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What’s a Christian to do with Culture?

The thing about culture is that it is always changing. That’s because culture is, in a very real sense, created by humans. It’s the result of what we think, what we imagine, what we change, what we legislate, what we invent, what we relate to, and all kinds of other human experiences. 

There are some moments, however, in which the changes are deeper and wider, the shifts in culture more fundamental. Many sense we’re living in such a time where the changes that have taken place over the last several decades have been substantial, to say the least. My friend Os Guinness calls this a “civilizational moment,” where society isn’t just at a critical crossroads in twenty-first century America. It’s instead at a critical crossroads for Western civilization itself. 

Of course, history tells the story about civilizations, how they rise and fall. There are rules to civilizations, and if those rules are broken, then those civilizations no longer have a future. What Os means when he calls this a civilizational moment is that we’re at a time when our future is unclear. Will Western civilization be renewed? Will it enter a time of revolution? Or will we continue in irreversible decline? 

It’s important as Christians to always remember that the decline of Western civilization is not the decline of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God both predates and will long outlast the history of Western civilization. However, its decline will be significant indeed because so many of the ideals of the Western world were shaped and formed by Christian beliefs—specifically those beliefs about morality and about human dignity. Such ideals aren’t found in other civilizations that have long since been swept into the dustbin of history. 

But here’s what Christians can be sure of, whatever the future holds for Western civilization: We belong to an even bigger story. In fact, given the biblical account of reality from Creation to new Creation, from Heavens and Earth to new Heavens and new Earth, the history of this civilization is more like a moment. 

And that’s the thing about moments that can only be properly understood in light of stories: You can never fully understand a story from a moment, but you can make sense of a moment from the perspective of the larger story. In God’s grace, that’s precisely what He has given us: The Story of reality, capital “T,” capital “S.” 

He’s also given us the truth about who we are and what it means to be a human being, which, of course, is something that has shifted dramatically in these latter decades of Western culture. Untethered from these ideological roots that made Western culture what it was, the future for this society is indeed unclear.  

But there’s good news. The most important thing we can know about this civilizational moment is that Christians don’t find ourselves in it by accident. Scripture reveals something very interesting and important about God Himself, which is that He is chronologically precise. In other words, we’re in this time and in this place by His intention … we’ve been called to it. So then, as Francis Schaeffer and later Chuck Colson asked, how now shall we live in the knowledge of this?  

The only way to do that is to get our hands, our minds, and our hearts around four fundamental realities of the Christian worldview, starting with hope. Scripture says that Christians are people of hope, but that means we must fully and rightly understand what hope is and not misdefine it as some sort of wishful thinking. Jesus is our blessed hope.  

We must also wrap our minds, hearts, and heads around what is true, not just the individual truths of Christianity, as important as those are. We must not just know the moral truths of how we ought to behave, but the truth of the Christian story and how that story is so radically different than all the other worldviews that are vying for our hearts and minds right now. 

A proper understanding of identity is another key point to navigating this civilizational moment. The Christian worldview offers the only accurate definition of what it means to be human, made in the image and likeness of God. We must know exactly what it means to be “made in the image of God” and how that impacts our relationship with the world around us, with God, with others, and with ourselves.  

And finally, we need to have a clear sense of calling. Especially in a time like ours, it’s easy to feel like victims against the forces of history. We feel as if we have no say in where civilization is headed. But remember, we have been called to this civilizational moment, and we have the truth about reality and about the human person at the ready in Scripture.  

If Christians can be clear on these four things of hope, truth, identity, and calling, that’s a pretty good roadmap for this civilization. The next Lighthouse Voices event will explore these guidelines with our “A Christian’s Guide to this Civilizational Moment” lecture. The Lighthouse Voices series is a joint project from Focus on the Family and the Colson Center designed to help Christians think well about the culture they live in, especially when it comes to those issues that intersect with family.  

Stop Lying to Women

According to ShoutYourAbortion.com (yes, that is a real website), women who want children are the abnormal ones. For example, Syd, who identified herself as a convert to Catholicism, wrote, “Thanks to my abortion, I will have a future.” Another wrote, “Abortion gave me a chance to focus on my own life.” An anonymous college student stated, “My future was worth it, and I am more than just a vessel to produce new life.” She then compared her baby to a tumor standing between her and her career.  

This website is among the legacies of a society now well into its fourth wave of feminism. Women see the procreative design of their bodies as a problem to be avoided or solved, not a gift of God. Between that consistent drumbeat and the celebrity voices equating abortion with “mercy” and insisting life without marriage and children is better (despite overwhelming research that suggests otherwise), it is no wonder that over one million women chose to end the life of their baby last year, 40% of young women think they should hold off having a baby until their career is established, and one-fifth of women say they would forego kids altogether for a career.  

