Mutilated and broken, is not a bizarre paranoid fantasy. It is currently the lived experience of tens of thousands of families across the West—and likely far more than that. These stories are unfolding every day. These ideologies are not simply absurd abstractions pushed out by recently-invented university departments—they are the guiding principles of the very institutions we once assumed had the best interests of our children at heart.

As Mary Eberstadt noted in her 2016 book It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, most people in orthodox Christian circles have, at some point, had a conversation about what they might do if their governments grow even more overtly hostile to Christian beliefs and practices. If you’re an American in a blue state, that might mean joining the growing conservative exodus to red states; if you’re a Canadian, that might involve deciding to move to the United States. If you believe that the American experiment has failed, you might—like Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option—decide to decamp to Hungary. I’ve been part of plenty of these discussions myself.
In the last few years, mainstream culture has become, in many ways, more tangibly dangerous. The complete colonization of our collective institutions by the transgender movement is one example. Many parents have reached out to me to describe the helplessness they experience when their children are introduced to gender ideology at school or online, decide to take irreversible cross-sex hormones or undergo sex-change surgeries—with nothing they can do to stop it. The educators, the medical professionals, the mental health experts—all stand in between desperate parents and their confused children. The pain they endure is cruel and unique—that of helplessly watching their children disintegrate before their eyes.
The Substack newsletter “Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans” regularly posts such stories, and a recent column titled “Eastern European Mom” caught my eye. It is written by an Eastern European immigrant to the United States who discovered that her 13-year-old daughter had gone through a “mental meltdown.” She was hospitalized and while in hospital stated that she was a boy. Her mother decided to do the only thing she could when she realized that every single institution supported a sex change for her daughter:
I subsequently learned that my daughter’s public middle school had socially transitioned her behind my back. Alarmed at this plot to take my child away, I immediately made plans to return to Eastern Europe. I located a school back home near my family for both of my children. I contacted the school director, explained the situation and was assured that they would not affirm and that they would work with me no matter what struggles my daughter has. So, I sent both kids to Eastern Europe to stay with family and I followed a few weeks later after making arrangements to work remotely.
When I returned to Eastern Europe, I opened up to my very large family about what had happened with my daughter. As opposed to many of the stories I’ve heard about with US families, where family members are quick to affirm regardless of what the parents see as being in the children’s best interest, my family was shocked.
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God has purposefully interwoven silence and salvation in his tapestry of redemption. Is it a surprise that the Enemy would use the flood of modern technology to all but eliminate silence in our lives? Wouldn’t that be an effective way to drown out God’s voice? Endless social media scrolling, music, Netflix, podcasts, and cable keep us from knowing our Savior and ourselves. How do we regain the margin of silence in our lives?

My wife, Angel, is very comfortable with quiet. I admire her ability to sit peacefully and listen to God. She intentionally shut down social media over a year and a half ago. Me? Not so much. I work out with audiobooks or podcasts as my audio backdrop. I write with music on.
There are benefits to this audio soundscape in which I live. It means that I input quite a lot of information. I benefit from the teaching of many wise voices and am grateful for the gift of music, which inspires, soothes, and convicts me through the Holy Spirit.
The problem with a life of input is that it can choke out self-reflection and even the voice of God.
In Psalm 62, David is desperate for God’s rescue. He declares, “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation” (Ps. 62:1). And then, perhaps as his heart becomes restless, he commands himself, “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him” (Ps. 62:5).
Similarly, in Lamentations 3, Jeremiah offers this thread of a promise amid tragedy, “The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” (Lam. 3:25-28).
For both David and Jeremiah, silence creates space for God’s salvific work to take hold. Silence and salvation are interwoven in God’s tapestry of redemption.
How am I missing out on God’s salvation in my wall of noise?
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The early Christians, acting in obedience to Christ, began to care for the poor, the sick, and the marginalized. So alien were their charitable acts and self-sacrificial lives that the Romans referred to them as “the third race.” In the centuries to follow, even though Christians were still a demographic minority, their care of the poor and sick, would serve as the first steps in achieving cultural authority.

Note: This is the conclusion of a 4-part series. Click here for Part I, Part II, and Part III.
We now come to our third and final example of cultural engagement: the early Christian church and its triumph over the pagan culture of Rome. The Roman world was brutal and generally indifferent to suffering. Sympathy and mercy were weaknesses, virtues anathema to those of Rome. The ancient world was both decadent and cruel. The practice of infanticide, for example, was widespread and legal throughout the Greek and Roman world during the early days of Christianity. In fact, abortion, infanticide, and child sacrifice were extremely common throughout the ancient world.
Cicero (106-43 BC), writing in the period before Christ, cited the Twelve Tables of Roman Law when he wrote, “deformed infants should be killed” (De Ligibus 3.8). Similarly, Seneca (4 BC-AD 39) wrote, “We drown children who are at birth weakly and abnormal” (De Ira 1.15). The ancient writer Plutarch (c. AD 46-120), discussing the casual acceptance of child sacrifice, mentions the Carthaginians, who, he says, “offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds while the mother stood by without tear or moan” (Moralia 2.171D). Polybius (ca. 200-118 BC) blamed infanticide for the population decline in Greece (Histories 6).
Historical research reveals that infanticide was common throughout India, China, Japan, and the Brazilian jungles as well as among the Eskimos. Dr. James Dennis, writing in the 1890s, showed how infanticide was common in many parts of Africa and was “well known among the Indians of North and South America” (Social Evils of the Non-Christian World, 1898). Suffice it to say, for much of the world and throughout most of its history the culture of death and brutality has been the rule, and a culture of life, love, and mercy has been the exception. It is to the cause of this exception that we now turn.
In roughly AD 27, a young Jewish carpenter—in an obscure Roman outpost—began to preach and teach, saying he was the Son of God, the savior of the world, the promised Messiah of the Jewish Scriptures. He claimed to be a king whose kingdom was not of this world—a kingdom without end. This king—Jesus—would validate all that had been revealed to the Israelites: there was a God and this God, who was hidden from the world, was a personal being who had made mankind in his image because he desired a relationship with mankind.
And so this Holy God further revealed himself—becoming incarnate. God became flesh and dwelt among us to do what only he could do: reconcile the chasm between God and man that sin had caused. God would implement his plan for reconciling man to God, man to himself, man to man, and man to creation. Suddenly, a radically new conception of reality, the world, and life would take hold. A new ethic and morality would challenge the old. All life would now be understood as precious, the intentional gift of a loving God. The kingdom of God was inaugurated on earth! A new day had dawned, and those who had been drawn into this kingdom began to think and act in new ways. They would strive to live and act in obedience to their king—not their flesh and not their culture.
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