It's good for Christians to fight the culture war.
Why?
Because the culture war is a spiritual war.
At first glance, the culture war appears to be about things like marriage, abortion, transgenderism, free speech and national identity.
But deeper down, the culture war is actually about God. It's about the West rejecting its Christian roots. It's about our civilisation throwing off all restraint, saying no to absolutes, and repudiating God's authority over human affairs.
As James Macpherson has put it, the culture war is a subplot of the main storyline, which is the cosmic war.
Read how Psalm 2:1-3 describes the cosmic war raging around us:
Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, 'Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles.'
The culture war is a spiritual war. And in the modern West, a big part of this spiritual war is whether our civilisation will completely throw off its Christian heritage, causing us to crash and burn - or whether we will return to Christ and experience restoration and renewal.
War is a dirty word in our culture and in Christian circles. But the Bible doesn't shy away from the metaphor of war and combat. More importantly, in the Bible, God gives us the tools we need to fight this war:
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:5).
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:12).
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. (Colossians 2:8).
One of the many reasons that Christians shy away from the culture war is because of the accusation that we're somehow responsible for it.
When Australia's political powerbrokers face pushback on culture war issues, they predictably wheel out a set of well-rehearsed lines:
"Let's not get involved in the culture war."
"Australians aren't interested in US political debates."
"So-and-so is trying to import Trump's culture wars to our country."
Have you heard these lines?
Consider a recent example from South Australia's Premier.
Early last year, SA's was going to be the first parliament in the country to hold an inquiry into gender dysphoria. But Peter Malinauskas decided to withhold a conscience vote from his party, which had the effect of killing off the inquiry before it began.
The Premier's reason? "I am not too sure if a parliamentary inquiry that would be highly political in nature and that would only seek to perpetuate the culture wars is the best way to do a proper examination of medical policy."
I could give you countless similar examples from high-profile Aussie politicians, including our current PM.
What these phrases all share in common is the deceptive accusation that Christians or conservatives are the ones who started the so-called culture war, or are invested in perpetuating it.
Nothing could be further from the truth. All we did was notice the culture war and decide to push back.
Let's look at the issue of gender dysphoria in particular. The man largely responsible for starting this culture war was the American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who used data from prostitutes and pedophiles to study orgasms in children.
It was Kinsey who reframed sexuality as a spectrum rather than a male-female binary, which paved the way for all of the toxic ideas about gender spreading in our culture today.
I could tell you a lot more about Kinsey but I don't want to give you nightmares.
The point is, when we stand our ground and say sex is binary; men are not women; children are beautiful just as they are, no drugs or scalpels needed - we're not starting a culture war. We are reaffirming obvious truths that have kept our civilisation sane and stable for thousands of years.
Pedophile enablers like Alfred Kinsey and his modern-day disciples might have started this particular culture war.
May we, for the sake of Christ, be the ones who end it.