Make Apostasy Hard Again

When everything in the surrounding culture is at war with the Faith, apostasy is easy. So change the culture.

Dear friends and supporters:

We live in a time when it seems as though a record number of children reared in Christian families are departing from the Faith as they reach adulthood, some of them even “deconstructing” their Christianity.

In 2019 Barna Research discovered that “the percentage of young-adult dropouts [from the church] has increased from 59 to 64 percent [since 2011]. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. 18–29-year-olds who grew up in church tell Barna they have withdrawn from church involvement as an adult after having been active as a child or teen.” And you can be sure they aren’t leaving the church to grow in their faith, as if that were possible.

Responsibility for this widespread departure and often subsequent apostasy is often laid at the feet of the parents, and there can be no doubt that in some cases the charge is accurate. But by no means all. God himself reared the children of Israel, yet they rebelled against him (Is. 1:2–3). God is not a failed Father. Adam and Eve led the entire human race into sin while cocooned in a flawless environment and lacking a sinful nature, so a Christian heritage, while invaluable, is no guarantee against apostasy.

There can be no question, however, that a Christian environment, though it can’t prevent apostasy, disincentivizes it (as the Garden of Eden did). This fact is one of the great God-designed benefits of not only the devout family and church but also Christian culture.

By Christian culture, I mean a society whose institutions, laws, and mores reflect Christianity. It is a society in which a large number of the population, perhaps a large minority, is either Christian or indelibly stamped with Christianity, even if most citizens are not existentially regenerate. (By “existentially regenerate” or “existentially Christian” I denote genuine Christian believers, God’s elect who have trusted Christ for salvation. A secondary definition of “Christian” is possible: those who profess Christianity and conform to its external morals and ethics, even if not a genuine Christian.)

Christian culture is, for example, a society in which the arts display the reality not only of a sinful world but also a redeemed world. It is a society in which civil law is grounded in the unchangeable moral law of God. It is a society in which the church of Jesus Christ is free to preach the gospel, and in which Christians are free to practice their existential faith as well as the Christian Faith.

It is a society in which science and scientists recognize that the order, stability, and predictability of the physical universe are due to God’s creational norms. It is a society in which sexual immorality is pervasively censured.

Christian culture itself is a strong deterrent to public sin, particularly sins that are not crimes (since most sins are not in fact crimes): for example, premarital sex, illicit divorce, profligate debt, profanity, rebellion against parents, and abandonment of the church.

In a Christian culture, when an individual clearly and publicly and intentionally jettisons God’s basic moral law, he is not applauded and rewarded, but censured and penalized — not by the state, but by the apolitical society.

In a Christian culture, apostasy isn’t easy.

This “apostasy disincentivization” has always been the case historically. It was true in ancient Israel, in the medieval world, in Christian Europe, and in early America. Although Hester Prynne’s character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictional The Scarlet Letter was subject to state enforcement of adultery laws in Puritan New England, it testifies to a critical fact: a chief deterrent to flagrant sin in a Christian culture is not in fact the state or politics but society itself. Adultery in a Christian culture is socially disapproved and censured.

If you sin bigly and publicly, you can expect social disapproval and disgrace. You might not be forced to wear an A on your sweater if you’re an adulteress as Hester Prynne was, but you’ll wear social stigma.

And what is true of adultery is also true of easy divorce, talebearing, laziness, avarice, rebellion against parents, refusal to financially support one’s family, abandonment of the church, and the multitude of other sins not punishable by the state.

When Christian culture erodes, the apostasy disincentivization mechanism erodes with it. And when obvious public sins are no longer disincentivized, not only is the barrier to those sins removed, but also the road ending in apostasy is cleared for travel.

Contemporary culture is a textbook case.

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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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Our Pre-Christian, Post-Christendom World

Almost everywhere we hear the lament that we live in a “post-Christian” world. This nomenclature is incorrect. We live in a pre-Christian world (the greatest Christian culture is in our future). But we do in fact live in a post-Christendom world, a different matter. What we have abandoned is not so much Christianity (which is actually thriving in notable places globally) but Christendom, created by a Christian culture, and this post-Christendom has wiped away the disincentives to apostasy.

There is plenty of global Christianity; there is no Christendom left anywhere. Therefore, there are few disincentives to apostasy, even in many Christian families and churches.

Far from Hawthorne’s Puritans who heaped guilt and stigma on Hester Prynne, pastors in even most conservative churches rarely preach against premarital sex. Youngling hormones being what they are, promiscuity among unmarrieds is one battle too many to fight in a culture engulfed in the LGBTQIA+++ agenda.

