Ephraim is like a dove,
Easily deceived and senseless.
Hosea 7:11
Social Media Fail
I made a terrible mistake.
Under the tyranny that is social media it was an unforgivable blunder. And I was not forgiven. A few months ago I did something I’ve largely refrained from doing for years. I questioned something someone said on social media. In today’s world, that’s considered equivalent to pressing the launch button on your nuclear arsenal.
Specifically, I challenged a Christian’s use of the inflammatory term “White Supremacist” – a pejorative that has become the staple slogan of extremists. For such a challenge I was summarily unfriended.
Leftist Christians are a friendly and tolerant bunch.
Now let me say upfront that I didn’t handle this interaction as well as I could have. And to anyone watching from the outside it may have seemed that I was perhaps unchristian and mistaken. And, I have to say, the entire conversation led to some soul searching on my part to try to understand why I had responded the way that I did.[1]
But there was something in this encounter that went beyond the placard waving, the rhetoric, and the tantrums; something I will touch on here but more fully in the coming posts.
Although I didn’t initially say so, I actually agreed with the author’s point. But that wasn’t what I was addressing. I was addressing the underlying assumption that those in government who try to prevent illegal immigration do so because they believe they are racially superior to all others. And I was also probing the belief that such an assumption underpins – that white people (whatever that means) are racist oppressors.
I don’t know whether that assumption is correct. My point was that neither did the author. But she, as a Christ follower, was happy to fling out loaded pejoratives, to pour fuel on an already inflamed political and social situation. Her response to my questions demonstrated she knew exactly what she was doing. And indeed, she seemed quite proud of herself for having done so.
As I said, I rarely, if ever, engage on social media, but I questioned this woman specifically because in the past she had shown evidence of an ideology that on the surface appears to be Christian, but which is in reality at odds with the work of the Holy Spirit. And so I wanted to know whether she truly believed the ideological stance she was identifying with in her attack.
I’ll come back to my friend and her racial epithets later. But I raise this here because this person (and their reaction) is representative of an already large and fast-growing group of Christians who have conflated certain ideologies with Christianity, and believe they’re one and the same.
That’s a very roundabout way of saying the Church is deceived.
Being a black and white kind of guy [not a racial statement], I have to be careful that I don’t make that sound like all the Church is entirely deceived all the time. When I started pondering this problem several years ago, I would have said that deception was a fairly isolated phenomenon. But, as I’ve come to realize, God often speaks to me about things before I see the evidence. After some years of watching I think my generalization that the Church is deceived isn’t too far from the mark. Not only that, but the pace at which it is taking hold in the Church is astounding.
Christians in their own words
Today, we are surrounded by beliefs, practices, and ideas that are completely contrary to living a godly life. What was once considered deviant and perverse is now tolerated, welcomed, even celebrated in churches across the world. Don’t believe me? Take a look at what Christians are saying and doing:
Why Jesus Is No Longer the Only Way for Many American Christians
“Whatever your path is to God I celebrate that”
Facebook: Belief that Jesus is the only way is “insanity”
Christians Must ‘Unhitch’ Old Testament From Their Faith, Says Andy Stanley
Megachurch Pastor Adam Hamilton Says Christians Can Support Gay Marriage and Not Be Heretical
Justin Welby Unable to Condemn Gay Sex in Interview, Admits He Is Struggling With Issue
Calif. Megachurch Accused of Practicing Occult in Use of ‘Destiny Cards’
Church of England Advises Clergy to Use Baptism Rite to Celebrate Gender Transition
And this from the recent Revoice conference:
“[W]hat does queer culture (and specifically, queer literature and theory) have to offer us who follow Christ? What queer treasure, honor, and glory will be brought into the New Jerusalem at the end of time (Revelation 21:24-26)?”
-Revoice – Promoting Gender and Sexual Minority Flourishing in Historic Christian Communities [Revoice, 2018]
I didn’t go searching for this stuff. These are just a sample of stories from a couple of Christian news sites I use, all fairly mainstream material. If you actually go looking there’s far worse going on than that, but even these show how adrift we’ve become from truth. The astonishing thing is that there are Christians reading this who will wonder what’s wrong with it.
