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I resonate with those who decry the disunity in our nation, and with those who discourage squabbling in our own convention. We devour each other daily. Calls for greater civility have become mundane, though. It’s as though everyone has made a call for peace and mostly meant to apply it to others.
We are right to think it’s dreadful. But let me offer a contrarian perspective: Division in American society may be the revealing of what’s always been true spiritually. An interesting article in the April Atlanticsuggests that American society has become more contentious because our culture has become our religion—with deeply held and warring creeds—but without grace and patience formerly infused in a more church-going population. For Christian Americans, a clear divide between those who believe God’s revealed truth and those who find the notion absurd is more overt now than at any time in our history.
Consider merely 20 years ago: Same-sex marriages were not recognized nationally by Supreme Court fiat. Gender dysphoria was considered a psychological malady rather than a privileged status. Twenty years back, the idea that a person could be effectively punished for his religion in the U.S. was much harder to imagine than it is with today’s Equality Act waiting in the wings.
All those things have changed. “Settled science” has reversed itself. Ideas recently on the lunatic fringe of corporate America are now doctrine in personnel handbooks. But maybe the sharpness of the divide between biblical Christianity and most everyone else can be a great blessing to us.
Times and places where the culture was outwardly Christian-ish made churches more at home in a society that did not share their biblical priorities more deeply than misquotations of “love thy neighbor” and “don’t judge.” Schools dared not plan events on Wednesday night, much less Sunday, because everyone went to church or claimed to. It made Christians assume some things about their communities and their churches that didn’t hold up to scrutiny. That pretense of respect for Christianity is far less common now. In fact, some today find it unacceptable that we believe, much less speak, some things the Bible says about God, man, sin and redemption.
We don’t have to call it persecution yet. Instead, consider that those who would cancel you for simply quoting hard passages of Scripture have noticed that what the Bible says is different from the world’s proclamations. A banished sermon has to be heard in order to give offense. We shouldn’t be surprised that the exclusivity of Jesus Christ is a doctrine that offends people, for example. At some point in the more comfortable past, we should have been anxious that no one was listening carefully to notice the implications of John 14:6 for those who don’t believe.
I have on an occasion been asked by a reporter, “Wait, are you saying that devout followers of [name a man-made religion] are going to hell?” They were listening to what Jesus said and to some degree understood what he meant! I think that’s good. In a small way we had that conversation of clarity at the SBTC this week. A tech vendor got partly into a project with us when one of its employees actually read some of our content. The result was a canceled contract after he spoke with one of us to hear more of what the convention stands for. It was inconvenient, but someone who perhaps had never heard the gospel read it and then heard it from a godly Baptist deacon at SBTC. I like the idea that those tech workers talked about us over coffee, even if they were shaking their heads in amazement.
Christians in the next decade or two in America are going to stand in increasingly stark relief to the culture, without regard to which party runs the country. We, and hopefully our message, will be noticed, even if we don’t always find the attention affirming.
Within the family of God, division is more distressing. Inside the fellowship of those who do believe what God has said, we fuss, as though we are Democrats and Republicans, over politically correct words or mask-wearing or presidential politics. That divide is not always clarifying. It is not a stark line between those who believe God and those who plainly don’t. Don’t hear me affirming a fight for its own sake; I am not praising those who are just mean and argumentative. All division is not the same; neither is all unity.
Unless you are cloistered, most of the people you know don’t have the hope of life in Christ and they won’t act as if they do. That’s always been the case, even when people have not been so proud to be unbelieving. Look at it as if darkness is more obvious, unmasked, now than before. We, the light of the world, must be unashamed to shine brighter in contrast. Some of our neighbors may notice that light for the first time.
