The War on Christianity
The Biden Administration’s Easter Chaos and the Reformed Answer
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. It’d be interesting to see what Joe Biden from 1975—or even Biden from 2008—would’ve thought about praising procedures that dismember and disfigure the human body in the name of autonomy and freedom. Following Biden’s example, the supposed “centrist” adult in the room, Democratic members of Congress, notable state governors like Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul, and lawmakers in virtually every state all either promoted Transgender Visibility Day alongside Easter, or promoted the former exclusively and made no mention of the latter.
Among the many phrases that The Blaze’s Auron MacIntyre has made famous, the one that applies here is that systems are never broken—they produce exactly what was intended. Likewise, the messaging priorities of Biden and the Democrats are purposeful. And what they intend to communicate is clear: honoring transgenderism is not only fully compatible with the teachings of Scripture but must be trumpeted from all the high places.
The Left’s aim is to make transgenderism a positive good that must be affirmed by all Americans. Those who violate the tenets of our new Constitution—both its written and unwritten forms—will face consequences, including social ostracism, removal from elite circles, and legal action. As Daniel J. Mahoney wrote at The American Mind, “A denial of the most elementary realities is now a precondition for being tolerated by those who adhere to the new morality and who control the commanding heights of our society.”
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.
The idolatrous sins that St. Paul catalogs in his letter to the Colossians that invite God’s wrath—“sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness”—are what the Biden administration enthusiastically celebrates as good with its honoring of the trans lie. The prophet Isaiah, of course, had something to say about “those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”
As evangelical elites are fond of saying, character matters. Evangelicals for Biden, Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden (pure Orwellian Newspeak), and other “Christian” pro-Democratic groups and “conservative” political commentators who made it safe to vote for Biden need to repent and publicly talk about their sins. Political leaders who voice their full-throated commitment to acts that are on par with bloodthirsty Aztec rituals need to be called to account. As the opening verse of Psalm 94 reads, “O Lord, God of vengeance, O God of vengeance, shine forth!”
After you finish praying the imprecatory Psalms, you must get to work. To launch an effective political counteroffensive, Reformed Christians need to start by mining the riches of our own tradition. As E.J. Hutchinson has written for the Davenant Institute, we have the resources “to aid in the formulation of a coherent Christian political philosophy that not only takes freedom seriously, but takes the moral end of government, as the Apostle Paul sets it out in Romans 13, seriously as well.”
We need to recover the teachings of the Reformed Confessions on political theology, which features a consistent doctrine that stretches from the French Confession to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Even the American revisions to the WCF, which call the magistrate “to maintain piety, justice, and peace, according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth,” agree far more with the Reformed consensus in principle than what some modern theologians and podcast hosts would care to admit.
We then need to elevate those into political offices who understand both the key principles of Reformed political theory and how to tailor them to meet the exigencies of our day. Following the teachings of Peter Martyr Vermigli from his commentary on the Book of Judges, these officeholders must see to it that laws “be diligently kept, the guilty punished, and the good holpen and fostered.”
The foregoing means rejecting the current model of evangelical political theology that attempts to Christianize politics in favor of one in which Christians do politics as Christians. Younger generations seem especially interested in rejecting the false choice of political quietism vs. transformationalism and look to reassert the public dimensions of Christianity based on a solid understanding of historic Reformed theology.
As Stephen Wolfe has argued at Mere Orthodoxy, this work includes creating and sustaining a culture that catechizes citizens in Christian practices. Even the new atheist Richard Dawkins recently said that he calls himself a “cultural Christian” and wants to preserve England as a “Christian country.” While insufficient as it relates to salvation, Dawkins understands better than most evangelical elites the importance of a good culture, which should promote patterns of living that point citizens toward eternal truths.
By recovering our Reformed heritage and finding the will to advance the concerns of Christians in politics again, perhaps someday massive crosses will again be towering over the New York City skyline.
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