How to Win the Culture War

A Christian Battle Plan for a Society in Crisis

Peter Kreeft

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780830823161
• eBook ISBN: 9780830875634
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The battle lines have been drawn. Many Christians have fallen into the trap of proclaiming "Peace! Peace!" when there is no peace. Hiding their eyes from the pressing issues of the day, they believe that resistance to the prevailing culture is useless. At the same time, other Christians have been too quick to declare war, mistaking battlefield casualties as enemies rather than victims. In How to Win the Culture War Peter Kreeft issues a rousing call to arms. Christians must understand the true nature of the culture war--a war between the culture of life and the culture of death. Kreeft identifies the real enemies facing the church today and maps out key battlefields. He then issues a strategy for engagement and equips Christians with the weapons needed for a successful campaign.Above all, Kreeft assures us that the war can be won--in fact, it will be won. For those who hope in Christ, victory is assured, because good triumphs over evil and life conquers death. Love never gives up. Neither must we.

1

We Are at War

A Wake-Up Call

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I assume you would not be buying, or browsing through, a book with the title How to Win the Culture War if you believed “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” If you are surprised to be told that our entire civilization is in crisis, I welcome you back to earth and hope you had a nice vacation on the moon.

Many minds do seem moonstruck. Especially those of the so-called intellectuals, who are supposed to have their eyes more open, not less. Most of them are the bland leading the bland. After a lifetime in academia, I have discovered that there is only one requirement for someone to actually believe any of the one hundred most absurd ideas possible for a human mind to conceive: you must be an intellectual. Some ideas are so ridiculous that only a Ph.D. could believe them.

For instance, take Time magazine. (Please! Thoreau said, sagely, of a similarly named publication, “Read not the Times; read the eternities.”) A cover article in Time a few years ago was about the question “Why is everything getting better?” Why is life so good in America today? Why does everybody feel so satisfied and optimistic about the quality of life? The authors never once questioned the assumption; they only wondered why.

It turned out, upon reading the article, that every single aspect of life they mentioned, every reason why everything was getting better and better, was economic. People have more money. Period. End of discussion.

Except the poor, of course. But they don’t count, because they don’t write Time magazine. They don’t even read it.

I have a theory about Time: that it is simply Playboy with clothes on. For one kind of playboy, the world is simply one big whorehouse; for another kind, it’s one big piggy bank. For both kinds of playboy, things are getting better and better.

That’s why Americans gave a 75 percent approval rating to Bill Clinton, the perfect combination of the two kinds of playboy. He kept himself happy with some big whores, and he kept us happy with some big piggy banks. We loved him for the same reason the Germans loved Hitler when they elected him: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Hitler gave them autobahns and Volkswagens, jobs and housing. In fact, Hitler wrought the greatest economic miracle of the twentieth century: from economic and military ruin to full employment and national pride in a few short years. What else matters as long as the emperor gives you bread and circuses? People are pigs, not saints; they love slops, not holiness, right? Or wrong?

Sexual pigginess and economic pigginess are natural twins. For lust and greed are almost interchangeable words. In fact, America does not know the difference between sex and money. It treats sex like money because it treats sex as a medium of exchange, and it treats money like sex because it expects its money to get pregnant and reproduce.

There is one little problem with the pig philosophy, however, and it is intensely practical: death. Both sex and money are often fatal. Two words show that: AIDS and suicide.

Most Americans are “sexually active.” (Next to technology, euphemism is our greatest achievement.) Half of all “sexually active” people have some sexually transmitted disease. Many STDs are incurable. Some are fatal.

Suicide is certainly the most in-your-face index of unhappiness there is. And suicide is almost always directly proportionate to wealth. The richer you and your country are, the more likely it is that you will find life so good that you will choose to blow your brains out. Suicide among preadults has increased 5,000 percent since the “happy days” of the fifties. If suicide is not an index of crisis, especially of the coming generation, what is?

But there are more suicides than that. Half of all marriages commit suicide. That is what divorce is—the suicide of the new “one flesh” made by the marriage. If half of all the citizens of a country committed suicide, would you think that country had a bright future or a happy present? But the citizens of any country are not merely individuals; they are also families. Individuals are not the primary building blocks of societies; families are. Individuals are the building blocks of families. So half of all the new citizens of America commit suicide.

