This is where World Opinions seeks to situate itself: precisely in that Protestant commentary market gap where incisive cultural analysis and neighborly love intersect, and the cultural falsehoods that lead our neighbors astray are clearly exposed for what they are. This is certainly my own goal as a contributor. It is precisely because not all Christians have the disposition or the calling to be culture warriors that wise volunteers are so needed. This is necessary work, and further, it is work that can be undertaken “objectively”—not because there is a Bible verse for everything, but because God has revealed himself by the light of nature as well as Scripture. 

Evangelical magazine news rarely draws mainstream attention. Last year’s New York Times coverage of the split between Marvin Olasky and World was a notable exception. It was a well-worn narrative: The magazine had been “conquered by Trump.” The launch of World Opinions, a new section on the magazine’s website, by co-editors Nick Eicher and R. Albert Mohler was ostensibly a manifestation of this hard right turn.
As usual, the facts are more complicated than the story suggests. Senior reporter Sophia Lee resigned in Olasky’s wake, but she also contradicted the Times narrative on her way out, tweeting that despite the “terrible” headline, World magazine “had not gone MAGA.” It was further confirmed at the time that funds were not being diverted to the opinions page from the magazine’s straight reportage arm, which Olasky was deeply concerned to preserve.
Nevertheless, in a new retrospective essay, Olasky maintains that the past year has borne out his concerns. He laments the shift in priorities between the “old World” and the new “Culture-War World.” Where old World covered scandal around a figure like Madison Cawthorn, new World hasn’t touched his latest shenanigans. Where old World toed an establishment line on the pandemic, new World has run stories that Olasky frames as playing to evangelicals’ “anti-vaccine prejudice.” And stylistically, where old World prided itself on “understated prose,” new World columns “toss hand grenades” at the left. Old World was “conservative on some issues,” but it also covered topics such as homelessness and poverty, which Olasky implies would be intrinsically out of place in “Conservative World.” Given that Olasky himself writes compellingly on homelessness for the Discovery Institute—the conservative think tank where anti-CRT activist Christopher Rufo first got his start documenting the gamut of homelessness and poverty issues—it’s not clear why he thinks this.
But the whole conceit of an op-ed page contradicts Olasky’s framework for “biblically objective journalism.” He defers to the Bible as the only “objective” source on matters it directly addresses. But on those topics the Bible does not directly address, he believes any human opinion is automatically “subjective.” Hence, he concludes that op-eds in these spheres are not the purview of Christian journalism.
Of course, the Bible doesn’t directly address a plethora of topics, including economics, immigration, gun control, contemporary American race relations, and pandemic protocol. 
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The new education merely conditions. Having removed all objective value and consideration from reality, they are “free” to shape and mold future generations into whatever they want. Having seized the reins of social conditioning, they will condition for their own purposes (wherever those happen to come from) and with little or no regard for the constraints of custom, tradition, truth, or goodness.

Many people know C.S. Lewis as the author and creator of Narnia. A slightly smaller group know him as a remarkably effective Christian apologist. An even smaller group appreciate him as a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. Fewer recognize him as a prophet of civilizational doom. But he was.
In a number of essays, in his lectures on The Abolition of Man, and then in his novel That Hideous Strength, Lewis clearly, patiently, and methodically identifies and warns his readers about an existential threat to Western civilization, and indeed to humanity as a whole.
This threat is a pernicious error that enables tyrannical power and totalitarianism. It’s a fatal superstition that slowly erodes and destroys a civilization. It’s a disease that can end our species and damn our souls. Lewis calls it “the poison of subjectivism.”
Doctrine of Objective Value
Until modern times, nearly all men believed that truth and goodness were objective realities and that human beings can apprehend them. Through reason, we examine and study and wonder at reality. When our thoughts correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of truth. When our emotional reactions correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of goodness.
Lewis refers to this as the doctrine of objective value, or, in shorter form, “the Tao.” The doctrine of objective value, Lewis writes, is
the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. . . . And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). (Abolition of Man, 18–19)
Poison of Subjectivism
The poison of subjectivism upends this ancient and humane way of viewing the world. Reason itself is debunked — or we might say today that reason is deconstructed. Instead of the human capacity to participate in the eternal Logos, reason is simply an epiphenomenon that accompanies certain chemical and electrical events in the cortex, which is itself the product of blind evolutionary processes. Put more simply, reason is simply an accidental and illusory brain secretion.
Under the influence of this poison, moral value judgments are simply projections of irrational emotions onto an indifferent cosmos. Truth and goodness are merely words we apply to our own subjective psychological states, states that we have been socially conditioned to have. And if we have been socially conditioned in one way, we might be socially conditioned in another.
Education Old and New
Lewis thus refers to the apostles of subjectivism as “conditioners” rather than teachers. Under the old vision of reality, the task of education was to “train in the pupil those responses which are themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists” (22). Teachers accomplished this through initiation; they invited students into the same experience of reality in which they lived.
The new education merely conditions. Having removed all objective value and consideration from reality, they are “free” to shape and mold future generations into whatever they want.
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But the trouble is, if we put all our hope and faith in these things, instead of God himself, then we will get our spiritual priorities all wrong, and we will end up looking to men and not God to be our deliverer. As I say, fighting in the culture wars and the like is vital, but at the end of the day we must put our full trust in and dependency on the only one who is worth leaning on: God himself.

We live in exceedingly dark times. It seems wherever you look, wickedness and evil are in the ascendency, and it seems that this darkness is covering the whole earth. It can be overwhelming at times. One wonders if there is any way out of all this. One seeks for respite and a reprieve, but that seems to elude us.
The Christian is realistic. We know that sin abounds in this fallen world. Evil will always be with us. But we also know that there is hope, because God is not finished with us yet. God is working out his purposes, and one day all evil will end, and all darkness will disappear.
But right now we live in between the first and second coming of Christ. What Christ initiated 2000 years ago is now being partially realised, but will not be fully realised until he comes again. So we will see some victories, some breakthroughs, some real encouragement now, but we will also experience some losses, some setbacks, and some disappointments.
And as things get darker, it is so easy to concentrate on that darkness, and get our eyes off God. I know this is true for me. One of my main prayers of late has been to actually repent of my lack of faith, my lack of trust. I feel so overwhelmed at times, and the encroaching evil seems so palpable. I can focus too much on what is happening around me, and not on the one true God.
So I am asking God to help me increase my trust and my faith. I am praying the prayer of the father of the child healed by Jesus who said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). It is so easy to get discouraged and to lose all hope. And at times like that, when we take our eyes off the Lord, we can too readily look to other sources of hope.
We can look to the next election, or another politician, or a different set of laws, or a reformed education system, or a cleaned-up media, or a better country, or a more godly culture, and so on. Now do not get me wrong: all these things are important indeed. I have been working in all these areas, and we need to be engaged in this way.
But the trouble is, if we put all our hope and faith in these things, instead of God himself, then we will get our spiritual priorities all wrong, and we will end up looking to men and not God to be our deliverer. As I say, fighting in the culture wars and the like is vital, but at the end of the day we must put our full trust in and dependency on the only one who is worth leaning on: God himself.
This was a lesson ancient Israel kept needing to learn afresh. They so often found themselves in a real bad way, but instead of turning fully to Yahweh for help, they looked to others for their deliverance. That is why we have so many passages such as the following:
Psalm 20:7 Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.
Psalm 33:16-17 No king is saved by the size of his army;no warrior escapes by his great strength.A horse is a vain hope for deliverance;despite all its great strength it cannot save.
Psalm 118:8-9 It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes.
Psalm 146:3 Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save.
Yet Israel so often did just this: they looked to other nations to help them out. They tried to make foreign alliances to keep them safe. In Isaiah 31:1-3 we read about this very thing:
Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help,who rely on horses,who trust in the multitude of their chariotsand in the great strength of their horsemen,but do not look to the Holy One of Israel,or seek help from the Lord.Yet he too is wise and can bring disaster;he does not take back his words.Read More