We are in a world at war, but as Christians we must not wage war as the world does. Our war is spiritual, and our foes are not our fellow man. But, in a society that is ruled by a secular and increasingly post- and anti-Christian elite, Christians face an inescapable choice: go against the flow and be relegated to the eddies and backwaters of the culture, or go along and be tolerated in the mainstream. Faced with this dilemma, the choice that many evangelical leaders and laymen have made is to lay down their arms and seek peace through appeasement. Silent, if not swayed, in the face of anti-Christian policies and principles, they spend their powder trying to get their brothers and sisters in Christ to fall in line. Exasperated at the surrender of their Christian leaders, others on the religious right have become all too willing to wage war as the world does, to seize the sword of the state and to use it to enforce not merely public order but an officially Christian state. In this spiritual and cultural war, Christians must not surrender to the world, and we must not fight the war as the world does.

It is undeniably true that the relationship of the Christian and of the Church to the kingdoms of this world is inherently complicated. who is first and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God, In many different political and cultural contexts, Ever since Jesus gathered his first followers, Christians have struggled with what is owed to Caesar, and with what is entailed by being in the world, but not of it.

Peace Through Appeasement

Because it challenges one of the primary planks of our secular mythology, submission to the thesis that we are the product of undirected evolutionary processes is one of the primary terms of surrender. Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists, who have not waved the white flag, have been mocked, fired, and deplatformed at universities and barred from news aggregators like Apple News. For example, Joshua Swamidass’ online magazine and forum Peaceful Science self-consciously seeks a truce and to be tolerated by acceding to every current orthodoxy of evolutionary science. Similarly, Francis Collins’ Biologos displays a white dove of peace in their logo, bending over backwards to ensure that Evangelicals don’t get sideways

Darrel R. Falk, former president Biologos, wrote a book Coming to Peace with Science, the foreword from Francis Collins. They share anecdotes of believers who have peace with science by accepting the standard view of human and animal origins. Addressing the open hostility from the “New Atheist” movement, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney write at the Biologos blog

The common ground, instead, must be science in its broadest sense — a shared body of facts we can all agree about, however we may differ about the spiritual. Yet this common ground itself is at risk if we let science and faith be in conflict. … the vast majority of Americas want nothing to do with this conflict. They want compromise, and compatibility.

The Case for (Spiritual) War

It is to be expected that the spirit of the times will be at odds with the Spirit of God. The calling for the Christian is spiritual war. Culture war is just a euphemism for spiritual war.

Ours is not unlike the situation faced by Frenchmen after the Battle of France. Whether under the military’s complete control in the north and west of France, or with nominal independence under the Vichy government in the south, the price of peace was submission.

We are in a world at war, but as Christians we must not wage war as the world does. Our war is spiritual, and our foes are not our fellow man. In a society that is ruled by a secular and increasingly post- and anti-Christian elite, Christians face an inescapable choice: go against the flow and be relegated to the eddies and backwaters of the culture, or go along and be tolerated in the mainstream. Faced with this dilemma, the choice that many evangelical leaders and laymen have made is to lay down their arms and seek peace through appeasement. Silent, if not swayed, in the face of anti-Christian policies and principles, they spend their powder trying to get their brothers and sisters in Christ to fall in line. Exasperated at the surrender of their Christian leaders, others on the religious right have become all too willing to wage war as the world does, to seize the sword of the state and to use it to enforce not merely public order but an officially Christian state.

It is undeniably true that the relationship of the Christian and of the Church to the kingdoms of this world is inherently complicated. who is first and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God, In many different political and cultural contexts, Ever since Jesus gathered his first followers, Christians have struggled with what is owed to Caesar, and with what is entailed by being in the world, but not of it.