And if you insist on limiting “new citizens” to “individual children conceived,” the statistics are not much better. Onethird of all American children are killed—by their mothers, before they can be born, using healers as hit men.

This is a happy country? This is peace?

I know a doctor who spent two years in the Congo winning the confidence of a dying tribe who would not trust outsiders (black or white) and who were dying because of their bad diet. He was a dietitian, and he saved their lives. Once they knew this, they trusted him totally and asked him all sorts of questions about life in the West. They believed all the amazing things he told them, like flying to the moon and destroying whole cities with one bomb, but there were two things they literally could not believe. One was that in the West there are atheists—people who believe in no gods at all. (“Are these people blind and deaf? Have they never seen a leaf or heard a waterfall?”) The other was that in one nation alone (America), over a million mothers each year pay doctors to kill their babies before they are born. Their reaction to this was to giggle, which was their embarrassed way of trying to be polite, assuming it was a joke. They simply had no holding place in their minds for this concept, and they expected every day that the doctor would tell them the point of the joke.

And it is we who call these people “primitive.” The irony is mountainous.

Mother Teresa said, simply (everything she said, she said simply), “When a mother can kill her baby, what is left of civilization to save?” Chuck Colson has said that a “new Dark Ages” is looming. It is a darkness that began by calling itself the “Enlightenment” at its birth three centuries ago. And this brave new world has proved to be only a cowardly old dream.

We were warned. We had true prophets as well as false: Kierkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age. Spengler, 85 years ago, in The Decline of the West. Chesterton, who wrote 75 years ago that “the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality, and especially sexual morality…. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but in Manhattan.” Huxley, 65 years ago, in Brave New World. David Riesman, 45 years ago, in The Lonely Crowd. C. S. Lewis, 55 years ago, in The Abolition of Man. Romano Guardini, 50 years ago, in The End of the Modern World. Solzhenitsyn, 25 years ago, in his Harvard commencement address. And John Paul the Great, the greatest man in the worst century in history, who has even more chutzpah than Ronald Reagan—who dared to call them “the evil empire”—by calling us “the culture of death.” That’s our culture, and his, including Italy, which now has the lowest birth rate in the entire world, and Poland, which now seems to be about to share in the rest of the West’s abortion holocaust.

It does not take much of a gift of prophecy to forecast where this road leads. It takes only minimal biblical literacy—an increasingly rare commodity in the West.

If the God of life does not respond to this culture of death with judgment, then God is not God. If God does not honor the blood of the hundreds of millions of innocent victims of this culture of death, then the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, the God of Israel, the God of the prophets, the God of orphans and widows, the Defender of the defenseless, is a man-made myth, a fairy tale, an ideal as insubstantial as a dream.

But (you may object) is not the God of the Bible merciful and forgiving?

He is indeed. But the unrepentant refuse forgiveness. And forgiveness, being a gift, must be freely given and freely received. How can it be received by a moral relativist who denies that there is anything to forgive except unforgiveness, nothing to judge but judgmentalism? How can a Pharisee or a pop psychologist be saved?

But is not the God of the Bible compassionate?

Indeed he is. But he is not compassionate to the demons worshiped by the Canaanites who “make [their] children pass through the fire” (Ezekiel 20:31). Perhaps your God is compassionate to this work of human sacrifice—the God of your demands, the God of your “religious preference.” But if so, he is certainly not the God of the Bible. Look at the data. Read the Book.

But is not the God of the Bible revealed most fully and finally in the New Testament rather than the Old? In sweet and gentle Jesus rather than wrathful and warlike Jehovah?

The opposition is heretical; it is the old heresy of Marcion in modern form, a heresy as immortal as the demons who inspired it. Our data refute this heresy—our live data, which is divine data and talking data, and thus his name is “the Word of God.” This data refuted the heretical hypothesis in question when he said, “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). The opposition between nice Jesus and nasty Jehovah denies the very essence of Christianity: Christ’s identity as the Son of God. For let’s remember our biology as well as our theology: like father, like son. That Jesus is no more the Son of that God than Barney is the son of Hitler.

