In the public square, I don’t want to play defense. I want to play offense.
Today, in the wake of the Moral Majority and the advancement of secularism, there are thousands of young believers who are struggling to find their voice in the contested American public square. These Christians love the Bible, trust its teaching, and ground their identities in the soul-saving cross of Jesus Christ. They sing Hillsong and LeCrae and Mumford and Sons in their cars, they capture epic life events on Instagram, they recoil when they think of tiny babies being aborted in the womb, they enjoy visiting big cities, and they are trying to figure out how to be meaningfully Christian in a world that more and more seems to find them deficient.
These young evangelicals aren’t angry. They don’t throw fireballs. They are my friends, neighbors, and students. Some of us rub shoulders with them in our day-to-day work teaching to college and seminary students. We want them to see that being a publicly minded Christian does not mean being old. It doesn’t mean being white. Indeed, we need to remix the very idea of what it means to be a Christian in public. Biblical ethics born of the gospel and bearing on every aspect of life cross all boundaries and divides—racial, social, economic, educational, geographic.
Our unity is not ultimately grounded in a political program, important as that is. It is not grounded in anger or fear or despair.
It is grounded in Jesus Christ, crucified and ruling over all the world. It is Jesus and no other who would have us stop dividing ourselves needlessly and privatizing our public convictions. It is Jesus who beckons us to be Christians not only at our weekly service but also in all our lives.
This is the great need of our time: for the church to be the church. We need pastors who preach the whole counsel of God, and who train their people to know the gospel and the body of ethics and convictions that it animates. From there, we need ordinary Christians to speak the gospel (Rom. 10), to act as salt and light (Matt. 5:13–16), and to love their neighbors (Luke 22:37). The church is told by secular culture today to be quiet, to muzzle its mouth, and to put its piety in a heart-shaped box, only taking it out on Sunday mornings. In truth, Christians should do exactly the opposite: we should speak winsomely and with great conviction on behalf of gospel truth, biblical ethics, human dignity, and personal flourishing. This the church has done for two millennia; this it must do today.
Our unity is not ultimately grounded in a political program, important as that is. It is not grounded in anger or fear or despair.
In 2016, we do not know what the future holds. It is clear that we have witnessed the dawn of a new social order. Gay marriage is a cultural reality. Christian groups are getting kicked off col- lege campuses. Pop culture has darkened in tone and morality. These are challenging times. Coming days may bring genuine hardship, even persecution, for American Christians. Or we may feature some ups and some downs, some great gains and some hard losses in the public square. The success of the pro-life cause over the years is just one example of how our country’s narrative seems less predictable than it might be.
The kids are going to be all right. The millennials will hold the line on ethical issues. Sure, we regularly hear polling data that suggest otherwise. But if you had polled Americans in 1850 on the morality of slavery or in 1950 on the nature of civil rights, you likely would have been discouraged by the results. Cultures can shift. Views can change. Generations can wake up. As a mil- lennial, I for one am tired of being told that my capitulation to secular culture is a foregone conclusion. It most certainly is not. I know that there are thousands, even millions, of people much like me. They will hold the line.
I firmly believe that there will be no truce on immorality. The true church will never surrender its convictions to the culture. It will never bow the knee to Caesar in slavish obedience. The church may suffer for being true to God. I am prepared for that, and we should all get ready for opposition and even persecution. But we will never give up the faith. We will not sell our beliefs for a cultural stew.
We are not here by accident. We have been called out for such a time as this. We are like Esther in days gone by. We find ourselves in the middle of a great societal contest taking place in the public square. The public square is the center of society in which all American citizens ask the great political and cul- tural questions of life and compete to give the most winsome and effective answers. We are not culture warriors, but there is indeed a competition of visions in modern America, and we have great answers to give. They can shape our culture for good. As Princeton professor Robert George said to me recently in an interview, “The future is not determined.” We don’t know what tomorrow will yield, in other words. Defeat is not assured. But much, it is clear, is at stake.
George went on to say, “In the public square, I don’t want to play defense. I want to play offense.” In other words, he wants to make a case, to persuade his fellow citizens to stand for life and truth and human dignity. Hearing George say this, I got chills. Later, I realized that he himself was similarly galvanized by a man who thrilled to take part in the great contest of ideas: Chuck Colson. Others had similar experiences with Colson. For Robert George, Eric Metaxas, Timothy George, Congressman Frank Wolf, and countless others, Colson had just this kind of inspiring effect. But he also had this effect on younger Christians, leaders like Eric Teetsel, Andrew Walker, and Denny Burk.
Colson still speaks. He and a host of others—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hannah More, Francis Schaeffer, and many others—show us that our faith need not be harmless. Whether we counsel a young woman who feels abortion is the only way out of her personal nightmare, raise support to stop the sex trafficking of women, or tell a classmate about the liberating gospel of Jesus, we can be like Colson and to be ready, as an ancient sage once said, to speak—and to act.
This material is adapted from The Colson Way by Dr. Strachan and is used with permission of Thomas Nelson.