If prohibition of almost any divorce in the church was (wrongly) common 50-100 years ago, today permission of almost any divorce is (very wrongly) normal.

Churches and Christian families seem to accept as a matter of course an entire generation of young adult males who’d prefer gaming to working.

Teenage and young adult females dress as street prostitutes (excuse me: sex workers) did just 30 years ago and the churches (except leering men) turn a blind eye.

Same-sex “marriage” hasn’t been just socially normalized; it’s now being ecclesially normalized: “If you’re a practicing homosexual, come to Jesus; he’ll enrich your homosexual partnerships.”

In this climate, apostasy is incentivized and faithfulness is disincentivized. This is likely the chief explanation for the widespread apostasy of Christian young people.

Cultural Reformation, Not Just Ecclesial and Familial Revival

This is also why calls for revival in the family and church, while necessary, are not sufficient. The devout Christian family and church create an environment that disincentivizes apostasy, but when everything in the surrounding culture is combatting that fidelity, the flowering of a majority of the devout will wither over time.

It is, of course, wrong to say it’s impossible to live a faithful Christian life and rear godly children in a depraved culture. Noah and the apostolic church prove that. But over an extended period the cultural depravity, if unreversed, erodes the Faith gradually and generationally, and in the end, there is a little Faith left.

This is precisely why Jehovah required the ancient Jews to expel the depraved pagans from the land they were to inhabit (Jud. 2:1–3), and why Jesus commissioned his apostles to peacefully subjugate the nations to his gospel authority (Mt. 28:18–20). It takes the most intense intentionality (as the Amish do) to resist in the long run normalizing in one’s own life and family and church the norms of the surrounding depraved culture. “Only God Gets to Decide What’s Normal.”

Christian Culture and Common Grace

Three days after I started this post, my colleague Dr. Brian Mattson released this superb article. I’m amazed at how often our minds are simultaneously pondering the same topics. Brian wrote about how young FBI agent Eliot Ness of The Untouchables fame was harassed by the gangster Al Capone, whom Ness and his team eventually brought to justice. Brian is making the point that even in that harassment, there were some actions that even Capone deemed off-limits. I’m including here a citation much longer than usual because Brian’s point is so pertinent:

This, my friends, seems to me a fruit of Christian culture. When even ruthless and murderous mobsters refrain from killing innocent people. What is that? Is it fear of God? Is it the prospect of the electric chair? Or is it an act so wildly outside the bounds of social mores and values—is it so utterly taboo—that the murderer stays his hand? Is it God’s common, restraining grace?

In my view, it is that last explanation by means of all of the other ones. God often restrains wickedness and vice, but he uses means to do that. Among those means are social taboos, censure, and shame, all of which shape and form the consciences of men. It is why in the Old West shooting a man in the back was considered “yellow” — a disgraceful and cowardly thing. How does that make any sense at all in a dog-eat-dog world where life was otherwise so dirt cheap? Because consciences (however seared) were still shaped and formed in a Christian atmosphere, where the taking of innocent life or “lying in wait” to commit murder is uniquely wicked. I would argue that it is Christianity that uniquely makes these sharp moral distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, legitimate and illegitimate targets, judicial and extra-judicial killing; and in a Christian culture those distinctions (sometimes, but not always) serve to restrain even the most brutal of men.

What happens when that moral atmosphere fades and, with it, some of the powerful common grace means by which God restrains evil? Compare the relative restraint of Scarface Al’s cartel versus the various cartels we have today in our increasingly post-Christian societies. Do you think the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico would hesitate to murder the families of law enforcement officers who get in their way? I daresay that is their very first order of business.

I am suggesting that Christian ethics (the value of human life, guilt and innocence, judicial process, etc.) is not simply for the benefit of believers or the institutional church; God’s revealed standards (special grace) serve also to bolster and buttress his common grace in wider society. To the extent a culture and society becomes less Christian, evil and wickedness become more evil and more wicked.

Al Capone was a wretch. A self-aggrandizing, greedy, violent, murderous, perverse and promiscuous man. But apparently murdering the family of his nemesis was a bridge too far.

Thank God for that.

Brian understands a key point even many knowledgeable Christians fail to consider. Christian culture is one critical aspect of God’s common grace. Common grace isn't just for the individual. It can (and should, and will) encompass an entire culture.

Christian culture exudes common grace. Christian culture and the common grace it bestowed prevented even Al Capone from being as depraved as he might otherwise have been. In this way, it maintains a continuity of ethics and morality, sometimes hanging by a mere thread, but still vital to the survival of a law-abiding culture.

