The Toxic War On God
How Satan's Lies Have Made Us All So Miserable For Three Hundred Years At Least
By some small miracle, I finished Nancy Pearcey’s The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes yesterday afternoon. It’s so good, you should read all of it. What I particularly love is how Pearcey cuts—as I said over on Patheos—through the progressive miasma. So much of what’s upsetting about the current state of the church and the world is that ordinary people haven’t clung with confidence to their convictions.
They felt that some things were true, but they didn’t really know the reasons for those feelings. When pushed to and frow, when buffitted by progressivism, war, and the opportunity to buy a second car, they, in some cases reluctantly, in other cases with great joy, abandoned both the feeling and the belief behind it.
One reason for failing confidence—which becomes clear when you read the book—is that the expectations and assumptions between men and women for each other, for the kind of work they could do, for morality, and for God, shifted so swiftly and suddenly that most people didn’t have time to keep up. When they did try to retain some previously known truth, they were often accused of being strident and, occasionally, hypocritical. This pattern emerged sharply in the split between Fundamentalists and Evangelicals which Pearcey elucidates so helpfully. Fast forward a few decades and you see the same thing, though told in the opposite way by Du Mez, with the Moral Majority in the 80s who, it bears mentioning yet again, were right to be afraid but were not afraid enough.
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