How Christians Can Know if They're Trapped in Culture Wars

Obeying God won’t guarantee we get to address every issue we want. Thankfully, the church is not called to fix the world but to be faithful in a broken world so that God may be glorified as He uses us to point to Him.

James Spencer

Updated Jun 20, 2023

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We live in a disorienting and disoriented world offering an endless stream of new ways to ignore, distort, marginalize, or deny God and diminish human dignity.

Thankfully, Christians are not responsible for fixing the world but for living faithfully in a broken world, only God can fix. We are not a people called to be effective at policing morality but faithful in proclaiming the gospel.

Even though we aren’t responsible for fixing the world doesn’t mean we are not to practice a “pure and undefiled” religion by visiting “orphans and widows in their affliction” and remaining “unstained from the world” (James 1:27). Instead, it means we obey God even when doing so leaves the world broken.

I won’t pretend to have the answers to all of these questions, but I think we need to be asking them. I am not offering a final word on these matters but encouraging Christians to think beyond the immediate, the popular, and the present to ensure we are not diminishing our ability to save some to ensure the world is only broken in ways we are willing to tolerate (if not enjoy).

We would do well to consider how biblical patterns might inform our contemporary actions.

Originally published June 20, 2023.

James Spencer, PhD, is a biblical scholar and author whose work concerns Christian formation, political theology, and technology. He earned his PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and an MA in Biblical Exegesis from Wheaton College. He serves as president of the D. L. Moody Center in Northfield, Massachusetts, as an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology, and as adjunct faculty in Wheaton College's MA in Leadership program. James has published multiple works, including Serpents and Doves: Christians, Politics, and the Art of Bearing Witness, Christian Resistance: Learning to Defy the World and Follow Christ, and Useful to God: Eight Lessons from the Life of D. L. Moody. His forthcoming book, Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press, 2026), offers a theological account of information and formation in a digital age. His work challenges Christians to remember that God sets the agenda for his people. James is an elder at Skyline Church in O'Fallon, Illinois, where he lives with his wife, Kim, and their four children. Listen to the Thinking Christian podcast and read more of his work at thinkingchristian.org/james.

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