Peace Through Appeasement

Because it challenges one of the primary planks of our secular mythology, submission to the thesis that we are the product of undirected evolutionary processes is one of the primary terms of surrender. Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists, who have not waved the white flag, have been mocked, fired, and deplatformed at universities and barred from news aggregators like Apple News. For example, Joshua Swamidass’ online magazine and forum Peaceful Science self-consciously seeks a truce and to be tolerated by acceding to every current orthodoxy of evolutionary science. Similarly, Francis Collins’ Biologos displays a white dove of peace in their logo, bending over backwards to ensure that Evangelicals don’t get sideways

Darrel R. Falk, former president Biologos, wrote a book Coming to Peace with Science, the foreword from Francis Collins. They share anecdotes of believers who have peace with science by accepting the standard view of human and animal origins. Addressing the open hostility from the “New Atheist” movement, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney write at the Biologos blog

The common ground, instead, must be science in its broadest sense — a shared body of facts we can all agree about, however we may differ about the spiritual. Yet this common ground itself is at risk if we let science and faith be in conflict. … the vast majority of Americas want nothing to do with this conflict. They want compromise, and compatibility.

The Case for (Spiritual) War

It is to be expected that the spirit of the times will be at odds with the Spirit of God. The calling for the Christian is spiritual war. Culture war is just a euphemism for spiritual war.

Ours is not unlike the situation faced by Frenchmen after the Battle of France. Whether under the military’s complete control in the north and west of France, or with nominal independence under the Vichy government in the south, the price of peace was submission.

We are in a world at war, but as Christians we must not wage war as the world does. Our war is spiritual, and our foes are not our fellow man. In a society that is ruled by a secular and increasingly post- and anti-Christian elite, Christians face an inescapable choice: go against the flow and be relegated to the eddies and backwaters of the culture, or go along and be tolerated in the mainstream. Faced with this dilemma, the choice that many evangelical leaders and laymen have made is to lay down their arms and seek peace through appeasement. Silent, if not swayed, in the face of anti-Christian policies and principles, they spend their powder trying to get their brothers and sisters in Christ to fall in line. Exasperated at the surrender of their Christian leaders, others on the religious right have become all too willing to wage war as the world does, to seize the sword of the state and to use it to enforce not merely public order but an officially Christian state.

It is undeniably true that the relationship of the Christian and of the Church to the kingdoms of this world is inherently complicated. who is first and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God, In many different political and cultural contexts, Ever since Jesus gathered his first followers, Christians have struggled with what is owed to Caesar, and with what is entailed by being in the world, but not of it.

Peace Through Appeasement

Because it challenges one of the primary planks of our secular mythology, submission to the thesis that we are the product of undirected evolutionary processes is one of the primary terms of surrender. Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists, who have not waved the white flag, have been mocked, fired, and deplatformed at universities and barred from news aggregators like Apple News. For example, Joshua Swamidass’ online magazine and forum Peaceful Science self-consciously seeks a truce and to be tolerated by acceding to every current orthodoxy of evolutionary science. Similarly, Francis Collins’ Biologos displays a white dove of peace in their logo, bending over backwards to ensure that Evangelicals don’t get sideways

Darrel R. Falk, former president Biologos, wrote a book Coming to Peace with Science, the foreword from Francis Collins. They share anecdotes of believers who have peace with science by accepting the standard view of human and animal origins. Addressing the open hostility from the “New Atheist” movement, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney write at the Biologos blog

The common ground, instead, must be science in its broadest sense — a shared body of facts we can all agree about, however we may differ about the spiritual. Yet this common ground itself is at risk if we let science and faith be in conflict. … the vast majority of Americas want nothing to do with this conflict. They want compromise, and compatibility.

The Case for (Spiritual) War

It is to be expected that the spirit of the times will be at odds with the Spirit of God. The calling for the Christian is spiritual war. Culture war is just a euphemism for spiritual war.

Ours is not unlike the situation faced by Frenchmen after the Battle of France. Whether under the military’s complete control in the north and west of France, or with nominal independence under the Vichy government in the south, the price of peace was submission.

