An overlooked mission field

Recent cultural shifts in the West that threaten our long-cherished values have begun to awaken some nonreligious people to the foundational role Christianity has played in their cultural heritage. Whether it’s Elon Musk fighting back against the “woke mind virus” or Richard Dawkins lamenting the ascendancy of Islam in the United Kingdom, so-called “cultural Christianity” has become a trending topic. Non-Christians now willingly adopt the “cultural Christian” moniker to signal their loyalty to some necessary religious identity as important to the future of Western civilization.

Of course, the Christian faith is not merely a means to improving society in this world, and so-called cultural Christians who find our religion useful but don’t believe it is true remain “children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Ephesians 2:3). We who confess Christ must not be naïve about where cultural Christians stand with God.

And yet, the current conversation about cultural Christianity should teach us an important lesson, namely that many unbelievers in the West (likely the majority) deeply value the cultural heritage that the Christian faith has given them. And that just might make them more receptive to the true gospel of Christ, if only we are willing to proclaim it to them. Now that we live in a time of cultural revolution, not only with the ascendancy of Islam in the West but also with the institutional dominance of LGBTQ progressivism, evangelicals must take notice of a mission field that our leading institutions have long overlooked: the field of normal people, perhaps non-Christian or nominally Christian, who are bewildered by the cultural chaos they witness daily.

As Aaron Renn has argued, evangelicalism’s primary “neutral world” (from 1994 to 2014) was marked by the “cultural engagement” strategy epitomized by many influential evangelicals. It was an effective strategy for its time, and it continues to provide enduring insights for mission work today. But it is an evangelistic approach largely framed as an appeal to urban people on the cultural left. As such, it tends to avoid direct confrontation with pressing moral and social issues (e.g., sexuality, abortion, etc.) lest it alienate urban progressives who might otherwise give the gospel an honest hearing. Practitioners of the cultural engagement strategy present a more balanced, thoughtful, engaged form of traditional Christianity to the urban world than the confrontational fundamentalists.

And yet, as “negative world” (from 2014 to the present) matures, the cultural left’s radicalization has accelerated. An urban progressive is often no longer a city dweller who is merely annoyed by his parents’ opposition to same-sex marriage. He may now be a nonbinary pronoun dispenser who advocates for puberty blockers for children, rips down posters of Israeli hostages held by Hamas terrorists, equates the slightest restriction on abortion with patriarchal oppression, cheers on dominant male swimmers in women’s competitions, and is passionately committed to the belief that drag queen shows can somehow be “family friendly.” He represents a morally twisted ideology that has little resonance with multitudes of “normal” people who have little cultural power and thus often go unnoticed.

The glorious message of the gospel is for all people, thanks be to God. And yet, contextualization matters. Churches in different contexts will be gifted to appeal to different segments of the unbelieving population (Galatians 2:9). Perhaps the main lesson we can learn from the cultural Christianity conversation is that there are likely millions of cultural Christians in our neighborhoods and workplaces who are, like us, appalled by the moral revolution they see unfolding around them and long for a return to normalcy. It is time for thousands of churches in the West to permit themselves to devote focused energy toward reaping new believers in that mission field. In contrast to the inherited cultural engagement strategy from “neutral world,” that will mean speaking more directly and confrontationally to the polarizing cultural issues of our day. We must show the masses of “normies” that they are not, in fact, crazy for thinking children’s genitals should not be mutilated and there is at least one institution in America today—the Church—that is willing to say so openly and without apology.

We cannot promise them a return to the 1990s—or the ’80s, or the ’50s. But maybe what we can say to our neighbors is that we resonate with their unrest and understand their longing for normalcy. That longing is a witness in their hearts, the voice of their Creator testifying to the moral order He established in nature that highlights their own sin and accountability to Him. And He is the very same Creator who now reaches out to them through His Son with the promise of forgiveness and new life. As Christianity recedes in the West and chaos takes over, we have a prime opportunity to proclaim to our normie neighbors that in the end, they will either have Christ or chaos, and they have already tasted the chaos.

Maybe, if the Church is willing to be more bold, direct, and confrontational toward the moral lunacy of our day, we will find that a field white for harvest is right before our eyes.