Many young women believe they will be happier if they remain single and without kids. Yet studies continue to show that the happiest people on average are women who are married with kids. In other words, there is an incredible gap between perception and reality. God designed humans for relationships. For most, that means marriage. He made women to be child bearers and mothers, uniquely equipping their bodies, hearts, and minds to be life-givers in this way. Scripture says that there is joy in following the precepts of the Lord, which align with God’s works in creation. If true, we ought to expect that living out God’s design will bring happiness. God’s burden is light, after all. 

The fundamental ideas of the feminist movement, at least in its current form, is in direct contrast. Its adherents even find it necessary to re-write the lives of historical figures to align with their views. Thus, the new and improved Lady Jane Grey was a power-driven vixen who did not need a man, and Jane Austen even envisioned a nonbinary society. For historical figures to be considered great, they must have rejected repressive narratives of womanhood that value faith, family, or men. 

This kind of feminism betrays women and is especially dismissive of the many who face infertility or who desire marriage and family in this culture that no longer values either. God made humans in his image, male and female. Though a woman’s value is not determined by marital or maternal status, who God designed woman to be can neither be erased nor can it be replaced by some progressive vision of “freedom,” careerism, or sexual autonomy.  

The truth about women is, in reality, far more radical than the ideas so dominant in this cultural moment. Women are uniquely and wonderfully different from men. It should not be thought weird for women to desire to give life and then nurture and care for life. Women did this for Jesus throughout His life and at His death. The Bible portrays women as prophets, judges, and businesswomen, but also, in nearly every book of Scripture, as mothers and wives.  

It is often said that being a wife and mother are the highest calling for women. It is not. Glorifying God, in whatever role or stage of life, is the highest calling of all image bearers. We are to do that in whatever station we find ourselves, as male or female, because that’s how God made us to live. Too many women have been told to fear the design that God blessed them with, or to fight it in the name of “freedom.” In this cultural moment, that fear has undermined the sacred roles granted to women within families. That’s a tragedy because God’s design of His image bearers, male and female, is, as Scripture has said, very good.  

The Problem with Christian ‘Worldview’

Every so often, a book or article will denounce the concept of worldview for Christians. The claims, which vary from writer to writer, are usually a mix of legitimate critique and odd straw manning.

Some argue that the German rationalist history of worldview makes it wrong, misguided, or even unbiblical for Christians. Others suggest that it reduces authentic faith to something too cerebral, too impersonal or too formulaic. Perhaps the most common critique is that it just doesn’t “work” in today’s cultural environment. 

That last critique extends to all Christian intellectual work, especially apologetics.

For decades now, last rites have been offered for Christian intellectual pursuits but, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment about rumors of his own demise, rumors of the death of worldview and apologetics have been greatly exaggerated. In just the last few months, millions witnessed Wesley Huff use apologetics to share the Gospel with millions on Joe Rogan’s podcast, as well as Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger proclaim a new faith in Christ and attribute it to a long intellectual journey which involved a popular apologetics and evangelism website. The long history of Christian intellectual work includes philosophy, science, medicine, art and virtually every area of human understanding. People still have questions, and the Bible provides answers. The life of the mind is a non-reducible aspect of the Christian faith.  

The most common criticisms of Christian worldview as a concept have come from those who doubt objective truth, objective morality, and Christianity’s clear doctrinal stands, and yet still wish to identify as Christian. In the past, these critiques came from those who embraced more culturally and theologically liberal views.

Just recently, however, a critic from the dissident Right complained that Christian worldview ideas, such as image of God and knowable truth, undermined their views about race and nationalism. He’s right. They do. There are clear implications of the Bible’s truth-claims about God, the universe, human dignity, and many other things. 

A smaller set of criticism comes from Christians who found that a formulaic understanding of Christian worldview hadn’t “worked” the way they had either been told or thought. In their experience, the Christian worldview was presented as obvious, and the others as nonsense. Perhaps they were taught objectively that certain sins were, in fact sins, but understanding that didn’t keep them from struggling. Or perhaps they had run-ins with obnoxious Christians who used worldview like a club to badger people into submission on narrow political opinions. 

Worldview has been done badly but, as a movement, it’s been largely self-corrective. Some of the earliest champions of Christian worldview, such as Herman Bavinck and Herman Dooyeweerd, pushed worldview thinking away from the confusions of German rationalism. Almost every popular champion of Christian worldview, from James Sire to Nancy Pearcey to Francis Schaeffer to Charles Colson, argued against reducing faith to cerebral formulas. More recently, many have worked to maintain the political ramifications of Christian truth without allowing the faith to be reduced to political partisanship.  

In his short book on the importance of creativity and art, Francis Schaeffer wrote: 

“If Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just ‘dogmatically’ true or ‘doctrinally’ true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.”

