How the Modern Christian Right Forgets Christ

There is a rarely admitted tragedy unfolding in American Christianity. It’s not the one the usually unbelieving critics trot out: the tired and biblically illiterate litany about Matthew 7:1–2 hypocrisy, the moral failing of this or that preacher, or the endless parade of fallen megachurch icons. That is the soft clay of lazy opinion pages and comments from baiting atheists looking for a quick and insincere jab. No, the real crisis is sharper, subtler, and vastly more consequential: Christians are forgetting Christ.

This is not an accusation thrown from the outside. I say it as a Christian myself, and as someone painfully aware that the West, now feverishly severing itself from meaning, needs Christianity more than ever. Ours is a culture that has replaced transcendent truth with therapeutic slogans, inherited norms with algorithmic neuroses, and the delicate rites of civilization with the dopamine circus of perpetual outrage. As I’ve written about countless times, children grow up rootless, taught to despise their own culture, to distrust their basic instincts, and to treat the legacy of their ancestors as a toxic spill. Every institution, from the family to the school to the church, has been told to apologize for existing.

In a world like this, Christianity could have been an anchor. Instead, parts of the modern Christian right have become little floating buoys, drifting right along with every other feuding tribe aiming to cause further division and anger.

Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen the emergence of a new breed of digital crusaders, those who brandish out of context scripture not as a lamp to guide the lost, but as a cudgel to bludgeon the disliked.

Read the full essay on Substack!