By Phil Mobley, byFaith Online Magazine.
In August 1992, Patrick J. Buchanan addressed the Republican National Convention, gathered in Houston to nominate then-President George H.W. Bush for a second term. Buchanan had mounted a strong primary challenge to Bush but now implored his supporters — many of whom were conservative Christians — to rally behind Bush against Democratic nominee Bill Clinton. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Buchanan asserted. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.”
The phrase “culture war” thus entered the American vernacular. It still usefully characterizes the political battles over the country’s most divisive social issues since Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark ruling on abortion. Over the following three decades, evangelical Christianity became associated (or, to critics, intertwined) with conservative political activism, primarily as a powerful bloc within the Republican Party. For better and for worse, “pro-life, pro-family” policy planks went hand in hand with right-leaning positions on taxes, immigration, and national defense for baby boomer evangelicals.
The landscape has changed rapidly for the trailing generation of Christians, many of whom consider the very idea of a culture war unpalatable. In his May article in byFaith on “The State of the PCA,” Bryan Chapell summarized their perspective. “Christians in the generation that is 40-minus years old have never perceived themselves as a majority, but always as a minority in a pluralistic culture,” he wrote. They thus recoil at the forceful speech and political activism of some of their parents’ heroes, considering them more a hindrance to the Gospel than a positive proclamation of its beauty. They prefer instead to emphasize mercy and social justice, what Chapell calls “help” ministries. Even so, these Christians are finding themselves drawn into battles not of their choosing.
Not optional
“A lot of Christians want the culture war to be optional,” says Erick Erickson. “They say it doesn’t affect them. But it does!”