Whenever somebody mentions Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, what do you imagine? Likely, your thoughts drift to the painting’s infamous stoic expression or its mysterious legacy. What you probably don’t think about is the thick bulletproof glass that sits between the Mona Lisa and art gallery patrons. Vandals have attempted to distort the portrait by throwing acid, rocks and red paint at the portrait for centuries. So the world’s most famous work of art must be protected.
Our broken world constantly tries to vandalize famously cherished works, so why would we expect God’s valued work of art to be any different? Like the defensive glass in an art gallery, Scripture too must be protected from those who are twisting its contents and damaging its legacy.
As you might have heard, there is a “millennial problem” within the church. Religion analysts, pundits and preachers alike are struggling to grasp why young adults raised in evangelical—Pentecostal, charismatic, Baptist and nondenominational—churches are departing from the Christian faith at rapid rates. Simultaneously, Christians are watching with shock and horror as the state of America’s morality and foundational Judeo-Christian principles follow the trend of descent.
As a millennial myself and public-policy analyst, I can tell you first-hand that the action needed to fix both problems cannot be found digging into complex data, hazy statistics or even lobbying our representatives’ offices in Washington, D.C. For too long, Christian culture warriors have been so focused on vandals’ threats to our faith from secular society that we failed to notice the damage being done from within our own evangelical community.
It is painful to admit, but within many evangelical churches, campus ministries, and even Christian universities, believers let our guard down. And so, the Christian Left crept in quietly championing liberalism and feeding a damaged and distorted version of the gospel to young evangelicals.
As I explain in greater detail in my new book Distortion: How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging the Faith, the Christian Left must dismantle the authority of God’s Word before it can convince young evangelicals that same-sex marriage, abortion, taxpayer-funded abortifacients, feminism, pacifism, Christian discrimination, and the expansion of a federal nanny state are biblically endorsed.
To do this, the Christian Left typically starts by excluding mentions of “sin,” “hell” and “transformation” from their sermons, lectures or Sunday school lessons. This way, the need to address and turn away from immorality is intentionally avoided. Next, they incite confusion in millennials’ minds regarding the clarity of Scripture. Some among the Christian Left will point to Levitical law outlined in the Old Testament and say that because we do not follow these laws in the Bible, then all Christians may cherry-pick their principles. Therefore, according to the Christian Left, followers of Christ don’t have to adhere to everything outlined in the New Testament either. Finally, the Christian Left has dismantled the Word of God so much that they have concocted their own cafeteria-style Christianity; that is, taking parts of the Bible out of context so that it fits their own liberal political activism.
