The American church is lazy. For far too many years it has rested on the power of the State instead of the suasion of the gospel message to enforce its morals and standards. That worked just great (outwardly at least) as long as the State saw eye-to-eye with the church on matters of human sexuality and sexual expression, marriage and family, abortion, Christian prayers (as if there is any other God upon whom one could call) in the public square, the education of children in the public schools, and so forth.

But something happened after World War II. Actually that war, and the one before it, changed just about everything in our culture. After a war that killed upwards of 50 million people and destroyed countless lives and entire cities, is it any wonder that many men and women emerged from that war disillusioned with all things religious?

The mainline churches had been proclaiming for years that we were about to enter the millennium of human peace, progress, and prosperity, and then the world experienced back-to-back world wars where the blood of the young, especially young men, was poured out on the soil like water, or like the drink offerings of ancient sacrificial rituals.

And the evangelical churches were little better. They, for the most part, sat in their churchly tombs licking the wounds they had sustained in their conflicts with the mainline ones. They did very little in the way of scholarship (look at what all that learning did for the skeptics of the mainline and for the Germans in general), They interacted cautiously if at all with other evangelicals (the risk of contamination you know), disdained the public square (they were all going to hell in a handbasket), and generally just sang the hymns of a more vital past, congratulated themselves on their doctrinal purity, and waited for Christ’s return when he would destroy everyone but themselves.

Into this vacuum created by a moribund mainline church and a fearful evangelical one stepped a defiant secularism. Religion had proved a failure, philosophy a ruse. The secular would create a new society based on two seemingly opposed concepts: radical individualism and collectivism. Radical individualism: my body, my choices. Abortion, birth control, sexual expression, music, dress, Anything and everything that restricted my individual choices will be rejected as old-fashioned, hegemonic, oppressive. Let Freedom Ring!

At the same time, ideas like nationalism, patriotism, ethnic identification and pride (on the part of majorities), were all seen as threats to the very survival of the race. War is hell, and no one knew it better than those who emerged from the shelters of WWII. So they created, on a grand scale, international institutions designed to restrict national identity for the greater good. Here come the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Geneva Conventions, the Warsaw Pact, and so on, and so on, and so on.

The changes secularism brought about were gradual at first. Bible reading disappeared from the classroom. Then prayers. Birth control as a woman’s choice, then abortion as a hidden Constitutional right. Laws against what had long been held as moral perversions were declared unconstitutional infringements on individual liberty. Finally, the bedrock institution of society, marriage, was radically changed. In the quest for individual freedom, gender, the most important identifier of our humanity after being human itself, is seen as a barrier to self-identity and is being “abolished” from public discourse.

And now the church finds itself floundering about looking for a foundation upon which to stand. That which was born countercultural has become culture driven. Having seen public support for its moral principles evaporate, it doesn’t know how to respond. It has absorbed so much of the world about it, it finds it difficult to impossible to resist it. It loves the world; how is it to say, don’t love the world? The modern church hasn’t taught its members to think and act biblically. Don’t blame the people in the pew. It’s not their fault their pastors are preaching on how to be financially successful, or how to make a success of that second marriage, or how important it is not to be critical of others life choices.

In more ways than one, this is the best of days for the church. This is even better than the times of the early church. We have, each and every one of us, access to the bible – our own bible – in more translations than we can ever read or study. We don’t have to rely on oral traditions passed from pastor to pastor; we’ve got the Word as close to the originals as we can get. We have access to commentaries, biblical scholarship, great preaching, bible study aids, all these things that, with the amplification of the Holy Spirit, are meant to make us strong Christians who can live the love of Christ in the world -any world.

So the church is no longer the alpha dog in the social pack. It no longer has the State to enforce its beliefs on the rest of society. It’s flabby, and it’s ill-informed. But it is not left an orphan. These are times in which the church can excell. It can excell because it has the Truth. And it can excell because its master is God Incarnate, the maker and ruler of heaven and earth.