It seems bizarre to me how the western, mainly evangelical Christian community sits so comfortably in the liberal democratic tradition.
The thinking goes that the more individually atomized or "open" a society becomes, the more freely the "simple Gospel" message can pass in between individuals, free of any other coercive cultural or religious structures found in pre-Enlightenment society. Ironically, when the Church is cleansed from public life, this is supposed to make the sharing of the Gospel of Jesus more fluid and effective.
You can see this attitude dominate in post-Enlightenment, Americanized Christianity. The Church no longer has any place on a societal or communal level. Society is now nothing more than atomized individuals, therefore the new concept of Church can never rise above the level of individual. In our society there is no longer a Christian Family ruled over by the husband, because this would go against the now sacred tenets of Liberalism, which dictates that a man cannot have any dominant role over a woman in any capacity. They are both equal individual units. The American Church (both Conservative and Leftist) now adopts this essentially satanic dogma into their way of life.
Privately, American Christians can say that they respect the Biblical hierarchy of man and woman, and yet they simultaneously promote a Liberal Democratic order which directly opposes such a hierarchy. This is just one example of many, but it really highlights the double-mindedness of American/western Christianity. In one sense, the Gospel message flows freely throughout the individualized west, and yet it flows within the confined spaces of an ideology that hates and rejects the Heavenly order that that the Gospel descends to earth from. ("...Thy Will Be Done, on Earth as it is in Heaven") And the same Evangelizers that spread the Gospel, turn around and promote the Liberal order as a result of divine providence, and a source of "Freedom" for humanity.
American Christianity wants to combine the Cross with the Statue of Liberty, they want to combine the ultimate hierarchy of Heaven with the perpetual revolutionary shattering of hierarchy via the liberal democratic order.
From what I am seeing, the Gospel of Jesus is inherently hostile to classical liberal ideology in fairly obvious ways. (not only the "Woke" liberal, but the "conservative" 18th and 19th century American style of liberalism also)... The Liberal Democratic order actively promotes the structure of sin (or the rejection of God's order)
I think many American Christians are beginning to realize this but just don't know what to do about it. There does seem to be a 'Reformation out of Liberalism' taking place.
What bothers me is that there are so many other (mostly Boomer generation) Christian leaders who completely drank the Kool-Aid on Americanism and believe that we basically inaugurated a kind of Millenial kingdom of God when America became a hegemonic power after World War 2. They have divinized modern individual American Liberty as a sacred force for good in the world, and the "Spirit of Democracy" as equal with the Holy Spirit itself. They made secularism sacred, which explains why our sense of morality seems to be dictated from the secular world now, instead of the church, (which now begs the secular world for its approval.)
In all likelihood, our way of life is so enmeshed with the liberal order, that it's probably going to take a major social collapse in order for the Church to come out of this. That seems to be the general pattern we see in the Bible as well. We aren't willingly going to give up our Liberty idols.
The thinking goes that the more individually atomized or "open" a society becomes, the more freely the "simple Gospel" message can pass in between individuals, free of any other coercive cultural or religious structures found in pre-Enlightenment society. Ironically, when the Church is cleansed from public life, this is supposed to make the sharing of the Gospel of Jesus more fluid and effective.
You can see this attitude dominate in post-Enlightenment, Americanized Christianity. The Church no longer has any place on a societal or communal level. Society is now nothing more than atomized individuals, therefore the new concept of Church can never rise above the level of individual. In our society there is no longer a Christian Family ruled over by the husband, because this would go against the now sacred tenets of Liberalism, which dictates that a man cannot have any dominant role over a woman in any capacity. They are both equal individual units. The American Church (both Conservative and Leftist) now adopts this essentially satanic dogma into their way of life.
Privately, American Christians can say that they respect the Biblical hierarchy of man and woman, and yet they simultaneously promote a Liberal Democratic order which directly opposes such a hierarchy. This is just one example of many, but it really highlights the double-mindedness of American/western Christianity. In one sense, the Gospel message flows freely throughout the individualized west, and yet it flows within the confined spaces of an ideology that hates and rejects the Heavenly order that that the Gospel descends to earth from. ("...Thy Will Be Done, on Earth as it is in Heaven") And the same Evangelizers that spread the Gospel, turn around and promote the Liberal order as a result of divine providence, and a source of "Freedom" for humanity.
American Christianity wants to combine the Cross with the Statue of Liberty, they want to combine the ultimate hierarchy of Heaven with the perpetual revolutionary shattering of hierarchy via the liberal democratic order.
From what I am seeing, the Gospel of Jesus is inherently hostile to classical liberal ideology in fairly obvious ways. (not only the "Woke" liberal, but the "conservative" 18th and 19th century American style of liberalism also)... The Liberal Democratic order actively promotes the structure of sin (or the rejection of God's order)
I think many American Christians are beginning to realize this but just don't know what to do about it. There does seem to be a 'Reformation out of Liberalism' taking place.
What bothers me is that there are so many other (mostly Boomer generation) Christian leaders who completely drank the Kool-Aid on Americanism and believe that we basically inaugurated a kind of Millenial kingdom of God when America became a hegemonic power after World War 2. They have divinized modern individual American Liberty as a sacred force for good in the world, and the "Spirit of Democracy" as equal with the Holy Spirit itself. They made secularism sacred, which explains why our sense of morality seems to be dictated from the secular world now, instead of the church, (which now begs the secular world for its approval.)
In all likelihood, our way of life is so enmeshed with the liberal order, that it's probably going to take a major social collapse in order for the Church to come out of this. That seems to be the general pattern we see in the Bible as well. We aren't willingly going to give up our Liberty idols.
