Tag Archives: secular culture

Why I’m Ok and You’re Ok Didn’t Work Out

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One of the things that postmodernism sort of introduced in our culture is the idea that your truth is yours and mine is mine.  This was sort of the battle cry of tolerance that was taught in early 2000’s (which now seems like a really long time ago).  The idea at the time seemed to be that I’m ok and you’re ok.  We’re all ok as we are.  What we feel is ok.  What we see as true is ok.  We should tolerate differences not only of experience but we now could say that our different perspectives and experiences were actually different truths that were ok to live out of.  Back then it was ok for everyone to not agree.  In fact the idea was that no one should impose their belief or truth on anyone else.

Many in the church sort of went along with this.  I don’t mean to say that most church leaders agreed that truth was relative.  But I think the idea was that to get along and work in this new culture we should just sort of let that go and be loving and understanding.  This idea of loving and understanding everyone isn’t a bad thing as far as it goes but by not standing up stronger we gave a lot of things that aren’t true a lot of ground.  The results are that now even more believers are of the belief that there is no absolute truth and that half of millennial evangelicals think evangelization is wrong.  After all that would be forcing our truth on others.

All of this has backfired spectacularly both inside and outside of the church in our culture.

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Is Sex With A Robot “Wrong”?

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You may have seen in the news that a man recently “married” a hologram.  Yes you read that right.  A hologram.  Now before you get all judgmental here please listen to the man.  Akihiko Kondo points out that, “I believe that the shape of happiness and love is different for each person.”  Does this sound familiar?

I’m not here to bash Kondo today.  What I want to do with this post is discuss a couple of things.  1. We are careening off the rails as a culture and 2. What should it look like as the church to stand in the middle of it.

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The Myth Of Reformed Romance

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Have you ever gone into the Christian Fiction section in a bookstore.  It’s sort of unbelievable.  First of all, I still have not figured out what exactly counts as Christian fiction.  Why do we have our own section – why can’t it just be in the fiction section but written by Christians?  Is there a Jewish fiction section??  The truth is that we have our own section because we want it, and we are the only people that would possibly read it.

But the most disturbing thing about the Christian fiction section is the focus on what can best be described as Christian romance novels.  It’s incredible.  I would wager that close to 70% of the books in this section fit that category.  Probably more.  More amazing is that of those romance novels, probably 80% are either western or amish. Talk about a limited audience.

We’re in obvious need of better literature but that isn’t why I bring this all up.  I bring it up because rather than lead in what love, marriage, and singleness looks like (let alone what good literature looks like) we in western Christian culture have adopted what the world says and then arranged our theology and practices to accommodate it.  The impact of this runs much deeper than we realize and impacts not only Christians but everyone else.

We have made romance the thing.  We don’t say that directly of course. We’re more “holy” than that. Instead we couch it in what I call Reformed Romance.  This is where we sort of combine secular romance and shaky Calvinism.

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