"The Overton Window has shifted so far to the left that the democrats of yesteryear are now considered literally Hitler."
He is right about progressivism being a religion that hid God under the carpet. Actually it's more accurate they forgot God. Or rather rejected Him when He became inconvenient to their desires. Yet their utopian ideals, which themselves ran back centuries, kept going. The rise of SJWs in recent years was interesting to me because while the phenonomen was kind of new, the language was old and familiar...it came out of the old line Protestatnt churches. They'd been using that language for decades. The fundamentalists used to rail against it as the social gospel.
Today those same churches are still around, but greatly diminished and dying. Any who cared about the true Gospel, about holiness, about truth left long ago. These are the ones with the rainbow flag out front or a woman in the pulpit. Their beliefs look like little more than liberal progressivism with a thin veneer of Christianity thrown on top to make themselves feel better. But seemingly they were once honest to God Christians. I'm not sure where the genesis of this movement was; it goes back centuries; though the histories won't tell you that.
Of course, social justice is but one part of this movement; though I'm sure they had their hand in the other parts: feminism, free love, racism, consumerism, darwinism, totalitarianism.
That last part is notable. Because this isn't only an issue of the left.
In this country we have many holidays; most of them celebrating the state, state power, or its theologies: Independence Day, Veterans Day, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Presidents Day, MLK Day, valentines (romance), Christmas (consumerism). Holiday....holy day. A day set aside from work. Like the Sabbath, this is a very ancient form of worship. About the only holidays that aren't that way are thanksgiving and Easter; although the churches are trying real hard given they increasingly think of the latter, like Christmas, in terms of how much cash it will bring in.
The AFL has long sought to outlaw flag burning.... an act protected for crosses; no movement to ban cross burning, even with it's association with the KKK.
And if society has a problem to whom do we turn (even on the right)? Poverty, drug abuse, crime, etc. etc. Always to government. Even conservatives look to government to solve all their problems, meet all their needs. 'There ought to be a law."
And what is the Christian's solution to winning the culture war? Why, political activism. State power.
But in doing so they are blind. Politics is down stream from culture, which is itself made up of religion. If they spent as much effort on actual evangalism as politics they've had made more progress. But that is hard to do when you loose your salt, when you're more afraid of name calling from the left than of God, when money and popularity are more important than holiness.
The 'culture war' the right so long rails against goes back to the free love movement of the 60's; well, that's when we lost it anyway. And we didn't just loose that war, we adopted the beliefs of the victors. The church is a staunch defender of equality and feminism (by other names if necessary). They abandoned the old ways of forming marriage for dating and then free love. Sure they rail against fornication; but they look the other way while it happens, abdicate their role in preventing it and refuse to condemn those most responsible for it. They complain about abortion of babies, but reject the idea of punishing the real murderer (the one person who could stop it). They worry about their children leaving the faith while abdicating to the atheistic state their role to raise them.
There is a greater point here other than just providing background history. TFM rightly presents this as a religious fight between two factions. But there is a reason one faction keeps loosing: they are constantly defending as 'conservative' things which their forefathers opposed as liberal transgressions. But once taken they dutifully defend beach heads the left established a generation prior. And there is a reason: fundamentally at their core they believe the same things as their opponents.They just find the outward manifestations (i.e. the end results of the matter) distasteful. They are too afraid of the world to stand strong against being accused of wrong think. They have completely lost sight of history; they don't even know what came before, that they are more liberal than the liberals of 30, 60, 90 years ago.
We are our own worst enemies. We will keep loosing this battle until the time we find the stones to stand against popular opinion and feel-bads and actually fight it.
Actually now that I think about it, with the possible exception of the atheism portion of darwinism, American Christians have embraced all the core tenants the current progressive religion.
. I think we're on the same page.
