On the West & Christianity < TheoLogosSite: what Christians must know

If you take the time to skim the founding documents of the United States of America after reading Catholic literature, the influence of Christian ideas are unmistakable.

Granted, other documents (like the Magna Carta and Machiavelli’s The Prince) also contributed to it. The Framers deeply considered the role of the Protestant Reformation, the philosophical focus on “natural law”, and the present trends and ideas of the time.

But, all the above elements were influenced by the much older Hebrew Law and Jesus’ message of grace. Like any other created work, it’s hard to say how much came from the Bible because it filtered through the creators’ brains, and we presently can’t contact them for comment.

America’s presumptions, like with anything philosophical, are subtle, but critical:

People are innocent until proven guilty.
Everyone has inherent and inseparable rights.
Everyone is entitled to pursue what they believe makes them happy.

The implication of this is that capitalism runs American society, which lets everyone reap the reasonable consequences of their actions. Entrepreneurs can become insanely wealthy giving people things they want instead of pleasing the current dictator or becoming one themselves.

The risks of this tie closely to how far “reasonable consequences” goes. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, even at scale (1 Timothy 6:10).

Influencing

In ancient times, Christians were oppressed for following Jesus. Like societies before it, the Roman Empire declared that day’s dictator to be a god. By saying Jesus is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, you questioned Caesar’s authority and, depending on the patience level of that Caesar, committed treason.

Historically, with some debatable exceptions to when and how the Catholic Church ruled, this has been society’s standard. Jesus commanded you to follow Him irrespective of the design of the world’s government.

Now, in a society that often conforms to Christian values, the system itself has been rearranged. Christians in the West are no longer the oppressed minority: they’re rarely oppressed, and are often the majority in some groups!

The opposition between Western society and Christianity is now far removed from pre-Catholic days, and far more nuanced than the two-state political system under the Catholic Church and monarchy. The Age of Reason brought about a secularization of society, which has placed God into a vacuum away from everything else. The culture has become so granular that a non-scholar wouldn’t be able to tell much of a difference between many Christian and non-Christian thoughts.

In a roundabout way, by creating a Constitution that gave unprecedented civil liberties within a comparatively low-corruption constitutional republic, people have used the Bible to transform politics for the better. This has generally created positive feedback loops for civil liberties everywhere, but with the afterbirth of Leftism.

Perverted

Western society has been deeply influenced in various ways by the truths in Scripture, but has also, in turn, influenced believers:

The United States was founded on rebellion. If you read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a set of colonies was able to successfully rebel against their leadership based on the broad belief that self-rule was God’s right for everyone. They’re the only nation in history to create a uniquely new political system after fighting off a larger outside force.
Modern technology (especially in logistics) has developed very fast in the past few centuries compared to before, and it’s empowered the USA to expand its power dramatically and rapidly across a vast continent-sized geographical area.
World War II involved many world powers fighting for various reasons, but the takeaway story of Post-WWII US soldiers was that they contributed to defeating the Nazi Party of Germany, who was performing a severe genocide of the Jews. For the first time in recent history, an entire people group had a religious devotion to a secular cause: submitting their small part in the role of a large national apparatus, and Western reputations are still driven by very impersonal connections with massive entities.

These ideas have distorted the central political message of the Bible, and most American Christian culture has attached themselves to fashions and ideas that don’t belong in a healthy Christian life:

American entrepreneurial culture defines how to plant churches. Unless it’s a denominational reproduction, it’s driven by rebellion against existing denominations.
Most churches seek influence, so they tend to prioritize evangelism over discipleship to that end.
Christianity is a very personal way of life driven by close person-to-person interactions, but doesn’t typically express when a church’s leadership has Bible college requirements or borrow management principles from not-for-profit organizations.
Capitalism works as a social system. But, the entire reason it works is the tragedy of selfishness and greed. While many conservative-leaning Christians speak to how capitalism cures many of humanity’s issues, it also definitively shows our spiritual failings.
Our increased political freedoms have led us to believe we are responsible to discuss political topics in-depth. However, the only roles politics plays a role is in large-scale management and the upper strata of society.

