Dr. Albert Mohler Warns Kirk Cameron of ‘Combined Effort To Displace And Replace Christianity’
By Movieguide® Contributor
In a new episode of TAKEAWAYS, Kirk Cameron and Dr. Albert Mohler discuss how Christian values are being displaced in today’s society.
“It’s a massive change and shift in the culture,” Mohler said. “Not just over selected issues but at the basic level.”
He explained that his new book’s title, “The Gathering Storm,” is an homage to Winston Churchill, who, before World War II, pointed out that world leaders were ignoring the signs signaling the threat of Nazi Germany.
“I think Christians are in danger of doing the same thing right now,” Mohler explained. “I think the biggest problem is they failed to see it as a sustained, comprehensive, foundational attack…they don’t understand that this is actually a combined effort to displace Christianity and replace Christianity in this culture with something very, very different.”
He explained that “the modern age” has brought “an enormous challenge” to Christianity but added that he has confidence that faith will prevail.
“A lot of Christians are waking up,” Mohler said. “At the deeper level, Christians just have to understand that our civilizational project is very, very different than that that’s being undertaken by our neighbors.”
Mohler has talked about this issue before, telling The New York Times “Guardrails” podcast that “secularization” has changed our culture.
“Secularization, just sociologically defined, is the decline of the influence of religion, but in the case of the United States, of historic Christian theism in the culture,” he explained. “And so that means that the message preached by evangelical Christians and other Orthodox communities of faith is more out of step with the direction of the culture than would have been the case in the 1950s. In the 1950s, the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention and the leadership of the United States and Congress or corporate America or all of us would have been seen as part of the same world. That’s not so much the case now, I think we just have to say, honestly.”
In another interview with Ligonier, Mohler said many churches have “failed to understand” that “Christians in the twenty-first century are being thrown into a world in which just a little bit of Bible knowledge is simply not going to be enough.”
“Simply having positive fellowship and nurturing experiences in the church and in the Christian family will not be enough,” he explained. “The church must prepare people to be able to think Christianly in a world where the intellectual rules have fundamentally changed. They are going to have to learn to be faithful in terms of everyday decision-making, in terms of profound moral questioning, and in terms of political, economic, and cultural issues.”
“It is not that the church needs to be constantly talking about the culture; rather, it is that with the cultural challenge around us, we need to be talking more and more about the Bible and coming to a deeper understanding of the Scriptures,” Mohler concluded.