Nancy Pearcey is a former agnostic who teaches at Houston Baptist University. Her new book, Love Thy Body, has as subtitle “Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality.”

In answering some of these hard questions, she writes: “Human life and sexuality have become the watershed moral issues of our age. The daily news cycle bombards us with stories related to sexuality, abortion, assisted suicide, homosexuality, and transgenderism. A secular orthodoxy is being imposed through virtually all the major social institutions: academia, media, public schools, Hollywood, private corporations, and the law.

“The hookup mentality comes out of a Darwinian worldview that treats the human being as nothing but a physical organism driven by physical impulses. No wonder it’s creating a trail of wounded people. They are trying to live out a worldview that does not fit who they truly are. There will not be a genuine turnaround unless we address the underlying worldview.

“In the book I tell several stories of real people, like Jean Lloyd who wore a tuxedo to her high school Christmas dance, then lived as a lesbian for several years. Finally, she said, ‘I began to trust the One who knew the truth of my identity more than I did, who wrote His image into my being and body as female, and who designed sexuality for my good.’ To her own surprise, Jean writes, ‘a flicker of heterosexual desire emerged,’ and today she is married with two children.

“The right to life itself used to be a pre-political right, something you have just because you’re biologically a member of the human race. But the only way the state could legalize abortion was to rule that some humans do not qualify as persons with a right to legal protection. The state has claimed the authority to decide who has a right to live – based not on biology but only on its own legal fiat.

“Marriage likewise used to be a pre-political right, based on the biological fact of reproduction. But the only way the state could treat same-sex couples the same as opposite-sex couples is to redefine marriage as a purely emotional commitment – which is what the Supreme Court did in its Obergefell decision. The state has claimed the authority to define which emotional relationships qualify as marriage – based not on biology but on its own say-so.

“Christians need to recover their own heritage.”

Let’s be clear, life is not what the state declares it to be. Marriage and family are not what the state declares them to be.

Over the last century America’s Christian heritage and Biblically-based culture has been dismantled brick by brick. Secularists had come to the realization that the only way for Secularism to expropriate the culture established by the Founders was to de-Christianize and secularize America. Secularism can only take root in the absence of morality. Or as William Gairdner put it: “All revolutionaries quickly see that to change the social order you first have to change the sexual order.” Having started as a cultural revolution, the sexual revolution next became a legal revolution. [1]

In beginning to reclaim their heritage and culture, Christians must revive the Founders Mission Statement, known as the Mayflower Compact. Before debarking the Mayflower they signed the document that declared: “In the name of God, Amen. … Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, … a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid.”

A disparate opinion has emerged in the church over the last century, “You don’t polish brass on a sinking ship.” That viewpoint is counter to the eschatology relied upon by our post-millennial, 17th-century Founders. Many today “are drilled instead to believe that the kingdom work is the work of churchmen in their institutions (the sacraments) and that their ‘secular’ role in life is to be kind and ‘loving’ at work, to be a sanctified husband and father in personal piety and then pray for the return of Christ, and if possible, en route, snatch a few brands from the burning. The Holy Spirit in this view does not fully represent the Godhead in the earth today and is unable to equip the church to fulfill Christ’s final command to bear the message of salvation and the restitution of all things to the nations.” [2]

As we have drifted away from God over the last half-century, the greatest threat to freedom has become government, the de facto ‘god’. Barack Obama set the stage from 2009 to 2017, while Hillary was well on the way to ‘running the table’. G.K. Chesterton, the greatest English author of the 20th century, recognized a similar ruse in his day, “The Government did not have such power over us when it could send men to the stake, as it does now when it can send them to elementary school.”

Restoration will begin with small steps. “The transformation of culture, indeed the potential for the rebuilding of Christian civilization, that is possible through the re-establishment of the Christian family, is immeasurable. As the great Puritan, Richard Greenham wrote, ‘Surely if men were careful to reform themselves first, and then their own families, they should see God’s manifold blessings in our land and upon church and commonwealth. For of particular persons come families; of families, towns; of towns, provinces; of provinces, whole realms.” [3]

Solutions: [a] prayer, much talked about and practiced little, must be restored in America’s churches and homes; [b] spiritual resurrection.

Gideons and Rahabs are moving toward the public square in 2018. Godspeed.

David Lane
American Renewal Project

 

[1] Joseph Boot, The Mission of God, A Manifesto Of Hope For Society.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.