It is very subtle, but many modern worship songs have been slowly changing the emphasis in their lyrics from God saving us to God helping us. Without clearly explaining how God helps us, many will think of their careers and happiness, but God is not in the happiness business. He is in the ministry of holiness.

I have been listening to the new song, “More Than Able,” almost on repeat for the past few days. This morning I woke up with the chorus ringing in my head. Later this morning, I watched the music video for the song, which displays a congregation passionately singing the lyrics. It brought tears to my eyes, but not in a good way.
As I watched hundreds of young people (where are all the older people?) sing this song together, I saw the faces of dozens of young men and women singing the lyrics like their lives depended on it. But I began to cry when I reflected on what they were singing. Here are the lyrics that were sung when the people were most impassioned:
“There’s so much more to the storyYou’re not done with me yetYou’re not done with me yetYou’re not done with me yetThere’s so much more to the story (C’mon)You’re not done with me yet (Say)You’re not done with me yet (After this, there will be glory)”
Is this worship music? Are we worshipping God when we sing about us? “You’re not done with me.”
Many of these young people are depressed and anxious. Statistically, that’s without question. When these poor young people sing, “You’re not done with me,” what is the point of this lyric? It’s that something good will happen to me. That is hopeful. But that is not worship. This me-centric focus is emphasized later:
“Just ’cause it’s not on my resumeOr just ’cause I don’t have it, doesn’t mean He can’t do itOh, who am I to deny what the Lord can do?”
The point is that the Lord can do things in our lives that others think are impossible. You do not have the experience on your resume (“Just ’cause it’s not on my resume”). The Lord can get you the job. You do not have the financial means to attend college (“just ’cause I don’t have it”). The Lord can get you a scholarship. You do not have the courage to face tomorrow. The Lord will give you joy. The song title is “He is More Than Able,” but the question is, “Able to do what?” If the ability we sing about is only regarding our future prosperity, we are not worshipping God; we are getting excited about what God will give us in the future.
Is it any wonder that all these young people are in tears singing these lyrics? They are worshipping their own prosperity!
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In the Left’s twisted theology, transgenderism is a sacrament that promises rebirth and renewal but delivers only despair, pain, disfigurement, and death. It sells the lie of salvation through the mutilation of mostly the bodies of young children. While Christ’s body was crushed for our iniquities (Isaiah 53:5) for making atonement for sin, transgenderism leaves scarred bodies in its wake for a fruitless quest that will end with the just judgment of God.

It’s been clear for some time that Christianity’s relationship to American culture has changed dramatically in recent decades.
You may have rolled your eyes at “The War on Christmas” as the rants of out-of-touch, older generations. Maybe the culture warriors’ focus on stopping the removal of nativity scenes in town squares and Ten Commandment monuments in courthouses only briefly caught your attention. You might have thought their work was important but these changes were probably not the signs of a looming cultural disaster. Now, however, it is beyond doubt that these warnings were prophetic and have been nearly all vindicated.
What seemed like overweening nostalgia for better times was actually a perceptive sense of massive shifts away from America’s historic traditions, which were largely the product of an Anglo-Protestant culture. The past 70 years in America have shown that the slippery slope is very real indeed.
Over the past few years, this cultural downgrade has been captured on social media by a picture of three buildings along the Lower Manhattan skyline on Good Friday in 1956. Each features lighted-up office windows in the shape of a cross, depicting the crucifixions of Jesus and the two thieves. Measuring 150 feet tall, these crosses were “sent over the wire by United Press Telephoto and appeared in newspapers around the United States—often front page center,” as Fox News reported.
This a far cry from what you will likely observe in NYC today. Now, instead of seeing purely Christian symbols and themes, NYC skyscrapers light up in the colors of the LGBT flag and other emblems of our 21st-century public morality, which uses many of the outward trappings of Christianity as a skin suit.
This fundamental moral reorientation becomes very apparent when considering how Easter is treated by the spokesmen for the current moral consensus.
Our social media behemoths routinely ignore the day that celebrates Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Google has not put up an “Easter doodle” on its homepage since the year 2000. On Easter Sunday in 2013, Google instead featured a web designer’s rendering of Cesar Chavez, the activist labor titan.
When Easter isn’t being sidelined altogether, it’s being used as a prop to support the latest regime propaganda that strikes at the heart of orthodox Christianity.
The Biden administration issued a short statement on Easter Sunday that was overshadowed by an ebullient and lengthy proclamation that declared March 31 a “Transgender Day of Visibility.”  The now-highest holy day of modern liberalism was created by Michigan transgender activist Rachel Crandall-Crocker in 2009.
Biden’s proclamation affirms “the most fundamental freedom” of trans people “to be their true selves” against “extremists” who “are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families.” Such supposedly horrific laws include “silencing teachers; banning books; and even threatening parents, doctors, and nurses with prison for helping parents get care for their children.” Contrary to Biden’s assertions, all these types of laws are ones that Christians should unequivocally support in principle. Students need to be protected from reading books filled with filth in public schools and from doctors and hospital systems that push them through the trans meat grinder. That Biden and his cronies think these things deserve to be praised and honored is a window into the soul of the modern Democratic Party.
Steve Sailer has aptly described the Democrats as a “coalition of the fringes,” one which has clearly molded the party into its own perverted image.
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But even with this, McGever disregards scriptural passages on guilt, justice, repentance, and forgiveness (such as Deut. 19:15, 24:16, Lev. 19:15, Ez. 18:4, Matt. 18:21-35, Luke 19:1-10, Eph. 4:32).  He also ignores the fact that while God uses various (and often imperfect) agents to draw men unto Himself, the spiritual genealogy of every evangelical originates with Christ (I Cor. 3:3-23, Eph. 2:8-10), thus bringing a unity to all believers across time and space (Gal. 3:28, Col. 3:11).