We are in a world at war, but as Christians we must not wage war as the world does. Our war is spiritual, and our foes are not our fellow man. In a society that is ruled by a secular and increasingly post- and anti-Christian elite, Christians face an inescapable choice: go against the flow and be relegated to the eddies and backwaters of the culture, or go along and be tolerated in the mainstream. Faced with this dilemma, the choice that many evangelical leaders and laymen have made is to lay down their arms and seek peace through appeasement. Silent, if not swayed, in the face of anti-Christian policies and principles, they spend their powder trying to get their brothers and sisters in Christ to fall in line. Exasperated at the surrender of their Christian leaders, others on the religious right have become all too willing to wage war as the world does, to seize the sword of the state and to use it to enforce not merely public order but an officially Christian state.

It is undeniably true that the relationship of the Christian and of the Church to the kingdoms of this world is inherently complicated. who is first and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God, In many different political and cultural contexts, Ever since Jesus gathered his first followers, Christians have struggled with what is owed to Caesar, and with what is entailed by being in the world, but not of it.

Peace Through Appeasement

Because it challenges one of the primary planks of our secular mythology, submission to the thesis that we are the product of undirected evolutionary processes is one of the primary terms of surrender. Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists, who have not waved the white flag, have been mocked, fired, and deplatformed at universities and barred from news aggregators like Apple News. For example, Joshua Swamidass’ online magazine and forum Peaceful Science self-consciously seeks a truce and to be tolerated by acceding to every current orthodoxy of evolutionary science. Similarly, Francis Collins’ Biologos displays a white dove of peace in their logo, bending over backwards to ensure that Evangelicals don’t get sideways

Darrel R. Falk, former president Biologos, wrote a book Coming to Peace with Science, the foreword from Francis Collins. They share anecdotes of believers who have peace with science by accepting the standard view of human and animal origins. Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney write at the Biologos blog

The common ground, instead, must be science in its broadest sense — a shared body of facts we can all agree about, however we may differ about the spiritual. Yet this common ground itself is at risk if we let science and faith be in conflict. … the vast majority of Americas want nothing to do with this conflict. They want compromise, and compatibility.

The Case for (Spiritual) War

It is to be expected that the spirit of the times will be at odds with the Spirit of God. The calling for the Christian is spiritual war. Culture war is just a euphemism for spiritual war.

Ours is not unlike the situation faced by Frenchmen after the Battle of France. Whether under the military’s complete control in the north and west of France, or with nominal independence under the Vichy government in the south, the price of peace was submission.

We are in a world at war, but as Christians we must not wage war as the world does. Our war is spiritual, and our foes are not our fellow man. In a society that is ruled by a secular and increasingly post- and anti-Christian elite, Christians face an inescapable choice: go against the flow and be relegated to the eddies and backwaters of the culture, or go along and be tolerated in the mainstream. Faced with this dilemma, the choice that many evangelical leaders and laymen have made is to lay down their arms and seek peace through appeasement. Silent, if not swayed, in the face of anti-Christian policies and principles, they spend their powder trying to get their brothers and sisters in Christ to fall in line. Exasperated at the surrender of their Christian leaders, others on the religious right have become all too willing to wage war as the world does, to seize the sword of the state and to use it to enforce not merely public order but an officially Christian state.

It is undeniably true that the relationship of the Christian and of the Church to the kingdoms of this world is inherently complicated. who is first and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God, In many different political and cultural contexts, Ever since Jesus gathered his first followers, Christians have struggled with what is owed to Caesar, and with what is entailed by being in the world, but not of it.

Peace Through Appeasement

Because it challenges one of the primary planks of our secular mythology, submission to the thesis that we are the product of undirected evolutionary processes is one of the primary terms of surrender. Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists, who have not waved the white flag, have been mocked, fired, and deplatformed at universities and barred from news aggregators like Apple News. For example, Joshua Swamidass’ online magazine and forum Peaceful Science self-consciously seeks a truce and to be tolerated by acceding to every current orthodoxy of evolutionary science. Similarly, Francis Collins’ Biologos displays a white dove of peace in their logo, bending over backwards to ensure that Evangelicals don’t get sideways

The Case for (Spiritual) War

It is to be expected that the spirit of the times will be at odds with the Spirit of God. The calling for the Christian is spiritual war. Culture war is just a euphemism for spiritual war.

