All the stuff we’re seeing about political correctness, social justice warrior-ing, GamerGate, Sad Puppies, online shamestorms directed at pizza parlors and bakeries for not catering gay marriages and the like, ultimately proves that a society is going to be governed by a religious worldview.  The only question is, which one?  A nation’s political system is going to be governed by the dominant religious perspective and worldview of that nation’s people (sometimes just their elites), and if it’s not clear what that dominant worldview is, then a nation is going to tear itself apart until one is established.  That’s what’s going on in America right now.

Partly I think this shows the faulty thinking of some versions of Two Kingdoms Theology, who want Christians to disengage from politics as Christians.  Jay Nordlinger in the National Review quotes a Macedonian social conservative saying that you might not like being in a culture war, but the alternative is cultural surrender.

But the bigger lesson that people are going to have to learn is that the idea that we can just be a society that is based on no perspective at all on the world and life, that the government is going to just police the borders and otherwise not reflect any kind of perspective on what society ought to be, is madness.  This is the main reason that I’m not a libertarian.  Though I agree with them on a great many things, every government is going to be driven by a worldview, and that worldview is going to include a lot of things about sexual relations between people, this being one of the fundamental aspects of human society.  Knowing this, I’m going to advocate for a government driven by a Christian worldview, since that is my own.  Advocating for a “secular” nation, one not driven by any particular religious worldview, is just surrendering to the others that are willing to step into the space.

A Christian worldview is better able to provide space for other worldviews than any other worldview.  This is ironic; a Christian worldview can permit Marxist utopians or Muslim Sharia advocates to live and even preach within its borders, because the Christian worldview is not trying to create utopia.  But the converse is not true.  When a utopian worldview comes into power, they cannot tolerate dissent, because they need to get everyone on board.  When their utopia does not come to pass, they will always look to the dissenters as the reason why, and crush them into submission.  This has already happened many times in history.  The claims on the left of tolerance were only a ruse they used when they did not dominate the culture.  When they do dominate the culture, all talk of tolerating opposing views goes out the window.

The Gamergate issue in particular I think is revealing.  I find myself somewhat ambivalent on the conflict itself, because while I do like video games, I think there is no question that a lot of them objectify and demean women, and that is contrary to the Christian faith and is damaging to culture.  The other side of it is the tactics that progressives always use- not persuasion but bullying, slander, and name-calling, and worse.  But the reason I think you should be interested in this, even if you don’t care about video games, is that it’s a wonderful demonstration how in the absence of a Christian worldview policing society’s view of such things, other worldviews will rush in.  The object all along has not been to get religion out of a position of influence in politics, it’s been to get one particular religion out of influence (Christianity) and replace it with another (progressivism).  A lot of libertarian minded people got on board with eliminating Christianity’s influence in politics, and are now surprised to find themselves the target of the hostility of the dominant religious perspective (progressivism) that they helped enshrine.

So it’s not a question of whether religion will lie behind and upstream from our political debates.  It’s just a question of which religion.  I prefer Christianity, and will advocate for it.