Christians Engaging the Culture

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

RICHARD LAND: Dr. Mohler welcome to For Faith & Family.

AL MOHLER: Dr. Land, it’s great to be with you.

LAND: What do you think is the most important issue that you talked about in your book?

MOHLER: You know that’s probably not an issue from a bullet point list like abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage; it is rather the big question of how Christians should engage the culture and that is where I want to go back to, I think, the fact that Jesus gave us two very important principles: Love of God and love of neighbor. That what we should do should be framed first of all by the fact that whatever we buy, whatever we do, however we vote, however we buy, and all the rest should be guided by love of God and the fact that God should receive all the glory. How will God be most glorified? And then we realized that God did, and you put this, well, make us social creatures. He’s given us neighbors. Jesus was very clear that anyone we meet is our neighbor, and our responsibility is to try to make these decisions and to negotiate our way in this culture in such a way that not only honors God, but also shows our love for fellow human beings.

LAND: Well, absolutely. There is so much to this mentality. There is just a huge pietistic strain in our faith tradition.

MOHLER: Absolutely.

LAND: Which is just, in my opinion, off the mark, and out of sync with Jesus’ command to be the “salt” of the earth and to be the “light” of the world. If you are going to be salt, you’ve got to touch that which you are going to preserve and He says, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father, which is in heaven.”

MOHLER: Yes, just so that folks will understand what we are talking about here, when we talk about this kind of piety, we’re not opposed to piety, which is the right relationship with God and a devotional life; it’s just that we’re opposed to suggesting that we ought to hang around only with the pious.

LAND: And that we should go into a holding pattern after we have become believers until it is time to go on up and be with Jesus.

MOHLER: As if the world doesn’t matter.

LAND: That’s right. The world does matter, the world mattered to the Lord, and God intends for us to be engaged with the world, and I think this is one of the reasons that we have become so susceptible to impact from the culture, is that we have lost the primacy of fellowship in our churches. You know, the Bible tells us that we are not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is, because you and I, individually, can never be all that the Lord wants us to be apart from regular worship and regular fellowship with fellow believers in a local church, because they have gifts that God has given them to minister to us and we have gifts that God wants us to minister to them, and it is only together that we can begin to plumb the depths and scale the heights and embrace the breadth of all that God intends for us in this life.

MOHLER: Absolutely. You know, there is another very tangible aspect to that that a lot of Christians just underestimate and that is that every one of us has a certain frame of reference that is important to us. We have what some of the psychologists call an accountability frame, and that is, we worry about every decision we make. We consider our choices and how we negotiate in this culture on the basis that some group we value will either be pleased or displeased by what we do. One of the most important reasons why the church is important for Christians is because the people we ought to be most concerned not to disappoint and think us unfaithful ought to be fellow believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, and if we are not regularly in fellowship with them, then our intuitions, our perceptions, and, ultimately our actions and choices, are likely to be made more in terms of what we perceive to be an accountability to a secular authority rather than to the Lord Jesus Christ as He ministers through his people in the church.

LAND: I want to switch subjects on you, Dr. Mohler. I know you hear this all the time, I hear it all the time. Well, you’ve got to expand your agenda beyond this narrow focus on life issues and marriage. And, of course, my response to that is, that’s like criticizing Dr. King for being focused on the issue of racial justice and racial reconciliation. He had other issues he was concerned about, but he understood you had to keep the main thing the main thing. It’s like asking an abolitionist to broaden his agenda beyond abolition. Explain to our listeners why the life issue, for instance, touches all the other issues with which we deal, and even including the environment.

