For Religious Liberty
What do our children need and not need from societies larger structures, like church and state, so that they might know Jesus?
Latest Articles
Against “Religious Liberty”
Conservative Christians have lost the public sphere by hiding behind the protective sheet of "religious liberty."
Church
Thankfulness, the Heart of Faith
“Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!” (1 Chronicles 16:34)
Hating Good, Loving Evil
Christian public witness must mean more than carving out thin religious exemptions. It means calling what is wicked, “wicked.”
There Must Be Factions
"Unity over division" attempts to substitute an artificial unity for the real thing: the perfect unity of Christ that transcends all differences not by diminishing them, but by bringing about conformity to Christ and his word by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Sheep, Wolves, and Fools
Over the past few years, many pastors and Christian ministry leaders let a lot of people down. It is my contention that the winsome model was a major contributor to what led them astray.
The Original Anti-Christian Nationalist
Christians have become exiles in a country that they played an indispensable role in building, and the Madisonian secular state has proven unable or unwilling to respond to the moral challenges facing the nation. If Madison is correct, and if classical liberalism is ultimately poisonous to the concept of Christian nationalism, then conservatives should seek to ground their vision of liberty in a teaching that is more distinctly Christian than that offered by the fourth President of the United States.
Culture
The Managerial Revolution in Middle Earth
As the first season ended in “Rings of Power,” Amazon’s entrée into the cape-and-dragon genre, I found myself cheering for the Orcs. Let me explain.
Lament for a Lost Way of Life
Sweet Land and Godspeed present a way of life that modern Americans have by and large forgotten... being tied to a particular and unique people that all have their own stories and come from particular, unique places.
Biased History
To be sure, constrained presentism exists on both the right and the left—everyone on the political spectrum bears the temptation to mine the past for present concerns. This temptation must be resisted. Our innate proclivity to tell stories and forge historical memory must coalesce with an uncompromising set of virtues necessary for the storyteller. Without these qualities, a true historical consciousness of who and what we are as a nation will fade, and we ourselves will perish.
A Politics of Divine Perfection
Joshua Mitchell considers what lengths moderns will go to cleanse the stain of humanity, but the prior question is whether the reality within which humanity exists is itself stained. The only hope of doing that is to believe in a God who is perfect, without blemish or creaturely limitation, for ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’ (1 John 3:3). The only hope for politics, therefore, is a renewed vision of the perfect purity of God.
The Danger of a Good Reputation
Everyone loves a good reformation until some rash soul takes a notion to actually reform something. The sons of the prophets much prefer it when their prophets are deceased. Perhaps when they have been dead for a generation or more will they cease to be objects of criticism and attack. Two generations and it is possible to buy a floor buffer for the marble rotunda. Thus it is that later generations build tombs and memorials for the prophets—prophets they would not tolerate for one skinny-minute walking around at ninety-eight point six.
Family
The World Wants Your Family
What good, hard-working families have done in the past will not suffice in today’s environment.
Teaching Sex and Gender Rightly
Most Christians have simply gone along with the ideas and opinions of the sexual revolution. One reason for this loss of Christian orthodoxy on sexual matters involves confusion about the roles of church, family, and school.
What do Women Really Want?
Help daughters plan for life in the way that girls must: with lots of wiggle room and adaptability.
Family Policy for a Great Country
Can a country, saturated with pornography, be a great country? History hardly provides examples. This is not an accident.
Homosexual Acceptance among Evangelicals
When I began my academic career, traditional Christian teachings on sexuality were embraced by the majority of my evangelical students even if they often struggled, as I did, to live up to them. That no longer appears to be the case.
Society
Protestants and Abortion
Protestants must rekindle intellectual fires and set terms for the emerging era. Serious thinkers, many of whom grace The American Reformer, are well underway with that project.
Pluralism Won’t Save Us
The foundations of our republic now face the universal solvent of gender ideology as identity politics mutates into medicalized violence and self-harm.
The Tao in America
Cultural Christianity never saved anyone, and to the degree that it covered over sin and wickedness, God hated it, and we ought to condemn it. But cultural Christianity, however imperfect, was and is a manifestation of the Tao. In that sense, it tills the soil to prepare it for the seed. As Lewis said, it gives us something to work on and to work with. It teaches us through laws and customs and cultural practices the reality of the Tao, of God’s moral order. So, cultural Christianity never saved anyone, but it did give many a sense of sin and guilt, which prepared them for the good news of Jesus.
Why the World Needs Men
Drawing on nature, history, literature, science, common experience, and Scripture, Anthony Esolen defends a traditionalist understanding of manhood, an understanding that recognizes the good and unique differences between men and women and the consequently different roles for men and women in the family, society, politics, and the church.
The Specter of a New Serfdom
Liberalism, democracy, individual Lockean property rights, and freedom of thought—these Joel Kotkin offers up as the elements of the lost golden age to which he hopes we may return. Indeed, he actively pours scorn on the more interdependent, organic model of society that characterized our pre-liberal past, deeming it one of the elements of “feudalism” to be shunned. Any thoughtful reading of our current cultural predicament will show that we will need something stronger than warmed-over post-war liberalism to escape the dystopian future that Kotkin so vividly portrays.
State
For Religious Liberty
What do our children need and not need from societies larger structures, like church and state, so that they might know Jesus?
Against “Religious Liberty”
Conservative Christians have lost the public sphere by hiding behind the protective sheet of "religious liberty."
David French’s Politics of Cruelty
As serious students of politics have been warning for ages, a poorly thought-out niceness is one of the most reliable motivations to cruelty.
Establishment and Secularization
Does state establishment of a church lead inevitably to secularization?
The End of Liberal Democracy?
The modern West is committing suicide, assisted by radical leftists.