Ours is not unlike the situation faced by Frenchmen after the Battle of France. Whether under the military’s complete control in the north and west of France, or with nominal independence under the Vichy government in the south, the price of peace was submission.

We are in a world at war, but as Christians we must not wage war as the world does. Our war is spiritual, and our foes are not our fellow man. In a society that is ruled by a secular and increasingly post- and anti-Christian elite, Christians face an inescapable choice: go against the flow and be relegated to the eddies and backwaters of the culture, or go along and be tolerated in the mainstream. Faced with this dilemma, the choice that many evangelical leaders and laymen have made is to lay down their arms and seek peace through appeasement. Silent, if not swayed, in the face of anti-Christian policies and principles, they spend their powder trying to get their brothers and sisters in Christ to fall in line. Exasperated at the surrender of their Christian leaders, others on the religious right have become all too willing to wage war as the world does, to seize the sword of the state and to use it to enforce not merely public order but an officially Christian state.

It is undeniably true that the relationship of the Christian and of the Church to the kingdoms of this world is inherently complicated. who is first and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God, In many different political and cultural contexts, Ever since Jesus gathered his first followers, Christians have struggled with what is owed to Caesar, and with what is entailed by being in the world, but not of it.

Peace Through Appeasement

Because it challenges one of the primary planks of our secular mythology, submission to the thesis that we are the product of undirected evolutionary processes is one of the primary terms of surrender. Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists, who have not waved the white flag, have been mocked, fired, and deplatformed at universities and barred from news aggregators like Apple News. For example, Joshua Swamidass’ online magazine and forum Peaceful Science self-consciously seeks a truce and to be tolerated by acceding to every current orthodoxy of evolutionary science. Similarly, Francis Collins’ Biologos waves a white dove in their logo, bending over backwards to ensure that Evangelicals don’t get sideways

The Case for (Spiritual) War

It is to be expected that the spirit of the times will be at odds with the Spirit of God. The calling for the Christian is spiritual war. Culture war is just a euphemism for spiritual war.

Ours is not unlike the situation faced by Frenchmen after the Battle of France. Whether under the military’s complete control in the north and west of France, or with nominal independence under the Vichy government in the south, the price of peace was submission.

Some things are this, and others are that. Some things are not like the others. We learn this. We know this. We depend upon our ability to discriminate between this and that. In a chaotic world, all is undefined and undifferentiated. Skeptics, subjectivists, and other agents of chaos are wont to undo that fundamental childhood skill of discriminating between spheres and triangles, lions and tigers, and boys and girls. If we are able to measure and cut reality along its seams, the skeptic’s epistemological pessimism is defeated. The subjectivist’s world-making is constrained. Today, for those who want to transcend our innate sexes, fuzzying the lines between male and female is the order of the day. The strategy goes like this. Instead of working from clear cases to understanding edge cases, the chaos agent argues from edge cases to deny there is any order or categories at all. Science News offers a typical example: “Biological Sex Is Not as Simple as Male or Female”. Surveying a variety of developmental sexual disorders and anomalies, Nathan Lents provides the conclusion: “These are not hard categories with clear definitions.”

Some things are this, and others are that. Some things are not like the others. We learn this. We know this. We depend upon our ability to discriminate between this and that. But in a chaotic world, all is undefined and undifferentiated. Skeptics, subjectivists, and other agents of chaos are wont to undo that fundamental childhood skill of discriminating between spheres and triangles, lions and tigers, and boys and girls. If we are able to measure and cut reality along its seams, the skeptic’s epistemological pessimism is defeated. The subjectivist’s world-making is constrained. Today, for those who want to transcend our innate sexes, fuzzying the lines between male and female is the order of the day. The strategy goes like this. Instead of working from clear cases to understanding edge cases, the chaos agent argues from edge cases to deny there is any order or categories at all. Science News offers a typical example: “Biological Sex Is Not as Simple as Male or Female”. Surveying a variety of developmental sexual disorders and anomalies, Nathan Lents provides the conclusion: “These are not hard categories with clear definitions.”