“The culture wars are being fought in virtually every sphere of life—government, business, law, politics, commerce, education, the sciences, media, the arts, entertainment, religion, marriage, family, health care, and popular culture to name just a few. Each of these spheres produces seemingly unrelated instances of cultural conflict. Yet, it is in the accumulation of such present-day moments of conflict that we gain an understanding and direction of the cultural drift. The purpose of these posts and the books I have written is to participate in the redemption of culture in all institutions of American life through sharing the truth of the biblical worldview which was at the heart of the nation’s founding and formed the central cultural vision by which it is to be governed.
Over the last 15 years I have written and posted many articles about American culture from the perspective of the biblical worldview. Therefore, I have selected a few of the posts that continue to offer time-tested answers to the questions of life and the turmoil found in modern society that we encounter every day.”
Larry G. Johnson
Tis the Season for Secular Silliness
[This article was first posted on culturewarrior.net on December 13, 2013. Given the growing hostility of the majority of secular culture to all things Christian,it seems appropriate to publish it a second time.] Holiday letter to my secular humanist friends, The first signs of the holiday shopping season peek from store shelves in September. October’s chill warns that Halloween nears. We must select a costume that tops last year’s. November heralds that most wonderful time of the year—Black Friday. But Oh My! What shall we do with December and that highly embarrassing “other” holiday? You know the one I mean. We once masked it by calling it Xmas. But the X could be misconstrued as a cross. And a cross can be associated with you […]
Revival – 5 – Spiritual Conditions in America 1620-1720
What occurred among the New England Puritans between 1620 and 1660 is a remarkable story that began with a rag-tag band of beleaguered separatist Puritans (Pilgrims) that landed on the shores of a vast wilderness in 1620. By the end of that decade many of the prosperous, well-educated members of the Church of England also began immigrating to New England. Unlike the Pilgrims, they still considered themselves to be members of the Church of England, although separated from their corrupt brethren that remained in their homeland. Known as Puritans, they formed the great migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony which by 1640 had grown to a population of twenty-six thousand. For these Protestant Puritans who strongly followed the teachings of John Calvin, religion was the […]
Revival – 4 – The British Great Awakening
Conditions in England 1688-1739 As discussed in Chapter 3, the Catholic Church and the various branches of the Protestant Church were in great turmoil from the beginning of the Reformation in 1517 until 1648 when the peace agreement at Westphalia substantially ended the Catholic-Protestant wars on the continent of Europe. However, the conflict would not end in Great Britain until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the triumph of Protestantism under William III. All wars invariably lead to post-war periods in which the Christian faith is neglected which leads to a general decay of national morality. This was the condition in which the British people found themselves at the end of the seventeenth century. Not only had the opposing camps of Christianity fought among themselves, […]
Revival – 3 – Purifying the Reformation – England and America
To understand the origins and nature of the great awakenings and revivals beginning in the eighteenth century, we must first look at the history of God’s people in England and the American colonies following the Reformation. Much of their history presented in this chapter is drawn from Chapters 6 through 9 in Evangelical Winter-Restoring New Testament Christianity.[1] Although the reformers readily affirmed their allegiance to “the scriptures alone” as the authority of the church and living the Christian life, it was a far more difficult matter to shed centuries of the teachings and practices of the Catholic Church that conflicted with or undermined faithful adherence to the Scriptures. Therefore, implementation of reforms in the new Protestant churches often carried with it many of the old […]
Revival – 2 – What is true revival?
What is true revival? Ask twenty Christian lay men and women under the age of fifty and you will likely get twenty different answers, and most of them will be incorrect. The same may said of many in the clergy. Very simply put, revival means to bring the church back to life. Noah Webster’s dictionary of 1828 lists four definitions that are helpful when applied to revival in the biblical sense. 1. Return, recall or recovery to life from death or apparent death; as the revival of a drowned person. 2. Return or recall to activity from a state of languor; as the revival of spirits. 3. Return, recall or recovery from a state of neglect, oblivion, obscurity or depression; as the revival of the […]