On a broad level with large groups, trying to follow God’s will in Jesus’ name with the secular world can often cause more harm than good:

Laws that stop everyone from doing what they want to do (e.g., homosexual marriage, recreational drugs) never instill morality, but they can often become tyrannical (e.g., the Catholic Church 600 years ago).
Starting with the founding of the USA, there has been a strict separation of God’s personal presence in any form of government throughout the West, which was intentionally by design. The product of this was that some people obsessed about certain moral consequences that never mattered as much as their moral causes (e.g., the Hays Code instead of bringing back Christian parenting, Satanic panic instead of understanding the Satan as he truly is).
The best way to govern is with few rules, strongly enforced. The very essence of modern civilization complicates reality, meaning governing gets exponentially harder. Eventually, technology can’t maintain the required nuances to stay at least somewhat fair or effective, which is usually right before an empire collapses (e.g., Rome).

The rest of the Christian West doesn’t do much better than the USA. Very frequently, they express a type of hubris in their inaction, instead of acting in the faith of what they do see.

As it stands, “Christian” in the West is a form of polytheism, with various idols and pet sins that many claimed believers refuse to give up. Most believers in the West could profit from the admonition of Laodicea (Revelation 3:14-22).

Enter Leftism

The freedom to speak whatever you wish is a largely Western concept, and is relatively new across the lens of history. The Bible does not promise that this life will involve plenty of thought freely converting to spoken language.

However, people have had this freedom for literally centuries now, and have grown so accustomed to it that they expect this luxury in this world as if it were a necessity. Speaking freely is most certainly a right, but this world treats it as a privilege, especially when it inconveniences them.

The culture of Leftism is a social revolution, and their shared cause is, in their words, to “defeat all bigotry, discrimination, and hatred”.

However, when we consider what their ideas (and more importantly, their actions) encompass, history repeatedly shows leftist revolutions create the same predictable, unpleasant consequences:

The claim is to defeat all bigotry, discrimination, and hatred. These are difficult to define, feel easy to discern, and are more held together by a shared sentiment than anything in a dictionary.
With a vague definition and tons of passion, many people direct the deconstruction toward a fashionable “bigot, racist, xenophobe, homophobe, etc.” codex. The words and targets change around all the time, but nobody past or present is exempt if they work against the narrative of the Left’s leadership.
To defeat the “intolerant”, it’s not a matter of simply disgracing them, nor an act of learning from them on what not to do. It’s effectively rubbing them out of existence, also known as “cancel culture”.
The movement will remove any history that doesn’t conform to its “new way”, with all the lessons and ideas leaving with that rebellion against recorded history.
Over time, they will create intellectual movements that affirm their rebellion, such as critical theory or intersectionality. Those intellectual ideas will be difficult to follow behind a dense wall of jargon, but end up distilling into a specific people group being an antagonistic force and blamed for all of society’s problems.
If given enough power, they become a leftist coup intent on overthrowing any existing government, and from this point is indistinguishable from any other totalitarian or fascist regime.
Either people fight back and silence it (often including police and military) or the movement takes on an increasingly larger presence across years and decades.
After enough decay from forced information control (and therefore no new, creative ideas that expand the truths of human nature), the entire Leftist sociopolitical framework collapses.

In many ways, it’s a type of religion, and many times a cult, minus any concept of an afterlife.

Christianity’s value system portrays the cure for society’s struggles as being the individual’s growth outward into love for others. By contrast, Leftism implies that government is the cure for society’s troubles, and they have already taken control of most aspects of formerly Christian institutions (James 1:27):

Taking care of orphans and abused children has largely become the domain of child protective government services. It should be individual believers who love those children enough to be decent-enough parents, but it’s now overseen by a bureau instead of strong Church leadership.
Most widows, mentally disabled, and unemployed can get various forms of subsistence government money to provide for them instead of the Body providing for its own (Acts 2:45).
The only holdouts to this care are the foolish or formerly foolish (Proverbs 27:22) and the incarcerated or formerly incarcerated. Many Christians raised in moralistic denominations tend to imagine incarcerated and foolish as being completely the same, and that they’re too dangerous to associate with either way.