Christian worldview is about the realization that if Christianity is true, it’s about everything and it changes everything. As Scottish theologian James Orr, among the earliest Christian thinkers to talk about the Christian worldview, wrote,  

“He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity.”

While I agree that the term “Christian worldview” or “Biblical worldview” is clunky, every alternative I’ve heard (like “Christian social imaginary”) is far worse. Perhaps we should just call it Biblical wisdom, this quest to incarnate Christ’s claim on reality, as articulated by Abraham Kuyper, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” Our job, Chuck Colson often said, is to go anywhere and everywhere and cry out “His!” 

The Progressives Who Want to Take Down Elon Musk and Tesla

Leftist activists are promoting and encouraging protests and attacks on Telsa, the automotive and clean energy company headed by Elon Musk.

Activists plan a “Tesla Takedown,” a “Global Day of Action to stop Musk” on March 29. Anti-capitalist groups, politicians, actors, and transgender-identified activists are just some of those working to bring down Musk and Tesla.

One of the most appalling celebrations of the violence occurred on The Daily Show, as co-host Jordan Klepper showed news video of Tesla cars set on fire at dealerships around the country.

The audience cheered and applauded the destruction, to which Klepper said, “Wow, you guys like petty acts of domestic terrorism.” The audience laughed and cheered again.

Actually, those are felony acts, and one wonders if Klepper and his audience would laugh at the destruction of thousands of dollars of their own property.

Tesla, headquartered in Texas, employs more than 100,000 workers, developing and manufacturing electric vehicles and installing and maintaining energy systems.

Touted as a clean energy company and long supported by progressive climate activists, many leftists have now turned on the company due to Musk’s work with the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, a temporary agency created by an executive order with the goal of combating federal waste, fraud and abuse.

Here are some of the left-leaning groups and individuals who oppose Musk’s work with DOGE and, apparently, support a bloated, wasteful federal government.

Philly Anti-Capitalist “exists to promote and spread anti-authoritarian events and ideas as well as facilitate communication between anti-authoritarians and anarchists in and around Philadelphia.”

According to Fox News, the group “claimed credit for terrorizing a Philadelphia neighborhood near the University of Pennsylvania during what it called the ‘Summer of Rage’ in 2020.”

Now, the group is giving tips to would-be arsonists, in a blog post titled, “DONT USE MOLOTOVS: Some notes on safely burning Teslas (or other cars),” as Fox News reports,

“The group’s site recommends against using Molotov cocktails, as several radicals across the country have, in favor of more effective devices. It also directs combatants on how much explosive material to use and where to place that material on vehicles in order to cause the most damage.”

“Philly Anti-Capitalist also provides tips on using those devices without getting hurt and quickly enough to escape undetected, and directs would-be arsonists to another site for further details on protecting their anonymity.”

Indivisible is another leftist group trying to stop Musk’s agenda of cutting federal agencies’ abuse and waste. Paul Sperry, a New York Post columnist and senior reporter at RealClear Investigations, warned about Indivisible back in February, saying agitators from the group planned to mob Tesla “dealerships, showrooms, [and] factories.”

More recently, he posted about founders Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, saying they had an $11.7 million war chest which included $7.26 million from billionaire George Soros, the far left donor to many radical causes.

Sperry also stated that Indivisible was paying protestors “$1,500 in ‘reimbursement’ cash” for participating in Tesla protests.

The nonprofit Action Network “trains and educates progressives on how to use technology to organize for change.” Action Network just announced that it is joining forces with MoveOn (formerly MoveOn.org), which also received funds from Soros.

Action Network lists the individual locations of the global Tesla Takedown protest, saying, “Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he’s using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it. We are taking action at Tesla to stop Musk’s illegal coup.”

The group gives no specifics about the alleged “illegal coup.” Nor does it explain how cutting federal waste destroys democracy or how Musk is using his fortune to do so. The group simply engages in empty sloganeering, as it urges those who used to support the clean energy company, “Sell your Teslas, dump your stock, join the picket lines.”

Politicians, Actors and Flight Attendants

Conservative Christian and social media influencer “Insurrection Barbie” recently posted that she sat in on an Indivisible call as the group discussed plans for the big protest day.

She noted that Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett was on the call, saying “March 29, it’s my birthday. And all I want to see happen on my birthday is Elon Musk taken down.”

Crockett, who advocates for abortion and “the LGBTQIA+ community,” stated,

“We are fighting for our country, we are fighting for our democracy, we are fighting for our freedoms. And when I say “fighting,” I am saying that figuratively. Obviously, everything that I’m promoting is nonviolent.”

Crockett did not explain how Tesla and Musk are threatening democracy, but she said elected officials weren’t listening to the American people and thanked the protestors for their work.