The Boon of Nominal Christianity

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that Christian culture necessitates nominal (“in name only”) Christianity, because many, perhaps a majority of, citizens living in a Christian culture are not existentially Christian. Christian culture does not demand a society populated by Christians, but only a society shaped by Christianity. This means that a number of citizens will be genuine but not particularly devout Christians, and many might be Christian in name only: nominal.

Actually, more than in name, in that in their external lives they maintain Christian standards: diligence, dignity, truthfulness, honesty, sacrifice, kindness, respect for the Lord’s Day, and so on. None of these, of course, make them existentially Christian. But they do help preserve a Christian culture. Only Spirit-indwelled Christians can manifest the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22–23), but unbelievers “who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, [and] these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves who show the work of the law written in their hearts. . .” (Rom. 1:14:15).

While, consequently, it might be the job of pastors to overturn nominal Christianity in the church, it is their job to support it in the culture. In fact, supporting it in the culture might help them overturn it in the church — the appeal to bring one’s heart into line with one’s (externally virtuous) actions.

In the 70s I heard a prominent Christian leader loudly castigate Jerry Falwell, Sr.’s Moral Majority because it would cause unconverted, nominal Christians to become self-satisfied in their external religiosity and thus harder to evangelize. This is false. Hypocrites are easier to evangelize because they are very aware of the deportment Christianity requires and that they try to imitate, while non-hypocrites have no interest in Christian ethics or morals. Carl F. H. Henry makes this point eloquently:

The Christian life must be lived out, among the regenerate, in every area of activity, until even the unregenerate are moved by Christian standards, acknowledging their force. The unregenerate are not, on that account, redeemed; nevertheless, they are more easily reached for Christ than those who have made a deliberate break with Christian standards, because they can be reminded that Christian ethics cannot be retained apart from Christian metaphysics [biblical beliefs about God]. To the extent that any society is led with Christian conviction [as in Christian culture, PAS], it becomes a more hospitable environment for Christian expansion.

External religiosity is far preferable to external depravity, and no matter what one may claim, he would much prefer to live in a Christian society with many self-satisfied but existentially unbelieving Christians adhering to external Christian moral standards than in a society of overtly unrestrained unbelievers, like the social horror that was Noah’s day.

Should Christians Pray for Persecution?

In fact, when we see a society with a proportionately high number of nominal Christians or externally moral unbelievers, we are almost certainly looking at a Christian culture. Why? Because Christian culture incentivizes the kind of external morality that marks nominal Christianity and outwardly ethical unbelievers. It also fosters genuine, existential Christianity, of course, but its potency extends far beyond genuine regeneration. Christian culture is so powerful that it helps create not only existential Christians but also nominal Christians and ethical non-Christians.

Alternatively, when you view a society in which the set of professed Christians largely overlaps the set of existential Christians, you are indisputably observing a non- or anti-Christian culture, likely a society in which Christianity is actively suppressed and even persecuted. Why? Since there is no incentive for nominal Christianity, existential Christians are almost the only ones left.

If you consider this situation desirable, let me remind you that it hinders evangelism, missions, Christian education, and nearly every other aggressive, kingdom-advancing activity. This is why those who pray for the persecution of the church in order to purify it are not only praying unbiblical prayers (1Tim. 2:2). They are also praying that God’s kingdom not come on earth as it is in heaven, that the Great Commission not be fulfilled, and that the Christian Faith as a global phenomenon be hindered, not advanced.

Beware of opposing nominal Christianity in the culture. It is a prime example of not loving one’s neighbor and attempting to hinder the gospel of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God.

Conclusion

The current apostasy epidemic among Christian youth (and others) won’t be countermanded merely by a revival of a vital, robust faith in the family and church, though this revival is imperative.

If Christians neglect to address the surrounding depraved culture, they will incessantly be fighting — and losing —battles against an all-engulfing culture that incentivizes apostasy and disincentivizes piety.

Therefore, if Christians wish to restore a society in which a large number of Christian young people persist in the Faith throughout their adulthood, they should work to establish a Christian culture — Christian influence in education, music, literature, entertainment, politics, technology, science, and every other aspect of culture. It’s a long-term project that must begin modestly, right at home and in vocation and in one’s local situation, but begin it must if Christians expect over the next 100 years to start turning the tide against apostasy disincentivization. In other words, restoring Christian culture.

That culture should never claim to prevent apostasy, but it will indisputably disincentivize it by re-normalizing Christianity.

It is this task to which CCL has been committed for almost 25 years. Will you join us?

Let’s make apostasy hard again.

Yours for the King,

Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership

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