Will the real Jesus please stand up? He does so gladly. The Gospels are pop-up books: open their pages and he leaps out. Let’s dare to look at our data; let’s see what sweet and gentle Jesus actually said about the sins of the Canaanites, about their culture of death. Many centuries ago those Canaanites used to perform their liturgies of human sacrifice, their infanticidal devotions to the devil, in the valley of Gehenna, just outside the holy city of Jerusalem. It was a vast abortuary— like our culture. When the people of God entered the Promised Land, the Prince of Peace commanded them to kill the supernatural cancer of the Canaanites. Even after that was done, the Jews would not dare to live in that accursed valley. They used it only to burn their garbage. The devil’s promised land became a garbage dump for God’s people. And the fires never went out, day or night. (No matches.)

Sweet and gentle Jesus chose this place—Gehenna—as his image for hell. And he told many of the leaders of his chosen people that they were headed there and were leading many others there with them. He said to them, “Truly, truly I say to you, the IRS lawyers and White House interns go into the kingdom of God before you do” (modern “dynamic equivalence” and “contemporary relevance” translation). He said, “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea” (Mark 9:42).

That is our data. That is the real Jesus. And that is the Jesus who is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). He has not started manufacturing Styrofoam millstones.

But isn’t it true that “God is love” (1 John 4:16)? God is a lover, not a warrior, right?

No, God is a lover who is a warrior. The question fails to understand what love is—what the love that God is, is. Love is at war with hate and betrayal and selfishness and all love’s enemies. Love fights. Ask any parent. Yuppie love, like puppy love, may be merely “compassion,” but mother love and father love is war. “God is love” indeed, but what kind of love? Back to our data: does the Bible call him “God the puppy” or “God the yuppie”? Or is it “God the Father”?

In fact, every page of his Book bristles with spear points, from Genesis 3 through Revelation 20. The road from paradise lost to paradise regained is soaked in blood. At the very center of the story is a cross—a symbol of conflict if there ever was one.

The theme of spiritual warfare is never absent in Scripture and never absent in the life and writings of a single canonized saint. But it is never present in the religious education of most of my “Catholic” college students. Whenever I speak of it, they are stunned and silent, as if they have suddenly entered another world.

They have. They have gone through the wardrobe to meet the Lion and the Witch, past the warm fuzzies, the fur coats of psychology disguised as religion, into the cold snows of Narnia, where the White Witch is the ruler of this world and Aslan is not a tame lion but a warrior—a world where they meet Christ the King, not Christ the kitten.

Welcome back from the moon, kids.

Who doesn’t know we are at war? Who doesn’t know the barbarians are at the gates—no, inside the gates, writing the scripts of the TV shows and movies, writing the public school textbooks and judicial decisions? Only the ones in the lunar bubble of academia or the lunar bubble of establishment religious education with the unprofitable prophets who cry, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace, the ones who compose those dreary, drippy little liberal lullabies we endure as “contemporary hymns.”

But where is this culture of death coming from? Right here. America is the center of the culture of death. America is the world’s one and only cultural superpower.

Do you know what pious Muslims call us? They call us “the Great Satan.” (Impious Muslims call us that too, but that makes no difference; we are what we are.)

But America has the most just, most moral, most wise and most biblically based historical and constitutional foundation in the world.

Just like ancient Israel.

And America is one of the most religious countries in the world.

Just like ancient Israel.

And the Church is big and rich and free in America.

Just like an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. We Are at War: A Wake-Up Call
• 2. The Identity of Our Enemy: Principalities & Powers
• 3. The Kind of War We Are In: True & False Spiritual Warfare
• 4. The Fundamental Principle of All Culture Wars: Colson's Law
• 5. Our Enemy's Battle Plan: Satan's Strategy for the Third Millennium
• 6. The Fiercest Battle: Sex Wars
• 7. The Secret Weapon That Will Win the War: Saints
• 8. Basic Training: How to Be a Saint
• 9. The Prognosis for Victory: Why We Must Win
• Notes
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright