Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, and Mark Burns will not help you live well as a Christian in the modern world. Their political agenda silences any useful message of the Gospel to the secular world and forces their followers into cloisters with nowhere to go and nothing to talk about but a political battle and an attitude of “us vs. them.”
Don’t be surprised. From Pope Gregory IX, John Calvin and Martin Luther, many Christian leaders have attempted to push “Christ against culture”with catastrophic results. This however, for the Christian and the non-Christian alike should be no reflection of the realities of the Christian faith and the message of Jesus of Nazareth or Paul of Tarsus that brought the concepts of individual liberty into the world. Understandable is the hate for the sin of those who have led, but it would be unintelligent to ascribe the failures of some leaders to the platform they hid behind. “Religion makes good people better and bad people worse,” wrote H. Richard Niebuhr in “Christ and Culture”. “The difference between the radicals and the other groups is often only this: that the radicals fail to recognize what they are doing, and continue to speak as though they were separated from the world.”
Christianity and the secular world have lived well side by side for centuries, “Christ of Culture.” Larry Siedentop in his book, “Inventing the Individual” argues Christianity made the modern secular political world possible. The writings of the Apostle Paul provide an understanding of “Christian Liberty”, of individual conscience and convictions, of a moral responsibility to a