How to Respond

In practice, within American politics, the Christian’s mindset will create friction with any other political faction:

For those who can legitimately solve their problems (e.g., the healthy unemployed, those who can work but refuse to) a Christian will appear to be a hard-line conservative (2 Thessalonians 3:10-12).
For those who can’t legitimately solve their problems (e.g., the elderly, the disabled), they’ll align with extreme liberalism (Luke 12:32-33).
The enforcement of God’s justice will mean Christians will love fair rules like other conservatives (Romans 13:1-7).
At the same time, the hope for redemption and change means they’ll believe in exonerating repentant sinners (Matthew 18:21-22).

Leftism itself, however, is absolutely relentless. It always directs attention toward an enemy, then implies that the only morally just action is to destroy them without hesitation. Many Christians will often miss the hatred behind the jargon.

When the USA is morally imperiled, many Christians wait for the Rapture, but that’s a bad idea. We’ve already spent 25 lifetimes between now and Jesus coming back, and every prediction has failed miserably so far. How do we know that it won’t be another 10 lifetimes until He comes back?

Instead, we must focus on two major moments: now, and the Kingdom of heaven across eternity. The entire book of Acts is God’s example for how we must live as a society, and we must revert to it if we want to create any lasting, positive change.

All that we do must be done in love, but it may require firmness of conviction as well.

A. Don’t Forget What You Know

To stand strong in who Jesus is, we must maintain several key theological aspects:

The Bible is the inspired word of God.
Jesus is the Son of God, the prophecied Christ fulfilled through the Hebrew scriptures.
We must be “born again” to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Most Christian denominations start sliding when they take away from any of those three basic ideas.

B. Understand Them

As a Christian, you’re not responsible for things other people did, including your ancestors. You were bought by Jesus’ blood, and He wishes the same repentance and payment for every one of your persecutors.

If anything, you shouldn’t have any shame or guilt, but gratitude and joy. Any feelings to the contrary are the never-ending battle for your soul.

Very often, persecutors are traumatized past self-awareness of how much they’re hurting, and it creates a feedback loop:

Their unrepentant attitude will often continue to pile on more self-unawareness.
They will persecute others harder in their pain and self-inflicted habitual wounds.
If they finally reach a low point, they may repent and realize how much they’ve sinned.
If they don’t admit their sin, they will burn eternally in hell

In light of this, we should pity them more than fear them. We only have trouble until we die!

As Christians, our political views should spin out from our religious views, not the other way around. The Left, at its core, is practically a religion, and history has shown that all governments have a type of state-endorsed religion.

To understand them does not mean to agree with them. There is no ideological reconciliation with a leftist doctrine. It’s God’s Holy Kingdom, but without God, which makes it a false hope that’s utterly impossible to fulfill. At best, it’s good feelings without meaning, and at worst, is the vehicle for centralized control by preying on our desire for vengeance under the veil of justice.

C. Avoid the Hype

By the very nature of following Jesus, Christians oppose progressive movements. It’s impossible to obsess about fashions when you’re following an ancient God who wrote a book compilation that’s thousands of years old.

If we start becoming discouraged by the media we consume, we’re effectively falling into an addiction of fear and anxiety.

The large-scale events are beyond our influence, so they shouldn’t have much sway on us besides making wise strategic decisions.

If the news or social media is robbing your joy, it’s a sin to keep watching it.

D. Live Righteously

In this slowly privacy-shrinking world, we can’t understate the importance of living righteously. Your good works reflect God within you to those around you, but are also a character reference the court of public opinion can’t silence.

More than anything, we must focus solely on living a peaceable, joyous life:

Offending the rest of the world has always been the case for Christians, but is especially true in an Information Overload society.

E. Expect Conflict

People hate Western society because it was inspired, at least in part, by the Bible (John 15:18).

