Cross Culture
If we expect a Christian culture, we must return to the cross of Jesus Christ.
The anti-Leftist resurgence in America today is a breath of fresh air after recent years of cancel culture, DEI, “trans” minors’ genital mutilation surgery, multiculturalism, “intersectionality,” the war on “toxic masculinity,” and much more, all fruits of Cultural Marxism. The pushback has been wide and swift and heartening. We should not, however, identify it with a revival of Christian culture, a historic reality1 almost none of its proponents know anything about and one to which they never refer. For them it seems a Christian-influenced society is one that bolsters the family, restores strong manhood and femininity, clamps down on illegal immigration, imposes trade barriers on other nations, employs lawfare against Leftists, and centralizes economic power in national politics. Here is an extreme but by no means isolated example addressing the ICE-demonstrators’ conflict in Minnesota:
One wonders if Mr. Wolfe will as enthusiastically support the militant coercion by federal law enforcement during the next Democrat administration. Political solutions at the hands of a “crushing” federal government is a chief mark of a drift toward crossless Christianity.
Cross Culture Is Gospel Culture
There’s little about the cross of Jesus Christ in much of the political discourse not just on the secular Left but also on the “Christian” Right, and that omission is fatal, because the cross is the crux of Christianity. In fact, that’s how we came to use the word crux today. When we say, “This is the crux,” we’re essentially saying: “Just as the cross is central to Christianity, so such-and-such is central to the topic under consideration.”2 Crossless conservatism cannot be Christian, and it certainly cannot produce a Christian culture. It can produce an Islamic, a traditionalist, a libertarian, or populist culture, but a crossless Christian culture is self-contradictory. This also means that there can be no Christian culture apart from the gospel. In the words of a recent Facebook post by my friend Pastor Max Graves, Jr.:
You cannot have a Christian Nation without Christians. It’s not enough to apply Christian virtue. The application of Christian virtue must be done by Christians. In order for Christians to properly apply Christian virtue in our land that has a real, culture changing effect, Christian men must be elected to positions of real influence. In order for Christian men to be elected to positions of real influence, there must be a Christian electorate. In order to have a Christian electroate, the Gospel must be preached. No Gospel, no Christians. No Christians, no Christian electorate. No Christian electorate, no Christian men elected to positions of real influence… and , consequently, no Christian nation. Period.
Why am I saying this? Because, as I follow the conversation about “Christian Nationalism” the one thing that strikes me as strange is the absence of the Gospel in the conversation. A lot of talk. A lot of pontificating. A lot of philosophizing. A lot of bloviating. But not a lot of Gospel. Not a lot of the one element that makes all of this possible. The Gospel is strangely absent from the conversation of a Christian nation.
The gospel is the preaching of the cross (1 Cor. 1:17–18). While law is necessary for a Christian culture, it’s not sufficient. In fact, a society governed by God’s law won’t long survive if it’s not leavened by the gospel. A Christian culture is a cross culture, and a cross culture is gospel culture.
Cross Culture Is Law Culture
A cross culture is also a law-based, or a justice, culture. Progressives have so misused the expression “social justice” that many Christians shy away from it. But the Bible is all about social justice, which is simply another name for social righteousness. In the Old Testament, the English word for justice is the same for righteousness,3 and righteousness means adherence to God’s standard, and that standard is his law.4 This means that a Christian culture is not only a gospel culture, but also a law culture. It is governed by God’s law. God’s law governs all areas of life, but in the political realm it is civil law. A Christian society’s law base is God’s moral law appropriate to that sphere. As Western societies have apostatized from Christian culture, they have abandoned God’s law and embraced instead pragmatic law (the moment decides), sociological law (society decides), and elitist law (law professors decide). In Christian culture, God’s word decides. Cross culture is law culture.
How Christians lost Christian culture, the high price we've paid for losing it, where we stand today in our own culture, and finally what we can (and must) do to create Christian culture today and tomorrow.
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Cross Culture Is Unified Culture
Christian culture is unified culture. A striking characteristic of modern cultures is how ideological they are; they’re dedicated to a comprehensive abstract principle that molds and remakes society. Among nationalists, it is racial identitarianism. Think of fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and imperial Japan. Blood-and-soil is the unifying factor. Society is unified – except for those of different races whom it excludes and generally persecutes. Communist society claimed to unify culture not around race or sex, but around economics – the forcible economic equality. But Stalin was a notorious antisemitic, and all communist cultures persecuted the economically unequal – the wealthy. By contrast, Christian culture is truly unified, and not just with Christians.5 Because unbelievers are created in God’s image and are fit objects for evangelization, they’re enthusiastically welcomed into Christian culture. The cross breaks down the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile (Eph. 2:11–22) – between everybody, in fact (Gal. 3:23–28). Cross culture is unified culture.
Cross Culture Is Free Culture
“[I]f the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (Jn. 8:36). Free from what? Free from sin, as Jesus makes clear to the indignant Jews. But how does he make us free of sin? The answer — by the cross: “[K]nowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin” (Rom. 6:6). The cross liberates from the power of sin. This sin is not only personal; it is also cultural. We rightly speak of sinful cultures, not just sinful individuals. The culture in which abortion, hatred, homosexuality, pornography, and vindictiveness are rampant is a sinful culture. There are no sinless cultures, of course, but a society dominated by these and other sins cannot be Christian. A Christian society is one in which sin, while still present, is dialed back because of the power of the cross. The cross dials sin back by freeing individuals its power.
One striking consequence of this freedom is that these freed individuals require less external, coercive guardrails to keep them from sinning. Citizens free from the power of sin are largely self-governed people; the’re governed by the indwelling Spirit. This in turn means a society with a significant number of Christians is freer from sin and therefore mostly self-governed. And if self-governed, it doesn’t require the heavy hand of a coercive state. Although civil government is God’s institution (Rom. 13:1–7), in a Christian culture that government is strictly limited. Why? Because big civil government is not necessary in a society of largely self-governed people. The size and scope of the state increases when the self-government of the citizenry decreases. While civil government is correctly limited by constitutions, bills of rights, and division of power, it is limited most comprehensively by citizens’ self-government. It is in this way that the cross of Jesus Christ contributes to the free society. Cross culture is free culture.
Conclusion
Leftist culture long ago scampered from Christianity headlong towards secularism, and, consequently, away from the cross. More recently, the Right has abandoned the cross of Jesus Christ, and is therefore falling into statism, abortion tolerance, sexual perversion, racism, antisemitism and other scourges of a crossless culture. The cross transforms not just individual individuals, but also cultures. If we expect a Christian culture, we must return to the cross of Jesus Christ.✞
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Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960).
Leon Morris, The Cross of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 1.
“sedeq, justice, rightness,” Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer, Bruce K. Waltke, eds. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), 2:752-755.
Greg L. Bahnsen, By This Standard (Tyler; Texas: Institute of Christian Economics, 1985).
The antisemitism in some medieval societies of Christian Europe and in Lutheranism at times was contra-Christian on this point.