Just so we’re clear, when I talk about deception I’m not talking about what some consider to be the bizarre teachings and freak shows of a Rodney Howard-Browne or the prosperity nonsense of a Kenneth Copeland, nor the facile, self-help drivel of a Joel Osteen. I think the errors there are well documented and widely known.
The kind of deception taking place now is one that undermines the authority of the word of God. It does so by emphasizing certain aspects, passages, or material while minimizing, belittling, or even discounting the veracity of others. It likes the gospels, but hates the law. It highlights love, compassion, and mercy, but spurns judgement, wrath, and punishment. It loves the God of the New Testament, not so much the “angry” God of the Old. It preaches affirming, uplifting, feel-good sermons, but avoids anything that could be construed as convicting. It talks always of grace (= tolerance) but never of sanctity. It lifts up its hands in worship but has no desire for those hands to be holy.
There are Christians who think supporting abortion clinics is an act of godly justice, that Jesus was a socialist, who have no problem promoting films that celebrate homosexuality, infidelity, vengeance, or gratuitous violence, and who see no incongruity between Christianity and witchcraft.
That’s the tip of the iceberg. The tame side of the Church’s deception. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see way more than that.
When you align yourself like this with the world’s thinking you, by necessity, become misaligned to God’s. When you are conformed to this world’s ideologies, when you are in agreement with the spirit of this age, your mind is not being renewed and you are patently not being transformed (Rom.12.2; 2Cor.6.14; Gal.5.17). And so, you become incapable of proving what God’s will is, firstly, because you are convinced it is the same as yours, and secondly, because God gives you over to a strong delusion. He gives you over to what you have already chosen for yourself.
How did we get here? Well, that’s for another time. But at root is a question, a very old question. And it sounds like this: “Did God really say?”
As I’ve previously stated, there is no fear of God in the Church. No one any longer trembles at his word (Is. 66.2,5; Ezra 9.4). How can they if they don’t know what it says? When we don’t know what God’s word says or don’t really believe it we open ourselves up to be conformed to the thinking of this world (Rom.12.2; 2 Thes.2.10). We open ourselves to question, did God really say?
Is there a hell? Does God judge people for sin? Does sin even exist? Is a woman’s right to choose of greater moral value than allowing life to live? What is truth? Will adulterers, homosexuals, swindlers, the greedy, idolaters, witches, and liars really be excluded from the kingdom of God, or is that just hyperbole, a metaphor, or some kind of purgatorial statement?
The only weapon a Christian possesses is their sword. The only way to confront both brazen and subtle attacks from without and corrosion from within is with the word of God. Why? Because the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Heb.4.12). It is able to tell Truth from half-truth, Reality from deception. It can tell us when what we believe is something of our soul rather than something of the Spirit. No other thing – not education, or philosophy, or reason, or belief, university, ideology, or intellect – can tell us what is of God and what is a subtle deception of Satan.
But we’ve thrown our sword away, and replaced it with a Nerf Gun. Loads of fun. Totally useless. That’s what’s become of God’s word in our lives. Something to make us feel good, but totally ineffective against the deceptions of the enemy. And none of this is helped when influential Christian leaders undermine the truth of that word by implying scripture isn’t really God’s word after all.
God began speaking to me about deception several years ago. At that time I didn’t understand quite what I was seeing or how to describe it. Nor did I recognize how widespread and ingrained the problem truly was. But I knew why it was taking place. A powerful combination of external and internal pressures were impacting a Church already unsure of what it believed.
Others noticed it too. In a 2015 interview Al Mohler noted:
“The problem for most American Christians is not atheism but cognitive contamination. [T]heir world view is actually being contaminated by radically unchristian ideas and principles and intuitions, and they don’t know it. So they’re actually being secularized in a way that is imperceptible to themselves and invisible. They’re not deciding to become atheists. They’re not even aware of the fact that as they take this course in anthropology, or as they watch this movie, or read this novel, or have this conversation… they are not aware that this cognitive contamination is coming in, and their Christian worldview is becoming less Christian even as they identify themselves as Christians.”
– Albert Mohler
Because we fail to see how our Christian worldview is being contaminated by unchristian principles, and because such principles go largely undetected by us (since many of them are subliminal, or mediated through movies, books, social networks, our friends and other “non-threatening” means), we bargain away our theological convictions or allow them to be eroded or, in the case of the latest generation, do not hold them to begin with.
