We live in a society wrought with moral problems. We do well to remember that in every society and culture there has been immense moral issues, and that our modern era isn’t necessarily uniquely evil. Yet at the same time, we are in a moral decline in the West, and many Christians are seeking to combat the many immoralities.
But why is there such a moral decline as this?
Francis Schaeffer, writing almost 40 years ago in 1981, diagnosed the problem spot on. Yet, as he says, we as modern evangelicals often miss it. Schaeffer writes,
“The basic problem of Christians in this county in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.
They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness, pornography, the public school, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion [and in the last 40 years, we could add much to that list]. But they have not seen this as a totality—each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about due to a shift in world view—that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and view the world and life as a whole. This shift has been away from a world view that was at least vaguely Christian in people’s memory (even if they were not individually Christian) toward something completely different—toward a world view based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance…
These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results—including sociological and governmental results, and specifically including law.
It is not that these two world views are different only in how they understand the nature of reality and existence. They also inevitably produce totally different results.” (Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto [in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, Volume 5], 423-424).
Schaeffer’s point is that we often focus on the branches when the root is the true issue. We try to change the symptoms, when we instead must aim to heal the disease.
What’s the disease? A totally different worldview. A totally false way of explaining the world, why things are the way they are, how we can know truth, and what’s important. Back in the 1980’s this worldview change was an issue, but it’s even more so today. Most people born in the West today have a default worldview “based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance.” And when this is believed to be reality, it inevitably impacts society, culture, morality, and law.
This accounts for society’s increasingly godless immorality. It is the inevitable result (as Schaeffer emphasizes) of something much bigger. And as we continue to breathe the air of Naturalism, we should expect such results to come even more easily, more abundantly.
Which is why our Christian aim is not mainly to cut at the branches. There is work to be done here, and we praise God for those in the trenches with specific issues (such as abortion). But branch-slicing isn’t the ultimate answer; neither is hoping in a politician who shares some branches with the Christian worldview. Rather, we must change the root. For the good of our culture and those in it, we must, through time, give people once again a Christian worldview. And this only happens through teaching God’s word in churches and homes, through personal conversations with unbelievers, through Christians proclaiming the gospel and showing that Christ in the gospel is better than anything the world can offer—with the ultimate hope of God making many more individuals born again through the gospel.
Accomplishing societal change, therefore, is counterintuitive: To bring moral change, we don’t focus mainly on moral change. To change immoralities in our culture, we don’t primarily focus on cultural immoralities.
We focus instead on Christ. We explain sin and spotlight the compelling remedy of the gospel of grace. Once Christ is embraced by individuals, who then spread it to more individuals, more people will not only be saved, but will also gain the proper root-worldview in accordance with Reality.
And then, and only then, will society’s moral branches change for the better.
