You Have to Fight

“If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. You have to fight.”

Photo by David Guliciuc on Unsplash

I was listening to a church discussion of how we relate to culture, and this perspective was expressed by one of the participants. The specific example that prompted it, chosen more or less at random, was Starbucks’ choice to not put “Merry Christmas” on their holiday cups.

There were - and are - lots of good arguments on both sides, but I’m more interested in the implication that we haven’t fought, that we have somehow given inches, that we need to do more or do different if we don’t want to continue to lose miles. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the American evangelical church fight abortion, LGBTQ rights, music with explicit lyrics, music with unintelligible lyrics, Democratic presidents, drinking, gambling, playing cards because of their association with gambling, drugs, smoking, Dungeons & Dragons, Pokémon, Harry Potter, sex in video games, violence in video games, blasphemous art, R-rated movies, movies that fail to promote “family values,” the theory of evolution, saying “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” universalism, theological liberalism, political correctness, Satanism, tattoos, child pornography, communism, socialism, critical race theory, and K-Mart selling Playboy.

And this is nothing new. In the early 20th century, for example, evangelist Billy Sunday preached his famous “booze” sermon in Boston, Massachusetts:

It is my opinion that the saloonkeeper is worse than a thief and a murderer. The ordinary thief steals only your money, but the saloonkeeper steals your honor and your character. The ordinary murderer takes your life, but the saloonkeeper murders your soul.

The saloon is an infidel. It has no faith in God; has no religion. It would close every church in the land. It would hang its beer signs on the abandoned altars. It would close every public school. It respects the thief, and it esteems the blasphemer; it fills the prisons and penitentiaries. It despises heaven, hates love, and scorns virtue. It tempts the passions. Its music is the song of a siren. Its sermons are a collection of lewd, vile stories. It wraps a mantle about the hope of this world to come.

It is the moral clearinghouse for rot, and damnation, and poverty, and insanity, and it wrecks homes and blights lives today. The saloon is a liar. It promises health and causes disease. It promises prosperity and sends adversity. It promises happiness and sends misery.

His preaching was a significant factor in the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting alcohol in the United States, in 1917.

In the 1960s, to our shame, we fought against civil rights. Philip Yancey writes in Soul Survivor of growing up in Atlanta:

[Martin Luther King, Jr.] was our number-one public enemy, a native of my own Atlanta, whom the Atlanta Journal regularly accused of “inciting riot in the name of justice.” Folks in my church had their own name for him: Martin Lucifer Coon. (p. 17)

During my adolescence I attended two different churches. The first, a Baptist church with more than a thousand members, took pride in its identity as a “Bible-loving church where the folks are friendly,” and in its support of 105 foreign missionaries, whose prayer cards were pinned to a wall-sized map of the world at the rear of the sanctuary. That church was one of the main watering holes for famous evangelical speakers. I learned the Bible there. It had a loose affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination founded in 1845 when Northern abolitionists decided that slave owners were unfit to be missionaries and the Southerners separated in protest. Even Southern Baptists were too liberal for most of us, though, which is why we maintained only a loose affiliation…

After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, our church founded a private school as a haven for whites, expressly banning all black students…

The next church I attended was smaller, more fundamentalist, and more overtly racist… There I learned the theological basis for racism. The pastor taught that the Hebrew word Ham meant “burnt black,” making Noah’s son Ham the father of Negro races, and that in a curse Noah had consigned him to life as a lowly servant (Genesis 9)…

If anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the trump card of miscegenation, or mixing of the races, which some speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in Noah’s day. A single question, “Do you want your daughter bringing home a black boyfriend?” silenced all arguments about race (p. 21-23).

Many years later, Yancey attended the “burial” of this second church (“After moving to escape a changing neighborhood, the church found itself once again surrounded by African-Americans, and attendance had dwindled. In a sweet irony, it was now selling its building to an African-American congregation” (p. 4)) and reflected on the poisonous legacy of the church and how people such as Yancey’s brother turned away from the faith as a result.

Looking back over this history, it’s hard for me to imagine what “If you give an inch, they’ll take a mile; you have to fight” should even look like, because it seems to me that we’ve been fighting non-stop, with very mixed results.

Sometimes these fights are successful. Crime rates, for example, are significantly lower than they used to be — 60% lower in 2020 than in 1980. (However, the fact that this decline in crime rates can be credibly attributed to the removal of lead paint, rather than moral renewal led by the church, may shake our confidence in the church’s ability to bring moral change to the broader culture.)

Sometimes these fights are still ongoing. The June 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed federal protections around abortion rights, a decades-long goal of pro-life activists, but pro-life activists would be the first to say that we still have a very long way to go in creating a culture where abortion is unwanted, where life is consistently valued, where unborn babies and expectant mothers are protected and provided for.

Sometimes, in hindsight, these fights seem to have been misguided. I don’t hear anyone too concerned about Pokémon or playing cards nowadays, and church youth groups enjoy the occasional game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Sometimes, we may realize, like Philip Yancey, that the fight was simply wrong, that reading the Bible and professing to follow Christ is no proof against sin, and that great evil can be rationalized in the name of following God.

And sometimes, perhaps, we stop fighting too easily. Liquor usage doesn’t appear to be a front-and-center concern for many contemporary Christians, as it was in Billy Sunday’s day, but too many people can still testify to the devastation that alcoholism can cause - over 140,000 deaths in the U.S. per year, not to mention the damage done to relationships, families, jobs, finance, and health.

What would it mean to not give an inch? Looking over that list, can we say we haven’t fought enough? Did we somehow fail to let secular Americans know that we disapprove of what they’re doing? Was there some tactic or measure that we failed to employ that could have compelled culture to go our way?

Despite how it may sound, it’s not my intention to criticize these combatants. We are all, I trust, trying to faithfully follow God in a world with many temptations and snares; for me to say that “I, unlike these others, know exactly what this should look like” would be the height of arrogance. Following God sometimes means speaking out against immorality or error and standing up for the victims of injustice - in other words, fighting. The issues that we fight over often come out of a commendable and correct desire to see Christ as Lord over every aspect of our lives, to leave no activity or item unexamined. God may call believers to different battlefronts and give them passion about different causes, and I believe that God can use even misguided zeal of someone who truly seeks to follow him. Conflicts that seem unnecessary or even silly from the perspective of our current time period or setting may be more important than we realize in another. (Paul wrote that idols are nothing while also recognizing that, in the setting of the Corinthian church, eating meat offered to idols could cause Corinthian Christians real spiritual harm.)

But fighting can become a substitute for following - maybe because we become so convinced of our own rightness that we decide we can judge others, or maybe because straightforward standards of right and wrong are easier to understand and control than pursuing an infinite God whose holiness we can never live up to, or maybe because fighting obvious immorality that we personally don’t struggle with is easier than facing our own sin. Or maybe it’s simply that we’re afraid - afraid to see a society that’s changing and falling away from religion, afraid of hostility and harassment and losing cultural clout, afraid of whether our own churches and families and children will be able to remain faithful - and so we fight in the only way we know how, instead of trusting Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell will never prevail.

Because, ultimately, we do have to fight - but it’s a fight against our own sinfulness, vigorously training our own bodies rather than merely shadow-boxing (1 Cor 9:27), a struggle against spiritual forces (Eph. 6:12), an assault against the gates of hell (Mt 16:18), a battle to “snatch others from the fire” (Jude 23), as we’re watched by angels (Eph. 3:10) and cheered on by those who’ve gone before us (Heb. 12:1).

Not just an argument over Starbucks Christmas cups.