Deception & Delusion
The truly tragic part of all this is that we are completely oblivious to it. We don’t see the problem. Well, we either don’t see it or we don’t want to. It’s either deception or delusion. There is a difference.
Deception occurs when we are persuaded or tricked into believing something that is not true or is only partially true. We become so convinced of this deceit that we sincerely believe it is the truth; that we are right and all others mistaken.
I understand when Christian’s think it’s all innocuous; TV, news media, -ist studies at university, societal attitudes – it’s not hurting anyone; it’s not really a slippery slope. I’m not suggesting you escape from life and go live in a cave. But this is precisely where deception begins. Deception doesn’t usually occur when some crazy loon starts preaching heresy from the pulpit. It begins in simple, tiny increments of change that question God’s word until “Did God say?” becomes “God didn’t really say.”
Some of us have no idea what God has said. We wait to get spoon fed on Sunday by a guy who’s often just as deceived as we are. And even if he’s not, he’s too afraid to tell us what scripture really says in case he offends someone.
Or we don’t wait to get spoon fed; we read the Bible through the lens of our ideological preferences: Oppressor and Victim, Colonialist and Colonized, Capitalism and Socialism, Legalistic and Liberated. Whatever paradigm we use to view the world, that is the one we apply in our reading of scripture. And everything we read gets tainted by it. And all the while we tell ourselves that we’re the ones who see clearly. Everyone else is wrong.
It was to people with just that attitude that Jesus said,
“You don’t realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.
I counsel you to buy… salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.”
Doctrine
After God spoke to me about deception, I began to watch what people were saying on Facebook, what they blogged about, and to listen to how they approached and interpreted the big social issues of our day. What I discovered was that instead of interpreting social norms in the light of scripture, many Christians were interpreting scripture in the light of social norms – adjusting their theology to fit with society’s ever evolving beliefs regarding gender, euthanasia, abortion, homosexuality, drugs, marriage, sex, worth, dignity, integrity, personhood.
As David French explained a few days ago, the Church’s thinking has evolved into something like this:
If the presence of sin leads to a conflict between what scripture states and what people practice, the “problem” lies with the doctrine condemning such practice, not the practice itself. The solution, therefore, is not to deal with sin but to simply change the doctrine. No doctrine condemning sin = no more sin.
This approach is a whole lot easier now that there’s an entire generation of Christians that either doesn’t know doctrine or doesn’t believe it. In fact, the word “doctrine” has itself become politically incorrect in our churches.
If scripture says homosexual practice is wrong.
The solution is that God loves everybody no matter how they were born.If scripture says mankind is “male and female” – made in the image of God.
The solution is, God loves everybody no matter where they are on the gender spectrum.If scripture tells us to Preach the word… correct, rebuke and encourage,
We should just love people, and let the Holy Spirit convict.When scripture says I can’t follow Jesus and keep my sin,
I simply tell myself, “God loves me just the way I am.”Scripture has a word, “sin”. I don’t like that word.
It’s a good thing God loved us while we were still sinners. God still loves me. God will never stop loving me. “Love covers a multitude of sins”. Isn’t love wonderful.
If we were in Eden today, we wouldn’t need Satan to tempt us; we’d simply tell ourselves, God loves me so much there’s no way he’d deny me that fruit. Love has become the skeleton key for any prohibited door – a universal panacea for every irritating and backward piece of scripture we can’t reconcile with our personal preferences. Got a conflict between scripture and your feelings? Just play the God is Love card. It trumps everything.
And so I discovered, as I watched, that sound doctrine was being replaced by some vague and generic “love everybody”-in-a-Beatles-kind-of-way philosophy. But I also discovered, as my Facebook friend demonstrated in her responses to me, that Christians weren’t merely deceived, they were deluded. That is, they wanted to be deceived. They wanted to believe something that wasn’t the Truth and then label that “truth”.
[1] A friend of mine told me that in similar situations he sends people a private message telling them he’s thinking of responding negatively to their Facebook posts and asks if that’s okay. Given that his friends are predominantly millennials and Gen Z, this makes perfect sense. But it also shows how infantile society has become if we have to forewarn people that we’re going to disagree with their opinions.
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