When I was in my teens I took the culture war stuff pretty seriously and the “worldview” discussions that often seemed to boil down to pep rallies for Republican activism. It seems Christians lack the historical breadth to see how quickly the shoe gets on the other foot. Now I feel that if conservative Christians saw how legislation from the era of the Social Gospel laid the groundwork for the “teen culture” so many culture warriors now get upset about they’d think twice about setting up what they consider to be “good law”. Even if we have laws that are good we still have plenty of people who are bad and law seems to be not about getting what you want from law in the next twenty years but the next century, especially when we consider the implications of enforcing laws that Christians seemed to push for in the 19th century.

The “good law” of prohibition, child labor laws, and compulsory public education finally got enforced and produced the teen culture Christian culture warriors have been fretting about for decades. Why do conservative culture warriors fool themselves into thinking that their forms of legislation and activism won’t backfire? Apparently the same reason prohibition activists thought so.

Culture warriorism for either liberal or conservative Christian thought seems to produce a nasty myopia about the implications of actual laws. I don’t think people shouldn’t be involved in politics but it just seems that we could use more Christians looking at the history of politics and Christian theological rationales for political action. If we’re to be the light of the world and a blessing to the nations in fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant it means we need to seek the blessing of people who aren’t Christians, right, not just ourselves?

steve