Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
November-December 2002 – On the one-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the banner of the Fox News Channel’s Web site said: “9/11 – The Day America Changed.” Very few would argue that our nation was altered in substantial ways by the attacks last year, but many Christians are perplexed to discover that, in spiritual matters, nothing has really changed.
It didn’t start off that way last fall. Christians who hoped the nation would return to God following the tragedies of that infamous day were probably heartened to hear that there were some initial signs that a dramatic spiritual shift might be underway. According to Fox News, some estimates determined that, on the Sunday following September 11, 2001, almost half of the U.S. population attended a religious service of some sort.
The intensity of religious feeling began to dissipate fairly quickly, however, and now it appears that things have returned to their pre-terror status. According to the Barna Research Group, a polling firm that specializes in tracking religious attitudes and habits in the U.S., before 9/11 42% of Americans said they attended religious services on a regular basis. One year later, the number was 43%.
Whatever spiritual impact resulted from the terrorist attacks, it was only temporary. George Barna, founder of the research firm, told USA Today that he was amazed by the “spiritual complacency of the American public.”
Elusive cultural change
However, Christians hoping that a national tragedy would produce a cultural transformation were hoping for something that rarely happens, because single events do not usually change cultures. Instead, such shifts occur on a much slower pace, following wide-based ideological change.
For example, there has been a substantial alteration of sexual mores in American culture over the last 50 years. The traditional ideas concerning human sexuality, rooted in a Judeo-Christian worldview, have essentially been replaced as the dominant view by hedonistic individualism.
However, the name usually given to this transformation – the sexual revolution – can be misleading. The word “revolution” often calls to mind political upheavals, in which governments are overthrown and cultures thrown into disarray. The sexual revolution was not really this sort of “revolution” at all. It was not sudden or particularly explosive; the changes that occurred were not forced on an unwilling public. Instead, it was quite slow and laborious, as traditional sexual beliefs were voluntarily surrendered one mind at a time.
In a similar way, cultural transformation did not occur after 9/11 because that event did not change many hearts and minds concerning fundamental truths. Worldviews remained the same. Philosophies were not discarded. Those things which Americans worshiped before, in general they worshiped afterward. If Christians want to know why the culture was not changed after 9/11, they need only to look in the mirror: Were they changed by it? Saddened – surely; frightened – perhaps. But how many were changed by that single event?
The sad truth isn’t simply that evil is spreading in America. More fundamentally the problem is that evil ideas are spreading – and taking root in human hearts. Homosexuality, for example, has taken hold in America precisely because the sexual revolution took hold first. Our culture first rejected the belief that God had ordained human sexuality and established limitations on its expression. Instead, it embraced the view that, in general, sexuality is a personal experience that is governed by individual tastes. Celebrating homosexuality follows from that.
This relationship between the power of ideas and cultural change is implied in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5. In that familiar passage the apostle Paul refers to “the destruction of fortresses,” as if the young church were embarking on a re-conquest of Canaan. The allusion to Jericho – and other such strongholds encountered by Joshua and the people of God – seems clear.
In the church age these “fortresses” are individual and corporate sins, drawing their vitality from depraved human nature, but organized and safeguarded by the ideas that undergird them. This is why Paul characterizes his apostolic ministry by saying: “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” (vs. 5).
Wicked principalities and powers, in other words, do not exist in a vacuum. Instead, the false gods being confronted by the church are rooted in false religions, which in turn are rooted in false ideas. These fortresses can only be uprooted by dealing with the “speculations” and “thought[s]” that are “raised up against the knowledge of God.”
Removing controlling powers
Obviously this is a drastically different strategy than that which God gave to His people in the days of Moses and Joshua. The land which God promised to Abraham’s descendants was already occupied: it was filled with pagan people, whose cultures revolved around the worship of false gods. That ancient land also had its fortresses.
God’s solution was the complete eradication of the pagans and their cultures: “You shall defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them” (Deut. 7:2).
Why was such an approach necessary? It was the only way to remove the influence of the false gods that inhabited the land of promise. Those very real demonic powers held sway through the Canaanite pagan religions. Those religions, in turn, were deeply rooted in the hearts and minds of the people.
That is why, in approaching these heathen cultures, the Hebrew armies were also commanded to “tear down their altars, and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire” (vs. 5). While the false religion was rooted in the minds and hearts of the Canaanite people, the physical trappings of those religious ideas were embedded in the land. Everything must go.
Make no mistake: when it came to the reason behind the command to obliterate the pagan cultures in Canaan, the removal of demonic powers in the land was the end game. The one major threat to this holy nascent nation was the threat that the heathen culture in the land would “turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods” (vs. 4). But when the pagans and their religions were removed, the false gods would be swept away.
Of course, in the New Testament age, Christians are not sent to sanctify a single parcel of promised ground – they are scattered throughout the world. Nevertheless, like Joshua and the Hebrew nation, Christians are also living in lands that are controlled by false gods who reign in their fortresses of false religions and ideas.
Paul, however, explicitly rejects physical combat as the method of conquest, drawing a parallel with Joshua but also making a clear distinction. The apostle says we no longer use fleshly weapons (2 Cor. 10:4), because we no longer battle against human opponents in the advancement of the kingdom – but against the spiritual forces that operate above and within human civilization (Eph. 6:12). These wicked powers, he says in 2 Timothy 2:26, have ensnared the unbeliever, who is being “held captive by [the devil] to do his will.”
So how does the church go about the business of destroying such fortresses? What “divinely powerful” weapons do Christians use? In breaking the hold of the Evil One, the emphasis is on sinners coming “to the knowledge of the truth” through repentance. Toward that end Christians are to proclaim the gospel in a way that is kind, patient and gentle (2 Tim. 2:24, 25).
The apostle states emphatically that the preaching of the gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16). It is God’s method by which individuals are changed – and by extension, cultures. If simple ideas – either good or bad – can alter cultures, how much more the word of God preached in the power of the Holy Spirit?
Culture wars
In understanding the cultural changes that are underway in our nation, the church must understand that Satan has been busily sowing false ideas into the soil of unregenerate hearts and minds. Those false ideas have been taking root for more than a generation, and they are overturning the fundamental truths upon which our nation was founded.
Pro-family and pro-life groups have been courageously fighting on the front lines for decades, resisting these false ideas. In Washington, D.C., in state legislatures and in communities across the nation, Christians have labored tirelessly to overturn bad laws and hinder pernicious movements such as that spawned by homosexual activists.
However, such efforts can only hinder – and never stop – the inevitable triumph of the pagan hosts that storm the gates of our culture. There is only one thing that can prevail; there is only one way that the Christian culture warriors can find relief as they battle, exhausted, on the walls; there is only one weapon of war which God has placed in the hands of His church: the gospel.
The channel of God’s grace to our culture is the church, which is empowered to change individuals through the preaching of the message of salvation. In this profound manner, the power of the gospel can transform the cultural landscape one soul at a time. As sinners cease their rebellion and throw away their arms in surrender to the King of kings, truth takes root in human hearts, false religions melt away, and false gods are stripped of their power.
Believers in any particular generation are heirs to a truth that has been passed down from our spiritual mothers and fathers. It is a message of hope and transforming power which stretches back to the beginnings of human history, back to a long-lost garden, where our first parents stood naked, ashamed and fearful before a Holy God. In that paradise fatally stricken by the entrance of iniquity, Adam and Eve received a promise of a Deliverer to come. As a token of that salvation, Scripture says in all its pregnant simplicity, “And the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them” (Gen. 3:21).
It is still a message that many Americans are waiting to hear for the first time. 
