Don’t focus too much on whether others think you are nice or religious or respectable. Follow Jesus. And, like Jesus, welcome anyone who comes to him, including those who you might naturally exclude or think are disreputable. Make sure you care less about how you look to others and more about how you can please your Father in Heaven.

Many people think of Christians as nice, clean-cut people. Those who are respectable, who are pillars of the community. There is a perception that Christians sometimes feel that they are superior to other people, looking down on those who have made different lifestyle choices. And – let’s be honest – sometimes that accusation has truth to it.
It wasn’t that different for Jewish people in Jesus’ day. It was clear to most people who the good guys were and which people should be avoided. The religious leaders were the good guys. They took the law seriously and they were widely respected; you could even see their devotion by what they wore and how they arranged their hair. On the other hand, there were people that were commonly looked down upon, especially tax collectors and prostitutes. Not only were these less than savoury professions, they associated with the Romans.
Into that context, Jesus had a conflict with the religious leaders in Matthew 21. They saw him as causing problems in their area, the temple. They demanded to know whose authority he was acting under. After an initial discussion, Jesus went on to use three stories to unpack who he was. The first one was the parable of the two sons:
28 “What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ 29 And he answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went. 30 And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go. 31 Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.”
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Written by Ben C. Dunson |
Monday, September 25, 2023
One reason Rufo’s book is so helpful is that it collects information that otherwise is so scattered as to make it hard to get a good, overall picture of the radical changes taking place in American society. By doing so it shows average Americans that they’re not crazy. Things really are headed off the rails in many ways. Rufo provides copious amounts of documentation for the claims he makes. Rufo’s history is a clear, engaging, and enlightening history of the cultural revolution unleashed on America by radical leftist activists over the last half-century.

Apocalyptic Floydianism
George Floyd’s death was an apocalypse.
It was an apocalypse, not in the sense of “chaos” (though there was plenty of that), but in the real meaning of the word: it was a revelation.
Despite the lawlessness, violence, and anarchy that was unleashed by Floyd’s death, America did not fundamentally change on that day. What had been there under the surface for quite some time, however, was revealed in all of its ferocious malice. May 25th, 2020 was, as it were, the storming of the Bastille of the American left’s cultural revolution. It is a revolution still underway, though there are some encouraging signs that a counter-revolution has begun.
America’s Cultural Revolution by Christopher Rufo tells the story of how America arrived where it is today. In short, it is an exposé of the ideologies that were steadily gaining ground for many decades prior to the Floydian Apocalypse.
It is often difficult to realize how much one’s culture and nation have been altered when you are living through the change. The transformation doesn’t happen all at once; our memories fail us regarding last year’s news, and we tend to become desensitized as we are forced to live with the “new normal.” Many Americans are probably no longer shocked that police in major U.S. cities will not even attempt to stop thefts in the range of $700-800, that self-defense against violent crime is increasingly likely itself to be punished (while those perpetuating the crimes get off lightly), that vast crime- and drug-infested tent cities of the homeless have taken over urban centers, and so on.
But then you look back ten or twenty years and it all becomes blindingly obvious: America is a fundamentally different nation than it once was. Rufo begins his book with a striking example. Angela Davis, a figure now nearly universally lauded in mainstream academia and the press, was in the 1970s the darling of Soviet Russia. On a 1972 publicity tour of the Soviet Union, Davis, as Rufo recounts, “praised her hosts for their treatment of minorities and denounced the United States for its oppression of ‘political prisoners’” (1). When approached by a group of Czech dissidents who were struggling against the Soviet regime with a plea to publicize their plight, “Davis responded with ice: ‘They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison’” (1). In the 1970s such unabashed sympathy with Soviet oppression, while popular in radical enclaves, remained on the fringes of mainstream society. It is on the fringes no more:
After the death of George Floyd . . . All of a sudden the old Angela Davis narrative appeared everywhere: America was an irredeemably racist nation; whites constituted a permanent oppressor class; the country could be saved only through the performance of elaborate guilt rituals and the wholesale overturning of its founding principles. (2)
Rufo’s book is an attempt to explain how this great reversal came about.
Viva La Revolución
America’s Cultural Revolution is divided into four parts: first, a history of the cultural revolution; then a separate section on the outworking of the revolution in the areas of race, education, and power (by which Rufo is referring to the undermining of America’s founding political order through the implementation of CRT, DEI programs, and the like). At the head of each section is a biographical sketch of founding figures in the cultural revolution: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, names that will be known to those who are familiar with the various offshoots of critical theory, but that will be less well known to many. And yet, as the saying goes, ideas have consequences, even the ideas of seemingly obscure and irrelevant academics tucked away in the dark nooks of musty university libraries. The ideas of these four have fundamentally altered nearly every aspect of modern American life. The success of the “long march through the institutions” of thinkers inspired by such ideas has been staggering. However, “the capture of America’s institutions was so gradual and bureaucratic, it largely escaped the notice of the American public, until it burst into consciousness following the death of George Floyd” (4).
Rufo’s narrative framing makes the ideological movements he describes easier to understand than a densely argued philosophical critique. Though he certainly delves into the content of these ideologies he never gets bogged down in overly technical or academic language. Some will inevitably fault him for this, but he is very clear that his book is not an academic exercise for the purpose of nuanced conversation. It is, instead, a powerful warning and a call to action. In Rufo’s adept telling of the story, it is easy to follow how all of these radical ideas have come to infect our society, and it is easy to see how devastating they are.
Put differently, the narrative approach makes it easier for non-academics to understand the origins of the complex ideas of the radical left and how they have led us to the present moment. Reading Rufo we can see that radical assaults on America’s past are not attempts to be honest about the messiness of history, or the fallenness of man, but are in fact attempts to undermine, scorn, and reject the entirety of the American project (apart from the ideology, stories, and heroes of the radical left). Today’s radicals will not be content until they have remade America wholly in their own image. Thus, founding figures in our history–whether Jonathan Edwards, John Witherspoon, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Abraham Lincoln–all must go. We must tear down their statues, we must rename buildings named in their honor, we must erase them from our cultural memory. Consider how they talk about Rufo himself: He is a “shrill ideological bully” who engages in “militant fascist rhetoric” as part of a “reactionary impulse bent on the radical transformation — if not the outright destruction — of America’s leading institutions.” All of this is written about someone whose stated goal is merely to return America to the founding philosophy embodied in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The goal of radical leftists is not nuanced historical understanding. It is total control of all levers of power, with no dissent allowed.
In a short review only the briefest of outlines can be sketched as to the detailed historical information Rufo highlights. He begins his story with Herbert Marcuse, whom he calls the “Father of the Revolution.” Marcuse’s chief insight was that class-based efforts at overturning the “bourgeois order” had failed in Western nations (especially America) due to the fact that the working class in a society that allows for upward mobility almost always remain socially and economically conservative. Absent the restrictions of feudalism or absolutist monarchies the working class would rather rise up to greater levels of wealth and social prestige than burn the system down. Marcuse, therefore, realized that the key to social revolution was convincing other groups to fight against the supposedly oppressive conditions holding them down. Race became the key at first, though other “categories of oppression” were eventually added (gender, sexual orientation, etc.). If you can convince someone with an immutable characteristic (skin color, for example) that he can be nothing other than the target of societal oppression then you are well on your way to creating the conditions of permanent revolution.
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We decided to answer the claims of Russell Moore and the Woke crowd by turning back a century in time to another person who fought this very same battle with liberals in his day. J. Gresham Machen’s book Christianity and Liberalism came out one hundred years ago in 1923, and his response to the out-of-context use of the Sermon on the Mount is instructive. The Sermon on the Mount is not an ethical prescription but a description of a life we are not at all capable of fulfilling in our own strength without the Spirit of God within. It is a demonstration that the wall of separation between God and us is so high we cannot possibly scale it. 

