The problem with Western culture is not that we are too bad; but that we are too good.
The West will not be destroyed by its vices, but by its virtues - virtues that, untethered from a belief in the God who defines them, have become wholly unholy.
Most people understand that vice runs wild when a culture rejects God. This is unremarkable since vice has always run amok, and more-so without Christianity restraining it.
What few people appreciate is that in a post-Christian world, virtues are not abandoned.
Far from discarding virtue, a post-Christian world exaggerates virtue. But the virtue we now promote is profoundly different to what it once was.
What makes something virtuous?
Why, for instance, is truth virtuous?
You may well answer that truth is right because truth works. If you are truthful, people will trust you.
And that’s correct, but it’s a purely pragmatic answer. It’s entirely utilitarian. To answer that truth is right because it works is to leave open the possibility that falsehoods would be right, if only they worked.
Truth is a virtue, not because truth works, but because truth is the nature of God.
In other words, even if falsehoods worked, they would still be wrong since they are counter to the character of God Himself.
When a culture rejects God, virtues continue and are even exaggerated. Have you noticed that our culture, while rejecting God, is becoming increasingly puritanical?
It’s weird, but entirely predictable.
Pride rejects God by insisting it doesn’t need God. And then that same pride that insists it doesn’t need God seeks to prove it doesn’t need God by emphasising it’s own righteousness apart from God.
But this new self-righteousness runs wild through culture and wrecks absolute havoc.
When you understand this you start to realise why some of the things causing the most damage to human life today are things that actually sound good.
No-one would say tolerance is bad. No-one would say being non-judgmental is bad. No-one would say that loving people is bad, or that compassion is bad.
But disconnected from the Person of Jesus, tolerance, non-judgmentalism, love and compassion, while sounding right, have become all sorts of wrong.
As a result we have young adults thinking and behaving in a way that they insist is Christlike when it is actually the opposite. And we have an older generation who instinctively know something is not right, but who lack the language to express their misgivings.
How do you argue against tolerance? How do you counter a person who insists we should ‘just love everybody’?
The virtues of tolerance and acceptance are now running so wild in culture that they are destroying it.
Marylin Munro famously said:
“If you don’t accept me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best”
It’s become a meme embraced by this generation. But it’s a sure way to be miserable.
You’re going to be a very lonely person if you insist that people only “deserve” you if they are willing to “accept” the worst parts about you … as if enduring all that is bad about you is the price of admission!
This generation believes deep down it has a right to be accepted.
We insist that all of our attitudes, behaviours and habits must be accepted by family, friends, church and the wider culture. The LGBTQ community has latched onto the virtues of acceptance and tolerance and preach them relentlessly.
Our Christian young people find this message impossible to resist. They agree that if you don’t accept people, we’re not like Jesus. We say this because they have been led to believe that Jesus accepts everyone!
But the Gospel is not ‘come and be accepted’. The gospel is ‘come and be saved’; come and be transformed. The Christian message is a salvation message, not an acceptance message.
Popular Culture says that if people don't accept you, they don't deserve you. That’s not virtue. That’s ego!
The other extreme - where we insist people must become acceptable to deserve God's acceptance - is also damaging. That’s called legalism.
Christianity says God accepts you, though you don't deserve it, so that you can becomeacceptable. This is called grace!
Another word for acceptance – in our culture - is tolerance. We are told we must be tolerant. We are taught that tolerance is always good and that intolerance is always bad.
The fact is that we need both tolerance and intolerance, realising they are for different things.
· Tolerance is for people, never for bad ideas
· Intolerance is for bad ideas, never for people
Jesus was fully tolerant of sinners (dying on the cross for sinners) whilst being fully intolerant of sin (he died to destroy it).
We are called to love our enemies, but not to love their ideas.
We are to be meek with the erring, but violent with the error.
We are to have charity with regards people, and clarity with regards ideas.
Charity without clarity leads to sloppy sentimentalism.
Clarity without charity leads to harsh legalism.
Charity toward people and clarity concerning ideas leads to life transformation.
Non-Judgmentalism is another virtue that is ruining our culture.
Jesus summarised all of Scripture in two sentences:
‘Love the Lord your God. And love your neighbour as yourself.’
But our culture is smarter than Jesus and so we summarised the entire Bible into three words:
‘Do not judge.’
Good judgement used to be a virtue. We now have an entire generation who think that refusing to exercise any judgement of any sort, at any time, about anything at all, is a virtue!
But the passage famously quoted on not judging (Matthew 7) is a call to judge rightly and fairly. It is not a command to not judge at all.
Jesus said we needed to attend to the plank in our own eye before we attended to the dust in our brother’s eye. He never said that, having dealt with ourselves, we should leave the dust in our brother’s eye.
Morally I must deal with the plank in my own eye, because otherwise I will be dishonest and hypocritical. And practically I must deal with the plank in my own eye, because otherwise I won’t see straight to help others.
To exercise good judgement is a virtue.
To exercise no judgement is not helpful, and it is certainly not virtuous.
Good judgement is the ability to remove the dust from a brother’s eye without blinding him. In other words, we exercise right judgement out of love and concern for a friend rather than out of pride and egotism about ourselves.
A culture that has made a virtue out of failing to exercise good judgement so as to be “non judgey” is a culture that will be destroyed. What’s that old adage? If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.
Should we talk about love before we finish? Ours is such a loving culture. ‘Just love everybody,’ is a popular anthem.
But this mistakes love for sloppy sentimentality, and fails to understand what love really is.
The world thinks of love as affirmation. ‘We just need to love everybody’ really means we just need to affirm everybody.
If we don’t affirm somebody’s choices we are accused of being unloving. And if Jesus is loving, how can we not affirming?
But here’s the missing piece. Jesus is not simply loving. Jesus IS love. So to understand what it means to be loving you must understand Jesus since He is the only reason we even know what love is.
Jesus said loving others is the second most important thing for us to do. The first priority is loving God. There’s good reason for this. It is in loving God that I learn howto love others.
To put it another way, if people are made in the likeness of God, how are we to know what people ought to be like? The only way we can know who others are supposed to be is to learn who God is.
It is in loving God that I learn how to love you into wholeness, health and blessing.
Jesus loves me. But he certainly doesn’t affirm every decision I make, or applaud everything that I do.
So I know immediately from Jesus that love is not affirmation of everything and anything.
Rather, love is affirmation of all that is true and right and pure. And when I am not doing what is true and right and pure, Jesus continues to affirm me into those things, because He loves me!
This is how we are to love others.
The problem with Western culture is not that we are bad, but that we are good.
We are so good that we don’t need God to be good, and so have corrupted goodness. We then exaggerate and flaunt that goodness in an egotistical bid to prove that it is good, and so are now busily destroying the world in the name of all that is holy, though it has become completely unholy.
This extremely insightful and perceptive essay needs to be read widely and studied closely. Thank you Sir!
Well written and so accurate. Hard to be so succinct, but you have done so.