According to Insurrection Barbie, “Other prominent organizations involved and mentioned in the call” included:  Planet Over Profit, New Republic 50501, John Cusack Civil Liberties Defense Center, Association of Flight Attendants, Troublemakers [and] Joan Donovan – original organizer of this entire project.”

The Association of Flight Attendants? Ironically, as reported by the Daily Citizen, while it works to “fight for our freedoms,” the organization is embroiled in a lawsuit for refusing to support its members’ religious freedom and free speech.

Back in 2018, conservative radio show host, author and Old Testament scholar Dennis Prager wrote an essay titled, “Whatever the Left Touches It Ruins.” He argues that leftists – who prefer socialism and communism to capitalism and want to “disrupt and dismantle” the West – have wrecked or poisoned art, education, sports, religion and more.  

Rather than building something, as Musk, Tesla and its employees have done, radical activist are trying to destroy a company that creates, innovates and employs thousands of individuals – many of whom have families to support.

Rather than burning down businesses, it’d be good, instead, to see all that time, energy and money focused on creating things that are beautiful, useful and good.

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Attacks on Tesla Escalate

Attacks on Tesla have escalated nationwide, with Tesla dealerships hit with gunfire and Molotov cocktails; drivers threatened, doxed and terrorized; cars vandalized and tires slashed; and charging stations lit on fire.

Social media accounts like TeslaDashcam on X and Cybertruck Owners Only on Facebook are posting videos of individuals damaging cars so they can be identified and charged. Assailants must not realize that Teslas have seven cameras and security features to alert owners of threats, as the company has pointed out.

The violence, which began in January, is directed at Elon Musk, and his mission with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut government waste and fraud. The temporary federal agency was created by an executive order from President Donald Trump to modernize “federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

Highlighting the severity of these crimes, Attorney General Pam Bondi released a statement on March 18 about the violence,

The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism. The Department of Justice has already charged several perpetrators with that in mind, including in cases that involve charges with five-year mandatory minimum sentences.
We will continue investigations that impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.

Here is some of the domestic terrorism she’s talking about.

In Salem, Oregon, “Adam Matthew Lansky, 41, has been charged by criminal complaint with illegally possessing an unregistered destructive device,” reports the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon. The DOJ’s office added,

“According to court documents, on January 20, 2025, officers from the Salem Police Department responded to a report of an individual throwing Molotov cocktails at a local car dealership. Later, on February 19, 2025, officers returned to the same dealership after a report of damage from what appeared to be bullets fired into a building and vehicle.”

Journalist and author Andy Ngo, who has written about terrorism by extremist groups, reported that Lansky also goes by the name Allison, and is a “leftist trans activist.”

According to Salem’s Statesman Journal, “The man’s fingerprints were identified on some of the glass bottles used for explosive devices recovered from the scene.”

Another transgender-identified activist, Justin Thomas Nelson, who goes by the name Luce Grace Nelson, “was charged by complaint with one count of malicious destruction of property for a series of incidents at the Tesla dealership in Loveland, Colorado,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado reported. 

On January 29, Loveland Police “discovered an incendiary device, commonly referred to as a ‘Molotov cocktail’” next to “a Cyber Truck located at the Tesla dealership.” On February 2, the dealership’s sign was spray painted with the word “NAZI.”

On February 7, more graffiti and incendiary devices were found, and on February 11, “a security guard at the dealership came into contact with a person painting graffiti, which used an expletive, on the front windows of the building.”

Finally, “police confronted Nelson at the dealership,” finding “a container of gasoline plus a box of bottles and wick material” in his car. Although mainstream media outlets reported a “woman” was arrested, Ngo again reported that it was “a leftist man” who “groomed children [online] into transitioning and encouraged them to lie to their families.” 

The DOJ reported another arrest in Charleston, South Carolina, “A third defendant wrote profane messages against President Trump around Tesla charging stations before lighting the charging stations on fire with Molotov cocktails.”

The “hapless anti-Musk activist” evidently “ended up setting himself on fire,” the New York Post reported, adding, “Daniel Clarke-Pounder, 24, burned down three EV chargers in a South Carolina parking lot Friday.”

Clarke-Pounder scrawled “long live the Ukraine” and anti-Trump epithets on the chargers.

The DOJ underscored the seriousness of these offences, saying,

“Each defendant faces serious charges carrying a minimum penalty of five years and up to 20 years in prison.”

“The Department of Justice is committed to ending all acts of violence and arson directed at Tesla properties and otherwise.”

Other Tesla attacks have taken place in Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington, Missouri and Nevada.

In addition to outright attacks and destruction of private property, the Tesla Takedown Action Network is calling for protests at several dealerships on March 21 and 22, with a huge protest at 500 locations scheduled for March 29, targeting 277 Tesla dealers and Supercharger stations.

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