McGever, Sean. Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2024. 240 pp. $18.00
Sean McGever joins the evangelical deconstruction project[1] with his most recent book, Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield.  Like the other books in this genre, Ownership denounces white evangelicals for “their” theology and practice, but not on the basis of Scripture.[2]  McGever tells them right at the outset of his book that even if they deplore the black slave trade of the early modern era,[3] they are still mistaken in their view of slavery in general, among other things.  If they want to learn the truth, they must listen to and affirm the so-called singular black perspective and their white allies (6-8, 10).[4]
According to this purported position, all slavery is a sin which “God hates” (184).  To support this claim, McGever briefly describes early accounts of slavery in Genesis and the beginning of Exodus.  He then notes that Exodus 21:1-11 regulates slave acquisition, but he then glosses over the rest of the Old Testament to say that it “imagines slavery as a common component of human societies that is utilized for communal and personal gain and a negative experience that the enslaved person seeks to escape” (34-35; incidentally, McGever does not discuss the stipulations in Exodus 21:5-6 for slaves who “love” their masters and do not want to go free).  McGever does not exegete any of the passages on slavery in the New Testament either, but rather cites John Anthony McGuckin (an Eastern Orthodox priest) to say that it has “considerable tension in regard to the issue of slavery: never quite feeling confident enough to come out and denounce it explicitly, since to do so would have been tantamount to a declaration of social revolution” (36).[5]  But God, McGever implies, wanted believers to infer that slavery was 1) wrong and 2) to be peaceably abolished.
For the next eighteen hundred years of Church history (from Ignatius to the Puritans), most Christians did not see it that way or seek its total eradication.  Rather, to McGever’s dismay, a number of them sought to put limits on slave acquisition and treatment, citing Scripture.  The Great Awakening preachers accepted this reasoning and tried to apply it to the African slavery already in their contexts.  From this group of ministers, only John Wesley questioned the institution of slavery later in life due to the influence of the egalitarian Quakers, and then, he only used “natural law” to condemn it (141).
In the concluding chapters of Ownership, McGever returns his gaze to modern white evangelicals whose “spiritual genealogy . . . originates” with eighteenth century “enslavers” (170).  He exhorts these descendants to own, repent, and learn from the mistakes of the Great Awakening preachers (171, 173).[6]  This repentance, he says, must include “a posture of open arms to people of all races who have every right to navigate our open arms on their own terms and in their own timing” (173).  But even with this, McGever disregards scriptural passages on guilt, justice, repentance, and forgiveness (such as Deut. 19:15, 24:16, Lev. 19:15, Ez. 18:4, Matt. 18:21-35, Luke 19:1-10, Eph. 4:32).  He also ignores the fact that while God uses various (and often imperfect) agents to draw men unto Himself, the spiritual genealogy of every evangelical originates with Christ (I Cor. 3:3-23, Eph. 2:8-10), thus bringing a unity to all believers across time and space (Gal. 3:28, Col. 3:11).
McGever continues his admonition to white evangelicals by exhorting them to listen to “unlikely voices (like the Quakers for Wesley)” (181) outside of their formative “religious influences” (176) to bring about change that pleases God.  He cites himself as an example of a man who experienced such an alteration:
To question the established norms of my Christian upbringing was something I feared to do out loud.  Instead, I had to do it in private, through hushed personal conversations and quietly learning alternate views wherever I could find them.  Most often, and even in most of my seminary experiences, I had to guide myself if I wanted to consider a different perspective.  Nearly all the Christians I was around tended to provide the best version of their view and the worst (or no) version of alternate views.  It took me quite a while to realize that the church past and present has plenty of beliefs about which faithful Christians disagree, and that there are some things that Christians have come to realize they once believed wrongly – most notably (now), the institution of slavery (181-182).
He then asks: “What alternate voices along the shore of my stream should I listen to?  How should I navigate my own internal questions and instincts about how to honor God?  What are good, less good, and flat-out bad ways to process all of this?”  He says nothing about turning to the Scriptures (Is. 8:20; Acts 17:10-12; I John 4:1), but claims: “These answers require the precious and usually decades-acquired virtue of wisdom” (182).
Since McGever’s own faith was built on a mixture of doubt, instinct, and multiple theological perspectives, he eventually began to:
depart from what I learned in my formative years.  With all due respect to my formative influences, I changed how I balance my time and focus between ministry, family, and personal health.  I changed who I choose to relate to – I have more friends and peers who are women and those who don’t look like me or have the same beliefs as I do.  I changed my views on the roles men and women undertake in the home, community, and church.  Each of these changes came slowly and after much thought and reflection.  Each of these changes represents a departure from what I once believed and how I acted several decades ago (182-183).
McGever now believes that he “cannot predict what specific changes [he] might adopt in the coming decades” (183).  Considering where other deconstructionists have gone before him, it may not be too hard to guess what changes could come next.[7]
Jonathan Peters is an administrative assistant at Reformation Bible Church and Harford Christian School in Darlington, MD.