The people who voice their grievances are typically unaware of the lens of history, where a fraction of their complaint would have gotten them killed.
They often express their hatred as a practical matter, and they’re typically unaware of the spiritual connections their ideas connect to.

Be prepared for public ridicule. While the Left have strong rhetorical weapons at their disposal, they’re variations of the same antagonism as any other society that hates the God of the Bible.

The only significant difference between the Left and most other tyranny is how much government they can influence to their side. The Satan has become a bit more skilled across a few thousand years of practice, but it’s the same artful distortion of the truth.

If we’re speaking with the authority of God’s Word, it’ll rightly divide truth from lies and is guaranteed to create conflicts (Hebrews 4:12, Matthew 10:34).

F. Fight Leftism Correctly

As Christians, we’re called to love our enemies, which means sometimes letting them take advantage of us. However, Leftist culture requires us to be more shrewd than normal (Matthew 10:16):

Control your anger to avoid reacting inappropriately to conflicts you’ll inevitably encounter.
Carefully choose spoken words to avoid implying your pre-existing cultural background, especially in writing and recorded media. This can be very challenging if you closely involve yourself in one church denomination for a long time.
Sincerely apologize promptly and openly for any inappropriate or unloving actions or thoughts.
Reason together with the aggrieved about who is responsible and what to do about it, which will often mean defending the innocence of other past or present people not in the conversation. Much of this requires a solid education in history.
Some of them are very toxic and dysfunctional, so spend lots of time in prayer and fellowship to recover from the inevitable trauma their encounters will bring to your life.

There’s one simple strategy to shut down any spirit of rebellion:

Behave respectfully toward them, and don’t let their inappropriate conduct provoke you to impatience or anger.
Their responses will often force this/that answers, so do not directly answer bad questions.
Instead, ask straight down the middle for specific, concrete details of what they want.
- In effect, you’ve provoked them to examine what they stand for and why they stand for it, and it typically means they’ll have to reflect on some of their sins.
They’ll respond in one of 3 possible ways:
- State something which you can deductively demonstrate is impossible to satisfy.
- Go silent and leave the conversation.
- Personally attack you, either with language or physical altercation.

Above all else, never practice bad boundaries against leftism:

Don’t sidestep conversation topics leftists steer directly toward. Your power to say “no” is the only way to allow an equal power dynamic, especially about matters pertaining to climate change, race, abortion, gender/trans privileges, evolution, capitalism, and anything political.
Never apologize when you don’t mean it, especially if you’re afraid of what others will do to you. Leftist culture tends to harshly punish people who repent. If you’ve been targeted, you’re already guilty and can’t do anything to change that.
Don’t apologize for something you know you didn’t do wrong. Their battle and sense of injustice isn’t with you, but with their contentions with reality. They will destroy you to validate their perspective, then celebrate your destruction as a victory for social justice.
Don’t fight back on their level. While the world’s conservative movement may do it, your job is to be a representative of the coming Kingdom, and its only value comes through love. Plus, this world employs a “face-for-an-eye” attitude, so expect disproportionate public disgrace toward yourself compared to others who may have done what you did.

G. Influence Who You Can

A church must concern itself with the interests of the Body on a personal level (Philippians 2:1-4), and the design of how Jesus commands us to love means it can’t be scaled beyond one-on-one discipleship.

We tend not to think about the least people in American society (Matthew 25:32-45) because their seasons shift more than the historical context of the past’s poorest:

We are responsible for taking care of the people we provide for, such as our immediate family (1 Timothy 5:8).
Often, poor people with an unpleasant personality can be left without any support network whatsoever.
Even when a government check takes care of someone, there’s still a window of time before that check arrives, and bills often don’t wait.
In regions with a year-round pleasant climate, the homeless are nowhere near as needy as formerly incarcerated people (especially when they’re still facing re-entry or are unskilled) because they have a harder time holding down a job.
Many parents (especially new mothers after the baby came home) are absolutely overwhelmed and overworked.

