chooses the weak things of this world to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27) and to show his people that he is stronger in his weakness than man is in his strength (1 Corinthians 1:25). God triumphs over his enemies by the quiet working of his grace (1 Kings 19:12). God’s word to Zerubbabel was the same: “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit” (Zechariah 4:6). There is greater power in the quiet working of God’s grace than in all the thunders and earthquakes of electoral and media triumphs.

A gospel-infused culture and rulers who recognize the Lord as God and take their directions from His word (Psalm 2:10-12; Romans 13:1-6) are great blessings on the just and unjust alike. But the church of Christ must not put her hopes in them. Even in our cultural exile, we live trusting God will do great works through weakness and small things.