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

As Snell admits, Christianity and Judaism, with their critique of paganism and rejection of idolatry, played a big part in banishing the “magic” and “enchantment” from nature. And yet, while God is transcendent, He is also immanent. Indeed, Christianity is all about how the transcendent God entered the “immanent frame.” The church would do well to emphasize the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Sacraments, and Vocation, all of which should resonate with those who have an “immanent frame.” Snell thinks Christianity may well come back.

“Humans are not well-suited to radical immanence.” After all, those who believe only in what they can see are still made in the image of God and possess a supernatural purpose even when they reject any kind of transcendent reality. But such a disconnect creates anxiety and malaise. As a result, substitutes for transcendence are pursued, which only make things worse. So says R.J. Snell in his new book, Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, Hope, a penetrating analysis of contemporary secularism.
Snell is building on the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, whose book A Secular Age argues that humans tend to think and perceive things through a “frame,” which, like a picture frame, limits what they can accept and imagine. Today, people tend to operate within what Taylor calls an “immanent frame” that fixates on the tangible and the immediately perceivable. There was a time, however, when people had a “transcendent frame,” through which everyone discerned a reality beyond the tangible and that gave the tangible meaning. The physical world was “enchanted,” that is to say, to one degree or another, it was “porous” to the supernatural, to gods or to God.
Secularism is not a matter of modern science replacing religion, Taylor shows, since religion has continued to flourish during modernity. The immanent frame allows for an “open-world” in which the transcendent remains accessible, though modern-day believers still embrace their faith as only one option of many and exercise it through an immanent lens.
But the immanent frame also allows for a “closed world,” the notion that the interior and material realm is all there is. Says Snell, drawing on Taylor, belief in a closed world is not a conclusion from rational or scientific argument. Rather, it is “a moral stance, an ethical commitment. … Secularity is demanded by a commitment to certain ‘values’” held by the person who insists on independence, nonconformity, resistance to authority, and refusal of the “consolations of an enchanted world.”
The coming apart of the “premodern” transcendent frame with the Enlightenment era resulted in an Age of Reform, a confident time of revolutions, social and political changes, and the new ideas of “modernism,” all celebrating a sense of liberation from the supernatural and otherworldly. But such reforms were often built on the unacknowledged remnants of the transcendent order. If matter is all there is, and matter can be reduced to physics and chemistry, meaning is impossible. “A universe of matter in motion reduces humans to matter in motion, ‘wet robots’ as we are sometimes called.”
If the universe isn’t “porous” to the transcendent, human beings aren’t either. We become the source of meaning, but that meaning is pretty much pointless, having no relationship to the outside world, which is also pointless. The result is what Taylor calls the “buffered self” in which we are self-enclosed, separated from others and the world, and autonomous. Today postmodernism has finished off any sense of transcendence. As Snell says, “Postmodernism and its progenitors critiqued and deconstructed any and every claim of order, harmony, or rationality as nothing more than projections of power and force.”
This allows for no hope of any kind. Life itself is no longer necessarily considered a good thing. Along with the decline in the number of marriages to the lowest level in history is the rejection of parenthood. Children have always been the sign of hope, Snell says. But today many young adults are getting sterilized on the grounds that it is immoral to bring children into this world. Coupled with the acceptance of abortion, the conclusion is that “it is not good to be, not worth giving life to another.”
So what can anyone do in this climate of despair? Snell examines three options. The first is “frenzied activism.” He notes the difference between “natural rights,” grounded in objective reality and transcendent morality, and today’s “human rights,” grounded only in the buffered self. The latter have no content. “They are formless aspirations to equality rather than substantive claims about the good.” They are purely negative: freedom as the absence of limits; autonomy as the lack of interference by others; diversity as nonconformity and nonuniformity.
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By the logic of Kirk and Madsen, bigotry, hate, and phobia are the only possible motives for opposing LGBTQ beliefs and demands. Such vilification is not only a bullying tactic to stigmatize and silence detractors; it also happens to be false. We cannot erase male and female differences without losing something exceedingly beautiful. Marriage cannot become a wife- or husband-optional covenant without losing something precious. Sexual distinctions are a gift from God to be celebrated, not obliterated. Saying so is an act of love. Telling the truth and teaching children the truth about human sexuality, like Mr. Rogers did, is an act of love, and courageous love, in a culture so quick to cancel. 

Why have award shows, professional sports, politics, commercials, education, children’s entertainment, and even churches witnessed such a steep rise in messaging that promotes LGBTQ lifestyles in recent years? Even the National Hockey League recently declared on its Twitter feed that “Trans women are women. Trans men are men.” Contrast this with Mr. Rogers singing, “Boys are boys from the beginning. If you were born a boy you stay a boy. Girls are girls right from the start. Only girls can grow up to be mommies. Only boys can grow up to be the daddies.” By the new sexual orthodoxy of our day, Mr. Roger’s basic biology lesson for children would be summarily cancelled as bigotry, phobia, and hate by the very cultural elites who now defend drag queen story hours in children’s education. This radical shift is hardly accidental.
Last month—November 2022—marked the 35th anniversary of one of the most culture-reshaping articles in modern history. In 1987 a neuropsychiatrist named Marshall Kirk and a public relations consultant named Hunter Madsen (under the nom de plume “Erastes Pill”) teamed up to write “The Overhauling of Straight America.” This article would later balloon into the 400-page tome After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s. Kirk and Madsen laid out a six-phase strategy that goes a long way toward understanding the mainstream messaging about sexuality of our own day.
First, “talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible.” Why?
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