[1] For a listing of some of the books in this project, see Jonathan Leeman, “Defending Sound Doctrine Against Deconstruction of American Evangelicalism,” 9Marks (October 14, 2021): https://www.9marks.org/journal/sound-doctrine-the-foundation-for-faithful-ministry/editors-note/.
[2] See also Jonathan Peters, “Review: Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett, The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond,” Journal of Biblical Theology & Worldview 5, no 1 (Fall 2024): 109-111.
[3] Many may do so on the basis of Exodus 21:16, James 2:1, etc.
[4] Deconstructionists at times fail to recognize that there is no monolithic black perspective, just as there is no monolithic white, Asian, indigenous, male, or female perspective.  There are, however, biblical and unbiblical theologies which anyone may embrace.
[5] McGuckin (and McGever) are more or less saying that Christ and His Apostles were moral cowards, contra John 16:8, Acts 5:29, Acts 17:6, etc.
[6] Interestingly, McGever makes no mention of non-white Christians who count the eighteenth century “enslavers” as a part of their spiritual heritage.  One may wonder if McGever would also hold them “responsible” for their spiritual ancestors’ mistakes.  Phillis Wheatley, “An Elegiac Poem On the Death of that celebrated Divine, and eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Revered and Learned Mr. George Whitefield,” Phillis Wheatley Historical Society: http://www.phillis-wheatley.org/mr-george-whitefield/, Thabiti Anyabwile, “This Black Pastor Led a White Church – in 1788,” Christianity Today (May 3, 2017): https://www.christianitytoday.com/2017/05/lemuel-haynes-pioneering-african-american-pastor/, Sherard Burns, “Trusting the Theology of a Slave Owner,” in A God Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards, ed. John Piper and Justin Taylor (Wheaton IL: Crossway, 2004), 145-17, and Samuel Sey, “Cancel Culture and Christian Culture,” Slow to Write blog (July 3, 2020): https://slowtowrite.com/cancel-culture-and-christian-culture/.
[7] Neil Shenvi notes that the “‘deconstructive’ approach to theology is necessarily a universal acid.  Even if [deconstructive authors] weren’t explicitly committed to challenging evangelical doctrine broadly, their methodological approach makes such an outcome inevitable.  This erosion is, perhaps, one of my greatest fears.  I worry that pastors will embrace these books thinking that their application can be confined to, say, race alone.  But once a white pastor endorses the view that he — as a white male — is blinded by his own white supremacy, unable to properly understand relevant biblical principles due to his social location, and in need of the ‘lived experience’ of oppressed minorities to guide him, how long before someone in his congregation applies the same reasoning to his beliefs about gender?  Or sexuality?”  Neil Shenvi, “Sociology as Theology: The Deconstruction of Power in (Post)Evangelical Scholarship,” Eikon (November 21, 2021): https://cbmw.org/2021/11/21/sociology-as-theology-the-deconstruction-of-power-in-postevangelical-scholarship/.

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