A common practice in our day is for Christians to speak of the
culture wars.
By this they usually mean the political and cultural
skirmishes between leftist secular thinking and the more moderate and
traditional thinking of believers. But the problem is that the phrase
culture wars
is a particularly inept way to refer to this problem.
Culture wars
would indicate a collision between two distinct
cultures, but this is not what we have. Rather, we see intra-mural debates
within one culture, and that culture is the form of modernity. One side of
the debate is clear-sighted and wants the unbelieving assumptions
permeating that culture to come to a full and complete fruition. The other
side of the debate is confused, and wants to pretend that the culture
surrounding them is something other than what it is.
Our phrases right-wing and left-wing came from the seating in the revolutionary legislature of the French Revolution. The moderate revolutionaries sat on the right, while the radicals sat on the left. They had their debates, of course, but they were all revolutionaries. What they held in common was more fundamental than what divided them. Separated by a ravine, at tha bottom of the ravine they were still joined together. While Scripture speaks of a bottomless pit, a place of unending and horrible judgment, there is another bottomless chasm as well, a chasm which we must come to understand fully. This bottomless ravine is the divide between faith and unbelief — and nothing joins them at the bottom.
We are not currently in a culture war, but we do need to get into a culture war. But there are prerequisites. Before you can have a war, you need weapons. And before you can have a culture war, you need to have a culture. And this is the central problem that confronts Christians today as they look around at the cultural manifestations of unbelief. What we see is the outworking of the "faith" established in the Enlightenment of the mid-eighteenth century.