Winning a Lost Battle

Depraved Disney

This comes to mind as I reflect on Disney’s vocal, open protest against Florida’s new law that prevents elementary school teachers from talking about “sexual identity” with “their” students. Leave that up to parents, the law basically says – the necessity of which speaks volumes about our culture’s lurch into depravity. For most of humanity’s 6,000 years, such a law was unnecessary. The parent’s right of sovereignty was assumed. Up until about 30 seconds ago, we would have called people who wanted to talk with children about sex behind parents’ back “predators” or “groomers.” Our church even has a policy to ward against such people.

As I reflect on this, I also remember a visit to Disney’s Epcot center in Florida. There was an animatronic show that, if memory serves me right, was meant to celebrate “progress” in technology. There is a grandpa figure in the show, who undoubtedly is meant to picture Walt himself. And at one point in the show, his grandson finds a magazine that grandpa jokingly tells little Johnny never to mind – it was undoubtedly what grandpa’s generation would have called a “girlie mag” – pornography, smut. I remember my sister and I looking at each other like, “Huh? Where did that come from?”

Same DNA

It came from that culture. And that culture gave birth to our own. They are of the same strain, the same lineage. The child is like the parent. Oh sure, the child-culture today is more out there, more brazen, wearing purple hair with tat’s, and all that, but the same DNA is operating.

For instance, it was the baby boomer generation that celebrated its autonomy, to be and do whatever it wanted. This love of autonomy started long before them, with 17-century Rene Descartes and his “I think, therefore I am.” With that simple phrase, Descartes upended the foundations of knowledge, by saying that man is the starting point of knowledge, not God and the fear of Him. This is the fundamental sin – autonomy – which, in a world governed by God, is always from God. It was this autonomy that the serpent offered Eve in the Garden, and Eve accepted. And thus the individualism and autonomy of our present generation is nothing new – just the full flowering of what was handed down to them.

Now, the mistake that many Christians make is thinking that they could fight the culture wars while remaining good standing members of that fallen culture. But that has not worked. After all, as Christians are discovering to their great discomfort today, our culture will no longer tolerate Christian thought (ironically in the name of “tolerance”). You cannot wear the same uniform and yet fight against the uniform. You either get in line, or change uniforms. As soon as you start to fight the culture you’re in, you get spit out, and these Christians were not willing to do that.

But there is another ditch, which I fear my friend Roger has driven into. He has concluded that the only other alternative is to give up, raise the white flag, and join in the prevailing culture. He is not willing to change uniforms, because he sees that it has not worked. And, along the way, he has become too invested, academically, professionally, politically and relationally in the prevailing culture.

A Culture to Impose

What both kinds of Christians fail to see is that God never intended for us to fight any “culture war” without another culture at hand, to fight with. From the very beginning, God intended for His people to fight the prevailing culture means of an alternative culture. God has always been on a mission to impose a new culture, in place of the old. News flash: that’s what war is – one culture displacing another. Thus we cannot fight the culture without one of our own to take its place. The problem with our “culture wars” is that we have not been fighting with seriousness, as if we really wanted to win, as if we really wanted to displace the old. We didn’t want to be seen as that “extreme”, or to go that far.

Everyone wants to impose a culture – not a matter of whether, but which one. God has called us to impose His culture here and now, in Elk Grove. But by “impose”, God does not mean a holy war, nor does He mean for us to employ power politics, nor does He mean “be nice”. But He will displace the rival culture with His own. And that culture is already here, in microcosm form, in the church. The church is the “snow globe” of this new culture, that we may point to, and take refuge in, and be strengthened by, and be commissioned by and sent out from again. This was always God’s purpose for His people: to demonstrate and bring the good life that is only found in ordering one’s life and world according to God and His wisdom and grace.

It Started in the Garden

And God means to proclaim this and bring this good life, because of how everything got turned upside down in the Garden. Creation was supposed to be a hierarchy of man, helped by woman, exercising dominion over creation, under God. But this hierarchy flipped when the crafty dragon spoke to the woman, and the woman listened, and the man listened to the woman, and turned their backs on God. So Christ in his resurrection is the firstborn of a new humanity, and his Body, the Church, is meant to be a living parable of that resurrection life. We are his new “culture”, breaking into the world, proclaiming to the world that life is found here, amidst the chaos, darkness and pain.

Our culture is only producing the fruit of seeds planted a long time ago, seeds that were growing in the 1950’s. Disney is only now doing the Full Waltie, because its perverse agenda was always there, evidenced in that animatronic presentation. And this perversity was only there because Uncle Walt and his generation had already discarded God at the center of their being. As Paul writes in Romans 1: