In the cultural battles of our day, conservatives always seem to lose. Some say progressives win because of their superior funding, organizational prowess, and cultural dominance. Others say conservatives lose because we are disorganized, factious, and lack an activist spirit. Perhaps they’re right on both counts. But that’s not why we lose. We lose because we have a much more difficult position to defend. We cannot go on thinking the left is acting in good faith for a good purpose, when in reality, conservatives and progressives are completely different projects with different goals and definitions of victory.

Roger Scruton once observed, “Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.” Take the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, France, for example. It took 183 years to build but was almost completely destroyed by fire in a matter of hours in 2019. This is a fitting metaphor for the modern West, which was carefully built to sustain our civilization for generations, but is now crumbling after decades of relentless attack by a progressive ideology hell-bent on destroying it.
Progressivism is a demon-possessed ideology that seeks to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10). The progressive disease has also infected evangelical Christianity, poisoning its bloodstream and spreading the contagion through trusted and once-conservative media outlets and educational institutions.
Conservative Christians, contending for “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), are being assaulted on multiple fronts by openly hostile secular progressives in government, business, news media, and Hollywood, not to mention apostate progressive pastors who claim to represent “the way of Jesus.” 
As Christian schools are overrun by tenured leftist professors and publishers sell cloaked leftist propaganda to unsuspecting conservatives, naive Christians convince themselves that “this too shall pass.” If they keep their heads down, silent and compliant, they’ll leave us alone.
Unfortunately, this is not possible. Sooner or later, conservatives must rediscover our fighting spirit and realize that we cannot play nice with progressives. They do not want to peacefully “coexist” with conservatives. They want to destroy us. Ordinary Christianity is the last major obstacle in their path.
Conservatism Operates Within Reality
Conservatism is only as good as the thing being conserved. In our day, what most needs conserving is nothing less than reality itself. Reality is conservative, and the more one accepts it as such the more conservative one will become. The progressive left is a reality-denying cope for those who would alter reality to match the idealized fictions of their minds.
This puts them at odds with God himself, for God is the ultimate reality. As Joe Rigney recently wrote, “The first imperative is to love the indicative.” We must accept reality as it is, as God made it. Daniel, describing God to Nebuchadnezzar, said, 
He changes times and seasons; 
he removes kings and sets up kings; 
he gives wisdom to the wise 
and knowledge to those who have understanding; 
he reveals deep and hidden things; 
he knows what is in the darkness, 
and the light dwells with him (Dan 2:21-22). 
This is reality. God made the world, set it on its foundations, made springs gush forth, and caused grass to grow. Finally, he entrusted it to the stewardship of man to subdue and exercise dominion (Gen 1:28-29). He orders the world such that it sustains life. God provides for all man’s needs through the ordinary means of discipline, skill, and work.
God also establishes limits, hierarchies and inequalities, and requires man to live within these constraints. These are not the result of the fall, but built-in manifestations of God’s wisdom in creation. Every restriction or inequality is an opportunity to trust God and work within the boundaries he put in place.
This is the world as it truly is, the world as God made it, that which is revealed in God’s word and observed in God’s world, a reality that must be respected for any society to thrive. Conservatism is a worldview of giving, receiving, and blessing. It dignifies work as a legitimate expression of Christian service, and dignifies man by beckoning him to discover the wonders hidden within creation. Such is the glory of God to conceal a thing, and such is the glory of kings to search it out (Prov 25:2).
Any kind of political or social conservatism that does not acknowledge God as the ultimate reality will inevitably fail. Christians are conservative not merely because we admire the constitution or love tradition, but rather for the sake of the transcendent, eternal reality upon which those things stand.
In other words, Christians aren’t merely conserving a nostalgic political worldview, but rather the application of Christian truth to all of life, including our society. Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt 28:18). Paul said, “God” commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). Christ is “highly exalted” and has been given the “name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:9-11).
This is the worldview that built Western society. To be sure, not all of our founding fathers were regenerate Christians, but they did draw upon centuries of Bible-saturated political theology and wisdom. In short, we’re not merely conserving something political, but convictional: we’re fighting to conserve and rebuild a once-respected Christian heritage that is now under siege by a demonic ideology of pagan progressivism. 
The progressive project is not a matter of alternate policy preferences in pursuit of a shared, common vision for society. Progressivism is a political and cultural attack directed squarely at Christianity itself. It is more than a political ideology, it is a rebellion against nature, nature’s God, and an attack on all who worship him.
The Sin of “Equalatry”
Contrary to what we’ve been told, human differences inevitably produce inequalities–divinely established natural hierarchies hard-wired into creation for his glory and our good. While some inequalities can be exploited for sinful gain, a virtuous society organizes them into a productive division of labor that benefits everyone. The most fundamental, inescapable human difference is sexual: God made us male and female from the beginning (Matt 19:4). The inequalities between men and women are a divinely designed gift for the harmonious joining of the sexes in mutual love and the creation of new life. Similarly, other human inequalities are positively presented in scripture as gifts for the edification of the church.
The left cannot accept this fact. Their sin is “equalatry,” which is making equality into an idol. The sin of equalatry is what Murray Rothbard once called a “revolt against nature,” rooted in envy and resentment towards those with superior skills, intelligence, beauty, or accomplishments. It regards all inequality as oppression and all hierarchy as tyranny. Since it bears a superficial resemblance to fairness, a biblical virtue, equalatry makes the left’s demands for “social justice” feel virtuous to Christians. But since the left defines justice as the elimination of all inequality, exceptionalism must not be tolerated.
The left subverts reality through media “narratives” that reward grievance. A man’s feelings of envy are merely a byproduct of his oppression. All inequalities are “privileges,” unjustly acquired. Their propaganda campaign that relentlessly categorizes the whole human experience as an epic struggle between oppressive villains and oppressed victims slowly brainwashes ordinary people into vicious cycles of self-righteous indignance or self-loathing guilt.
Deep down, people intuitively know that society cannot function without the basic virtues of hard work, competence, and honesty, yet they are gaslit into affirming the opposite.  They gradually find themselves nodding along with the guilt-inducing narrative that they are oppressors whose sins can only be absolved by yielding to the irrational demands of the state, BLM activists, and the rainbow mafia. Over time, the propaganda wears them down. One can only resist for so long.
The left regards our Christian heritage as a blight that spawned injustices that can only be remedied by tearing it all down and rebuilding anew. Captivated by the social Darwinist “myth of progress,” humanity must break free from the antiquated shackles of Christianity and march towards their vision of an eschatological, secular utopia.
As Thomas Sowell once said, we have “reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today.” Americans have now reached peak efficiency in our ability to manufacture victims at warp speed through a malicious parade of patriarchs, homophobes, and white supremacists. It doesn’t matter that their thinking is irrational, because they have already determined that rational thought is yet another tool of oppression.
Progressives arrogantly believe reality itself can be bent to their wishes. With enough funding and power, they can refashion the world any way they choose. With enough medical technology, they can overcome the dreaded gender binary. They act with high-handed moral certitude, believing they possess sufficient wisdom to save our planet, end hunger, correct injustice, house the homeless, eliminate suffering, maximize erotic pleasure, turn men into women—you name it. This is delusional, of course, but they can’t see it because their worldview is predicated upon a carefully curated denial of reality.
Read More
Related Posts:

Paul views Jesus in Jonah-like terms, one who is both a true Israelite and true Israel himself, and in whom even the godless and uncircumcised Gentiles can find reconciliation. What was there in God’s call to Jonah was only a dimly-lit picture, a veiled foreshadowing of something greater – it was, in the Biblical sense, a true mystery[3]. But this account of Jonah certainly pointed forward to what Paul says was the unfurled “mystery that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Ephesians 3:6; see also Col. 1:26-27). 

Of all the Minor Prophets, perhaps Jonah is the most read and beloved, and certainly not for its brevity but for its extraordinary story – a story of a prophet running from God, of being thrown overboard in the midst of a storm, of being swallowed alive by a whale of a fish, and upon being spit out three days later, the account of the revival of the heathen and godless Ninevites. And when it comes to the Christo-telic thrust of Jonah, we have a clear reference that Jesus himself makes in Matthew 12:40 – “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” It’s divinely established typology.
But even beyond this clear typological connection, Jonah provides a wealth of Gospel connections that both foreshadow the person and ministry of Jesus Christ but also the inbreaking of Christ’s world-wide Kingdom. And it is this latter focus which is of special interest. In one sense, Jonah himself serves as a representative of Israel. He, like Israel in his day, had forgotten and forsaken the role they were to have to the wider world.[1]  Genesis 12:2-3 is a clear statement of what God wanted his people, the Jews, to be: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing… in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Likewise, Isaiah 49:6: “I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Their role to the world is clear, but it’s also clear that both Israel, and Jonah himself, have forgotten that role.
Hugh Martin makes this point beautifully, that Israel drifted into the wrong conclusion, “that the heathen nations, as to their moral and spiritual interests, were, among Israel, objects of simple contempt and neglect, and were dealt with as if Jehovah, the God of Israel, utterly neglected them also.”
Read More
Related Posts:

Have you ever looked out over a large body of water as the sun rises or sets? The water can look magnificent with the shining light beaming across the glittering waves. From the shore you may be able to make out the direction of the current if the water is a river, or perhaps make out a distant sandbar or drop off if it is a lake, sea, or the ocean. With all the beauty your eyes can behold, you’ve only just begun to get a glimpse of the water.
How deep does that water go down? How fast is it moving? Is it moving at all? Is the water warm? How far will you be able to wade into the water before it would be at your ankles, your knees, your waist?
Looking out over the picturesque scene is one way of appreciating, and knowing the water. But it is surely the most introductory way of knowing the water. Your eyes can see a good deal farther than you can touch. Your eyes and observations from a distance have limitations.
What if you did something crazy, and you began to walk closer to the water? What if you took off your shoes to let your feet feel the warmth of the sun on the sand? Could you experience something different, something more by wading into the water? The experience would give you a much deeper understanding by going into the water rather than simply looking from a distance.
Often in our reading of God’s Word, we only take a brief initial reading of a passage. Like driving in a car that is going around a bend near the shoreline, we only get but a moments glimpse of the water. That initial reading is helpful, it’s certainly better than not reading at all. Yet it’s not to be compared to moments spent thinking, conversations had discussing, and prayers given to God over that same passage.
Read More