Try to avoid social media. Unless a social network weighs an algorithm heavily against it, the majority opinion will be by the people who have the most time on their hands (and therefore are being the least productive). As a child of God, they’re not worth your anxiety or time unless you wish to spread the simple, redeeming, apolitical message of Jesus.

H. Don’t Trust the World

One element of human nature is that we trust the enemy of our enemies. However, by following the God of the Bible, we must never fully trust the fickleness of any person, including ourselves.

Our nature is rebellious enough that we’ll always have nation-states. Even at the End of Days, the leadership will be more of a committee than a completely unified force (Revelation 13:1-10), and the Left’s attempts at globalism are hopeless attempts by the devil himself to hasten that time.

Some groups (e.g., political conservatives) exploit Christians’ fears, especially if they’re media personalities or politicians.

Very frequently, they’ll use “Christian” as simply a placeholder for “moral“, and any Christians who advocate those ideas are typically diluting the Church’s culture in the long term.
Most of them don’t consider persecution as an inevitable product of the Christian life, so they often imply that Christians will lose their power to fight back if they don’t act urgently to support them.
For some political hot-topic items, we should have ethical issues with it (e.g., abortion). For others, it may be an important matter but does not have as much spiritual significance (e.g., gun control).
The decay of any empire is inevitable, and our interests should be more in God’s long-term goals than necessarily building toward any government-minded interests.

One of the most prominent discussions with political emphasis ties closely to how the West should view Israel:

Christians are essentially grafted into the Hebrew Messiah (Romans 11:11-14), so any broad hatred of Israel is absolutely inappropriate, though specific sins performed in the geographical area of Israel are certainly right to hate.
While God may act against nations who stand for or against Israel (Genesis 12:3), it has absolutely zero effect on our personal lives, and even the most God-hating nations will have some believers who follow the Hebrew who died for our sins (Revelation 7:9).
Given their relative geographical distance, the only thing we should really be concerned about, if we do have influence over it, is whether guns/supplies/troops are being sent to Israel or to Israel’s enemies to attack Israel.

We must judge with righteous judgment (John 7:24) to legitimately advance God’s Kingdom, which means not having fear or rage at what people are doing in this world. This may mean different things at different times:

Inaction as we wait for God’s will.
Building like mad to fight oppression.
Boycotting a devil-worshiping product.
Within a few weeks or months before an election day, thoroughly researching about candidates and voting based on what you know to be true.

It doesn’t mean rioting, causing insurrection, or becoming addicted to the hope in a politician. It also doesn’t mean being a jerk about your political values.

It Doesn’t Matter That Much

For all their accomplishments, the Enlightenment-era thinkers shared one precise failure of reasoning and human behavior that history has seen before it (with the Catholic Church and the Reformation) and afterward (with the Communist revolutions).

They had the overstated optimism to presume humanity could be morally restored on a grand political level without Jesus.

Jesus’ coming Kingdom is far removed from everything we see in this world, and it depends heavily on His presence as the head of a government’s administration.

Keeping people in control at a distance through the Holy Spirit is effective-enough for small groups, but the temptation becomes too strong for us in either direction (Proverbs 30:9):

When we acquire too much power, we forget God’s legitimate position on the matter, which is that He owns and can do whatever He wishes with everything we have and are.
When we have too little power to survive, we act out of desperation and sin through a plethora of unloving actions.

Therefore, Jesus’ presence is not sufficient in this fallen world, and He must be more physically present for humanity to make any legitimate, lasting social progress that spans generations. I’m not saying the Holy Spirit isn’t enough for individual faith, but that He respects our wills enough that He needs to be here to hash out some of the more persnickety political issues.

The entire American experiment depends heavily on good people in everyday life rising into positions of authority (i.e., “of the people, by the people, for the people”). There will always be corruption, but the system can keep working as long as that corruption doesn’t sabotage the processes that determine judicial decisions, law enforcement, and elections.

And, naturally, Jesus will return to a very fallen world, so any government that allows people to do a decent job at picking their officials must fail. Across the world, people will be so entitled that they’ll be happy to follow an anti-Christ instead of taking on the challenging work involved in running a political system.