Category: Culture War

The Uselessness of “Christian Nationalism”
Over the past several years the topic of Christian nationalism has occupied the minds of Evangelical intellectuals and pastors. No less than half a dozen books have been written on the subject in the past year. Three of them have...

Shame
Shame is, amongst other things, the problem of how to understand yourself and your relationship to neighbor in the aftermath of offending or hurting your neighbor. Given the fragmentation of our society, we shouldn’t be surprised that no one seems...

The Role of Social Science in ‘Deconstructing’ White Evangelicalism
My friend Jonathan Leeman has written a thoughtful reflection on what he calls the project of evangelical deconstruction. I want to respond, in part because I expect some readers may view my forthcoming book, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s...

Purity Culture
So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” (Matthew 27:24) Our contemporary culture has...

Dr. Trueman’s Hauerwasian Turn
“My wish is that this book might help Christians rediscover that their most important social task is nothing less than to be a community capable of hearing the story of God we find in the scripture and living in a...

Can Justice Be Saved? Part One: On Faith
Christians can't embrace all aspects of contemporary ideas of social justice. But we must also recognize that what came before was similarly dangerous.

The Self-Exposure of Truth: Culture Wars, Projection, and Husbandry
Human moral growth is partially measured by a human being’s desire to live in the truth. This involves accepting the truth about ourselves – or put negatively – refusing to avoid unsavory realities about our own lives. The same could...

The World We Have and the World We Want
The pace of online discourse makes life difficult for those who wish to think seriously about Christianity and politics. By now, the takes have begun to cool regarding the recent fracas between Sohrab Ahmari, David French, and their respective factions...

The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way: Against the Culture War
One of the saddest consequences of the culture war is that it has managed to make people boring. The culture war has made us predictable, even if individual people are anything but. The libertarian online troll is in real life...

Debating the Actual Crisis of Liberalism
Now that the dust has settled a bit on the Mortara debate prompted by Fr. Cessario at First Things, I want to ask a more general question about the state of play between the more radical anti-liberals in the religious conservative...