Conservative Christians often say that the left and the culture hate the church, pointing to fierce opposition to Christian positions on abortion, so-called same-sex marriage, and the transgender lie. That is only half the story. The left loves the church when it is co-opted for leftist ends. The screeching starts when the church grows a backbone. That is what happened after a small-town conference in Tennessee.
On September 26, Kairos Christian Alliance hosted its first annual Muscular Christianity Conference in Cookeville, Tennessee. Featuring speakers such as Dr. David Schrock of Christ Over All, Offensive Christianity author J. Chase Davis, and The Federalist’s very own Sean Davis, the gathering was not a gym session or a branding exercise. It treated the church as a public institution that must form men with spines, name the sins of the age, and refuse to surrender the public square. I was there as one of the speakers.
In response, jeers and insults poured in from the left and even from some who still call themselves conservative. Critics called the conference “a safe space for men who think empathy lowers testosterone” and the “Department of Unintentional Satire.” Even Erick Erickson, who still claims the conservative label, reduced the whole thing to a joke and asked for the speakers’ “deadlift weights.”
These critics are caught off guard by a church that names sin and enters the public square as the problem. A weak and winsome church would be welcomed, flattered, and left alone.
They prefer the church to remain spiritual so long as it stays private and therapeutically nice. They want a church that confuses niceness with love and baptizes the sexual revolution, mass migration, the erasure of sex, and the hollowing out of the family.
An Inside Job
A church full of “men with chests,” as C. S. Lewis put it, is a threat. The church that recovers its spine on abortion, marriage, children, nation, and the moral law is a rival authority. This is why they resort to mockery. Ridicule is cheaper than an argument. This is also why the left opts for institutional capture. They enter as subversives and take over from the inside, weakening the opponent so the fight never has to be honest.
We have seen this pattern play out over and over again since the 1920s. J. Gresham Machen confronted the rise of leftist subversion in his 1923 book Christianity and Liberalism, predicting with near-perfect accuracy the effects of modernism and public-school indoctrination on new generations of Christians.
In the ’60s and ’70s, the fruits of this slow drip of liberalism culminated in mainline churches abandoning their stance on biblical inerrancy, trading textual criticism for orthodoxy and orthodoxy for cultural relevance. The ’90s and early 2000s brought the “seeker-sensitive” movement, which downplayed sin and the need for repentance and brought a soft, inoffensive gospel centered only on grace with no room for truth.
These are the conditions that brought us lesbian pastors, churches promoting drag shows, and Christian charities being used to support mass migration into the United States. These are also the conditions that the Muscular Christianity conference confronted head-on.
Throughout the day, speakers gave the crowd warnings on the rise of paganism and Islam in the United States while also presenting the doctrines and tools to confront these and other social ills. Panel discussions focused on confronting evil, promoting the gospel, ordering loves properly, and even the importance of getting involved in local politics. I spoke on the importance of remaining positive and rejecting despair, encouraging others to build a better nation for their children and grandchildren. J. Chase Davis encouraged the crowd to live offensively, not watering down the truth of God’s Word or shrinking from the battles ahead of us. Sean Davis called for a courageous church to rise before joining a closing panel with Kenny Cody, J. Chase Davis, and Joshua Abbotoy on how to build a better future.
So-called conservative detractors may call these things a distraction from the gospel, but these are centered at the very heart of the gospel itself. When the Church as an institution grows a backbone, the demons screech, and “men without chests” would rather stop the screeching than fight the battles in front of us.
The Culture War is for the Gospel
The question is not whether Christians will be accused of fighting a culture war. They will. The question is whether they will fight the one already being waged against their households, or call that fight a distraction and go back to sleep.
The claim that this fight distracts from the gospel only works if the gospel is an inner-life exemption from creation. It is not. Christ is Lord of the world He made, not chaplain of a private mood. As Abraham Kuyper put it, there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, “Mine!” That includes the household, the school, the law, the nation, the bodies He created male and female, and the public square. The same Lord who saves sinners commanded His people to love their neighbors as themselves. That command does not stop at the sanctuary door.
Love of neighbor is more than sentiment. It means refusing to hand children to a sexual revolution that cannot define a woman. It means refusing to treat the unborn as a medical inconvenience. It means refusing to pretend that a nation can dissolve its people, its language, its moral law, and its heritage and still call the result compassion. A church that will not say those things is not “just preaching Jesus.” It is preaching a smaller Christ, who never interferes and never calls anyone to repent.
If that gospel does not teach a man to protect his neighbor from the lies devouring the neighbor’s children, it is not the gospel that made the West and it is not the gospel that will renew the church. The culture war is not a distraction from love. It is one of the forms love takes when the people you are commanded to love are under assault.
Muscular Christianity is not gym theater, and it is not contempt. It is a church that tells the truth from the pulpit, forms households that can absorb cost, and refuses to serve as chaplain to the regime. The mockery will continue. That is the receipt that the church is no longer harmless. Count the cost anyway. Proclaim Christ’s lordship in every sphere. Love your family and your neighbor enough to fight the wolves. The people who liked you better when you were quiet are not the ones you answer to.
