Tim Wildmon
AFA president
February 2014 – There is a difference between going looking for a fight and having a fight come to you. It was that way with the colonists who decided to break away from the king of England in the 1700s. Those soon to be Americans – the men and women who founded our country – decided they had had enough abuse from the king, and so they made their grievances public with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and the war for America began.
Our founders didn’t go looking for a fight with the British crown, but the provocation for a fight came to them. It is much the same way for those of us who believe in traditional Christian values in modern day America. For the past four decades, we haven’t been looking for a fight, but our beliefs and morals have been under assault. For example:
▶ Honoring God and prayer were very much a part of public life, but then the secularists went against those practices through the courts and many of us felt the need to fight back by forming Christian legal organizations to challenge the atheists and secularists in the courtrooms.
▶ Christian teaching regarding sexual behavior was the standard before Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner and the entertainment industry (Hollywood) began to attack it relentlessly. Television programming from the 1970s forward has proclaimed there are no rules with respect to sex. Christians saw this as having dire consequences for the long term health of our society and decided to fight back and were mocked for doing so.
▶ The taking of innocent human life through abortion was illegal in most states until the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision overruled the states and made abortion the law of the land. Some Christians decided to fight back, and thus was born the pro-life movement.
▶ For all of human history, the definition of marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. The vast majority of states, even liberal California, have reaffirmed this view of marriage in the last 20 years. But one federal judge overruled seven million Californians, and later the Supreme Court concurred, thus changing the legal definition of marriage to include men “marrying” men and women “marrying” women. Talk about a classic oxymoron! Some Christians decided to fight back, and what America will do with this issue remains to be seen.
There are many more examples of what the “culture war” is all about, but I’ve just laid out four of the more high profile issues of our time. These issues were why my dad, Rev. Don Wildmon, founded the American Family Association. He saw the need to give Christians (and others who support traditional values) an organized response to the attacks on the Christian value system. That was in 1977. But we have been backed into a corner and left with no recourse but to fight for our values.
There were other groups like AFA who have also engaged in the effort to preserve and restore these values. The culture war is really a spiritual war; therefore it is eternal. There will always be good and evil, right and wrong, moral and immoral. And just as these values matter in our personal lives, they also matter for the well-being of our country. If we as a nation continue to rebel against God and godly principles, He will either destroy us or He will allow us to implode. I can’t tell you exactly what that looks like, but judging by historical and biblical accounts, it will be really, really bad.
If you are a Christian solider, let me encourage, warn and challenge you. Let me encourage you that standing for the Lord and His righteousness is always the right thing to do. We must do what we can, while we can. Elections matter. Building strong families matters. Being involved in your community matters. Winning converts to Christianity matters. Let me warn you that the world is against us – and sometimes hostile towards us – because we make moral judgments based on Scripture and proclaim them publicly. Jesus told us this would be the case.
Finally, let me challenge you to stay involved with groups like AFA. We will win some and we will lose some. But we can’t quit. We can never give up. What a future America will look like for our children, grandchildren and Christians in general is very much at stake. 
