Vibe Shifts - Real or Imagined?
What to make of cultural moves toward common sense
I trust you are well. Our family is heading toward (or limping toward) the end of the school semester, grateful for the unseasonably cool weather here in Fort Worth but a bit eager for the new rhythms of summer. I am happy baseball season is here, and that my Cubs are first in their division. I’ve been going through the final line edits on my book, In Defense of Christian Patriotism, due out in September from Broadside/Harper Collins. I’m very excited about this book, which was the product of a lot of work over the last year and a lot of thinking over a lifetime. My editor, Hannah Long, was superb. She put me through the paces like a good editor does and helped make the manuscript shine. Now, we are a few months away from releasing it into the world and seeing what the world thinks.
Last week, I was in World Magazine with a column on the cultural “vibe shift” that has even left-leaning politicians questioning the wisdom of biological men playing in women’s sports. This time, it was California Governor Gavin Newsome. How should Christians think about this?
Overall, I think we can say this is a good thing. I wrote:
In a poll conducted in January, The New York Times found that 79% of the American people, including a majority of Democrats, believe biological men should not compete in women’s sports. Figures like Newsom and Emanuel know their party is on the wrong side of popular opinion and thus have shifted their views. Many are blaming the loud activist fringe who pulled the party so far to the left as to cost them elections.
We can also take heart that a significant majority of Americans are acknowledging reality. What they may call “common sense,” we understand to be God’s law written on the human heart and embedded in the creational design of the universe. When courageous athletes such as Riley Gaines began opposing this, even when it was unpopular, they helped move the needle forward by igniting a public debate. We should be thankful anytime elected officials are persuaded to give rhetorical support to good policy. Even if they arrive there much later than they should have.
Still, the vibe shift against transgender athletes in women’s sports is not the end of the argument. Unfairness is the most accessible argument to make against the insanity of the transgender movement, but it’s a mere symptom of a much larger social problem. It is the perverse moral architecture of the sexual revolution, which denies creational realities and exalts expressive individualism, that has led to today’s moral anarchy.
This is why Christians should not hesitate to hold fast to and declare God’s design for sexuality and marriage. Not merely to win an argument or be proven right, but out of love for our neighbors. In a sexually confused culture, people are questioning the received wisdom of progressive orthodoxy and looking for guidance on how to order their lives.
Christianity, with its high view of human dignity and the promise of bodily renewal at the end of the age, offers something more beautiful about sexuality and marriage than the cheap substitutes on offer in the world. What’s more, Christianity offers not only a cohesive worldview, but a compassionate and redeeming Savior who is making all things—especially the broken things—new.
You can read the entire column here. One other note I might add, which is a bit downstream from this particular column, is that vibe shifts can be fickle and short-term. This is to say that both hostilities to certain Christian beliefs and acceptance of certain Christian beliefs can be present in a given culture and then pass away. Faitful Christians must contextualize well to the mission field and yet not build entire infrastructures, I don’t think, around 4-8 year electoral waves.
You might also be interested in a journal article for The Southwestern Journal of Theology on the 18th century Baptist who helped shape the world we live in today, at least when it comes to religious liberty. I am particularly proud of my title: “Backus to the Future,” which about seventeen people will appreciate. Here’s a part of the intro:
Though the idea of religious liberty was not new to Backus and, in some form or another, has been around at least in part since the second century and Tertullian,2 Backus and his contemporaries bequeathed to us a world where religious liberty is a reality, even if in imperfect forms. Three hundred years after the birth of this consequential man, Baptists are still wrestling with Backus’s words as we contemplate freedom of religion in an increasingly confused age.
Whereas Backus and his contemporaries surveyed the wreckage of a too cozy alliance with the church and the state, the strong arm of government often coming down on the side of one Christian tradition or the other, today Baptists wrestle with the wreckage of secularism. The strong arm of the government is often quick to push Christianity into the margins of private devotion.
On offer, as an antidote to a fraying social fabric are two competing visions. One, a small, but loud cohort of would-be magisterial Protestants casting their lonely eyes toward the state church of the medieval era. Another, a strict separationism which flinches at any intersection of Christianity and government. Ironically it is traditional Baptist theology, as confessed by Baptists, that might serve as an alternative to these, in the view of this author, aberrant approaches.
You can read it all here.
A few more things of note:
I’ve got a long essay on Easter, the Khmer Rouge, Christianity, and democracy coming up for National Review Easter week. I’ll send that along here just as it posts. I’ve had a lot of really cool writing opportunities in my life, but it still tickles me to write for NRO, a journal I have been reading since high school.
Have I mentioned my Easter book? I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here a time or two. At any rate, if you haven’t gotten it yet, The Characters of Easter is available. Hey, it got up to #1 in the Easter category of Amazon for a whole two days. Even ahead of Lee Strobel! Not that anyone is counting, of course.
Ok, thanks for bearing with me. I hope you are having a wonderful spring.