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America has entered into a time of increasing social and political conflict, and that conflict is only going to grow worse because it ultimately flows from an underlying foundational identity crisis which itself only seems to be growing worse.
Christian conservatives in America have had difficulty understanding and engaging in this social and political conflict because we’ve failed to recognize that at its root, it’s a conflict over the question of foundational human identity:
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Who/what are we?
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We’ve been down this road before, but we have a hard time recognizing this modern manifestation because we just don’t think much in terms of our foundational identity anymore. We’ve forgotten how astonishingly important it is.
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But oddly enough, by coming out in favor of the legalization of same sex marriage, President Barack Obama may have inadvertently done us a favor. He may have provided just the focus we need in order to see the foundational identity crisis and how it’s coming our direction in a way the founders would have never guessed:
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It’s an odd thing, but a conflict over marriage could set in motion the political divorce of the United States.
Our identity conflict is sending us in the direction of The War of the Roses:
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Unlike the climax of that film, we don’t have to end up dead on the floor. We may be able to save this marriage.
And in that saving we may also be able to go a long way toward restoring robust freedom and self-government to the United States.
But in order to pull that off, Christians are going to need to begin looking at our conflict through the foundational identity lens of image bearing. We’re going to have to bring that idea back in style:
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While far from perfect, Western civilization has brought more economic prosperity, more scientific and technological advancement, more political freedom, and more concern for human rights and equality than any other civilization in history. And all of this was based on a biblical worldview which believed that human beings are made in the image of God and thus have both the potential to understand the physical universe and an inherent dignity and worth that cannot be taken away.
We have already largely lost the idea of the image of God in Western culture, leaving us with a free-floating conception of human rights devoid of any overarching framework to support these rights.
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If we are to recover the promise of the West, we must recover the core ideas and values of the culture, beginning with the critical elements of the biblical worldview we have lost. …. [T]he key idea is the recovery of a fully formed appreciation of the image of God shared by all people. When Western Civilization embraced a robust vision of the image of God, we had our greatest successes; when we ignored it, we had our greatest failures.
Dr. Glenn Sunshine,Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home(Zondervan, 2009)
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Are the lights going out or coming on?
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This is a work-in-progress, and we’d welcome your insights.
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Contact
Dave Schneider
[email protected]
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