MOHLER: There were several thoughts about that; I really appreciate the way you frame the question, Richard. You know, when someone says to me, we need to broaden the agenda, my statement is, I’m sure you’re right, not one of us ever has the complete list of things we ought to be concerned about. That’s gets back to why we need to be in a local church and all the rest, but what really frustrates me is the dishonesty implicit in so many people saying that because what they mean is, I want to exchange your priorities for another set of priorities and they’re just being dishonest about that. For instance, I had someone say to me today, just in an e-mail, you need to broaden beyond abortion, same-sex marriage, and homosexuality to other agendas and stop talking about that. Well, if you’re broadening, you’re not stopping talking about that, you’re simply starting also to talk about other things. Yet, the second real reality for us is that every single human being has a hierarchy of concerns. We can’t be equally concerned about everything all at once. That would be irrational. I believe that if you do not have a basic understanding of human dignity and the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of the institution of marriage, you are simply not going to get anything else right, and that no fundamental recovery can take place on anything from the educational crisis to poverty to racial justice to the environment until we understand that the environment is important only for the glory of God and for the habitation of human beings as the stewards of the earth.

LAND: Let’s hunker down on the environment for a second. You listen to a lot of the environmental gurus today and it is almost as if human beings are the enemy of the earth. If we could just eliminate the human beings, it would be okay.

MOHLER: The human footprint.

LAND: That’s right. God created the creation for human habitation.

MOHLER: And said dominion over it, also stewardship.

LAND: That’s right.

MOHLER: We will give an answer for our use of this but we are to use it and to God’s glory. Richard, you know this idea of broadening agenda. I just have to tell you an anecdote because you live in the media so much as do I. One of the interesting things that really reveals us going on there happened to me just a few weeks ago. I got a call from a reporter, big name, in one of the national newspapers and he started asking me about same-sex marriage. After about five minutes of grilling me on same-sex marriage, “Now I want to ask you a question. Why is this all you guys talk about?” And I said, “Let me remind you of something. I didn’t call you this morning and interrupt your day to talk about same-sex marriage, you called me, you asked me these questions,” and, I must admit, he did laugh, he did recognize he had been caught on this one and he was very gracious about it. He said, “Alright, fair enough”. I said, “If you asked me about global warming, you are going to get a lot on global warming and what I believe about the stewardship of the planet and all the rest, but that’s not what you asked me about.” So, a part of this is just a matter of perception. People keep saying, “Well you conservative evangelicals only talk about this.” Well, guilty as charged. We see this as a matter of grave tremendous incalculable importance. We are going to talk about it, but also, we do care about many other issues but that’s not what the media is asking us about.

LAND: And a lot of those issues are directly related. I mean, you talk about basic mega ethical issues. How is man and why art thou mindful of him?

MOHLER: And how are we to live?

LAND: And what is God’s basic building block for human society? Those are pretty basic questions.

MOHLER: I should say so. And, again, that’s why if you don’t get the marriage question right, you can’t possibly get the poverty question right and so, you want to add poverty to the list, yes, but I’m just going to hold you accountable as we add poverty to the list to the fact that you can’t talk about poverty without talking about marriage, no matter much you want to try.

LAND: And, how do you eliminate or reduce poverty? It depends on what you believe about man. If you believe what the Bible says about man, at least a modified capitalist system is going to be the system that is going to alleviate the most poverty. People say, well we have to care about the rest of the poor world. Okay. What parts of the poor world are getting richer? South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, those are countries that have adopted a capitalist system and they are the ones that are eliminating poverty and generating wealth for their people. Brazil, those are the countries that are doing it and so we have to, at some point in time, ask the question what works.

MOHLER: You know at the recent Dallas meeting, and there are very few delights I heard out of that, but one of them was a representative from the third world who had listened to this thing about why the third world doesn’t need free markets and why the third world doesn’t need all these things, and he said, “Why don’t you ask us what we want in the undeveloped world? We want to be developed.” And so, it is Western liberals who often, in a very paternalistic way, want to say, “We know what you need, you want the wrong things. You don’t really want clean vegetables in a supermarket, what you want is local food grown organically.” And I’m not saying it can only be one or the other. I am saying that we really have to watch the kind of elitism, the kind of paternalism that creeps into Western thought.

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