In the coming weeks, we are going to be learning a great deal more about the presidential candidates. But it’s also increasingly true that we’re going to be learning a great deal about ourselves as evangelical Christians in America. Perhaps we had better brace ourselves for what we’re going to learn.

In the 1976 presidential campaign, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, then the Democratic nominee, made headlines in the United States and around the world merely by granting a single interview. That interview was with Playboy magazine. The interview was a political bombshell. No major American politician had come within any distance of Playboy magazine. It was considered the iconic symbol of American pornography, and the very fact that a political candidate—not to mention the nominee of one of America’s major political parties—had granted an interview to Playboy magazine, seemed almost ..

Different seasons seem to bring different ambitions and opportunities for reading. Summer offers an excuse to read books we set aside in colder months, in hope.

Different seasons seem to bring different ambitions and opportunities for reading. Just as summer represents a season for rest and a needed change of pace, it also brings a sense of permission to spend time reading a stack of books you could not spare time to read for months. Add to that stack yet another — books strategically released just in time to be added to the backpack or book bag. This summer publishing season was really strong, with a significant number of books worthy of reading.

My summer reading stack has multiplied into stacks, but in this list I share ten that I have found particularly interesting, timely, and worth the investment of summer hours. As usual for this annual list, the books are non-ficti..

Paul yearns to see the Word of God, the gospel of Christ, race across the world, knowing that the Day of the Lord is coming, when there will be no more days left to preach.

If you want to know what people really believe, the philosopher Roger Scruton once explained, listen to them pray. It is one thing to ask a person what he believes, but it is another thing to listen to him pray. Prayers reveal the underlying theology. As the old Latin formula reminds us, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi — As we pray, so we believe.

I think we can safely take Roger Scruton’s point one step further. We learn a great deal about someone by what they ask others to pray for. That point draws me to the Apostle Paul, and to his prayer requests as found in 2 Thessalonians 3:1-5.

“Finally, brothers, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honored, as happened among you, and that we may be delivered fr..

The terms of moral surrender have been delivered to us, and they are absolute and unconditional. Just ask Japan and Germany what that means.

Now that the moral revolutionaries are solidly in control, what is to be demanded of Christians who, on the basis of Christian conviction, cannot join the revolution? The demands have now been presented, and they represent unconditional surrender.

The latest terms of surrender were delivered last week by Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. In a stunningly candid essay, Tushnet declared a total liberal victory and chastised his fellow liberals for what he called a “defensive crouch liberal constitutionalism” that is now outdated. With liberals firmly in control of almost every power base in the culture — most importantly, the federal courts — there is no reason for liberals to play d..

When the essential institutions of society are no longer respected, government demands that respect for itself. That is a recipe for tyranny.

For nearly two and a half centuries, Americans have enjoyed the enormous privilege and responsibility of forming our own government—a privilege rarely experienced throughout most of human history. For most of history, humanity has struggled with the question of how to respond to a government that was essentially forced upon them. But Americans have often struggled with a very different reality; how do we rightly respond to the government that we choose?

To put all of this in historical perspective, the Framers of the American experiment understood that a representative democracy built on the principle of limited government would require certain virtues of its citizens. These would include a restraint of passions and an upholding of traditional moral virtues, without..

The church has no right to follow the secular siren call toward moral revisionism and politically correct positions on the issues of the day.

“The greatest question of our time,” offered historian Will Durant, “is not communism versus individualism, not Europe versus America, not even East versus the West; it is whether men can live without God.” That question, it now appears, will be answered in our own time.

For centuries the Christian church has been the center of Western civilization. Western culture, government, law, and society were based on explicitly Christian principles. Concern for the individual, a commitment to human rights, and respect for the good, the beautiful, and the true-all of these grew out of Christian convictions and the influence of revealed religion.

All of these, we now hasten to add, are under serious attack. The very notion of right and..

The Church does not have mere permission to celebrate the Resurrection, it has a mandate to proclaim the truth that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

The pattern of the Christian year is an exercise of the Church’s discipline. The annual celebrations of Christmas and Resurrection Day force the Church to ponder again the truths of Christ’s incarnation and resurrection.

Christians understand that every Lord’s Day is Resurrection Day, but this Sunday is the festival which draws all Christians face to face with the empty tomb and the truth of the resurrected Lord.

Resurrection Sunday is the central event in the church year–the climax of worship, expectation, and celebration. This celebration is also an acid test of the Church’s faithfulness and conviction.

The secular world has done its best to make a mess of Christmas, but it has largely ignored our celebration of t..

The modern or postmodern quest for sexual emancipation cannot be neutral when it comes to the teachings of the Bible and the moral witness of historic Christianity.

This post is the final in a four part series on Secularization and the Sexual Revolution.

How Did We Get Here?

The question remains, how did all this happen? As already noted, the sexual revolution did not emerge in a vacuum. Modern societies created a context for moral revolution that had never been available in intellectual terms before. In other words, certain cultural conditions had to prevail in order for the revolution to get the traction it needed to succeed. One of the things we need to note is that we are looking at an explicitly cosmopolitan revolution.

Urbanization, Technology, and the Weakening of the Family

Modernity and modernization brought urbanization such that increased numbers of people were now livin..