No True Christian … Part One examined what basis there is for an assertion that a true Christian would or would not do certain things or behave in certain ways. By way of reminder, those who do make such assertions commit the No True Scotsman Fallacy. Knowing right from wrong does not guarantee that one will make every decision with that view in the forefront. People are fallible, as we are all aware.
In our present time, the left side of the aisle that identifies as Christian contends that Jesus was a woke Socialist and that his followers must needs be woke socialists also. What do they offer to support their contention? Why, Scripture, of course. Both progressives and conservatives turn to the Word of God in support of their political and cultural positions, but the understanding and application of Scripture differ substantially for progressives and conservatives. For progressives, their social and political commitments sit on top of the Bible, and their preconceived “truths” inform their understanding of Scripture rather than allowing Scripture to inform their positions on a given issue to decide what is true and right.
On the other hand, the historical-grammatical context informs a Christian conservative’s understanding of Scripture. (Not all conservatives are Christians, of course, so they may very well base their choices on the way they were brought up, though those “passed down views” probably stem from “the Christian Era,” a time when society in general judged many issues of right and wrong through the lens of scripture.) As a result, conservative’s social and cultural views – and how they vote for any given position – are informed by their biblical understanding. As Dr. George Yancey,  Professor of Sociology at Baylor University points out:
For progressive Christians, Jesus is primarily the model of inclusion and tolerance. For example, one progressive Christian drew a cartoon of Jesus saying, “The difference between me and you is you use Scripture to determine what love means and I use love to determine what Scripture means.” Progressive Christians focus on the actions and teachings of Jesus that reinforce their values of tolerance and inclusion, which they see as examples of love.1Who’s More Political: Progressive or Conservative Christians?, George Yancy, TGC. April 29, 2021
Progressive pastors may be dumbfounded when they quote from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) and find themselves accused of using liberal talking points. In “Jesus Was a Socialist”: Christianity in Crisis as Conservatives Finally Realize Jesus Was Woke, Russell Moore, one of the Woke, weighs in:
Moore said that some individuals are questioning the origins of these teachings and dismissing them as “liberal talking points.” Even when pastors assert that they are directly quoting Christ, their words are often met with skepticism. “When the teachings of Jesus himself are viewed as disruptive to us, we find ourselves in a state of crisis,” Moore said.
The essential key of interpretation, however, is often missing for progressive liberals – they do not take context into account. Simply because a passage is quoted doesn’t mean the application given it is true. False teachers, cultists, Eastern religions, and yes, progressive liberals and even conservatives can take Scripture out of context and give it a meaning that is not derived from the context.
For example, was Jesus identifying Peter as the literal Prince of Darkness when He rebuked Peter:
But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. (Matthew 16:23)
No, not at all. Jesus was saying that Peter was “speaking as Satan would speak” when Peter tried to dissuade Jesus from going to the cross. Peter was acting as a stumbling block to Jesus since it was His divine purpose to suffer and die for mankind’s salvation.2 Thinking about it here, Peter was “doing unto others (Jesus) as he would want others to do for him” (according to the flesh) since Peter would not think it would be in his own best interest to die on the cross.
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