This week, I had a conversation with a Christian leader who explained to me that Christians need to avoid getting involved in “culture wars” and “politics”, and just focus on being nice and loving everyone. “Just love everybody” he assured me. “What’s the point of being divisive?” So, I thought it might be a good idea to review what happens to Christians in countries that follow his advice.

Read this article from The Public Discourse. The article just came out this week, and it’s written by Dr. Päivi Räsänen, a member of the Finnish parliament.

She writes:

I have been a member of the Finnish Parliament for twenty-nine years. During that time, I have witnessed a dramatic change in the value system undergirding our modern society. From the protection of life to the defense of marriage, the changes we are living through are undeniable, with far-reaching implications for us all. And it’s evident that the general atmosphere toward Christianity grows increasingly hostile every day. Only ten years ago, I could not have imagined that I would soon be summoned to my country’s Supreme Court to defend my religious convictions.

“Has somebody occupied Finland?” My six-year-old grandson asked me this in June 2019 when he saw a giant rainbow flag, the biggest we had seen to date, flying over our home city of Riihimäki, Finland. At that same time, the majority church of our country, the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church, officially published its support of a Helsinki “pride” event, which disappointed and shocked many (including me).

Before our very eyes, the church was assuming a position contrary to its own confession that God designed marriage for one man and one woman. If the authority of God’s Word is undermined, the question becomes not only about marriage or gender, but also about the path to salvation and eternal life. Every person, including the LGBT community, has the right to hear the whole truth of God’s Word. While I briefly considered leaving my church, I was convinced that it was better to stay aboard and try to wake up those who had fallen asleep, not jump out of a sinking boat.

This was why I wrote a tweet, in which I directed a question to my church leadership. I wanted to exercise my basic right to free speech to publicly ask how they reconciled their activities with biblical teaching. The main content of my post was a photo of verses 24–27 of Romans Chapter 1, where the Apostle Paul teaches that homosexual relations are sinful. A citizen filed a criminal complaint in response to my tweet, and more complaints quickly followed.

These complaints resulted in eighteen months of police investigation and thirteen hours of interrogations. As a former government minister, sitting parliamentarian, and grandmother, I found the situation unreal. Just a few years before, I had been in charge of the police as Minister of Interior, and now I was sitting in the police station being interrogated, with the Bible on the table in front of me.

And it goes on.

I can’t possibly quote enough of her post to tell you all you need to know. All I want to say is that I’ve been watching how people are responding to Megan Basham’s book. On Twitter, a lot of Megan’s attention recently has been focused on J. D. Greear – a pious pastor who is always trying to be nuanced, sounding good to Democrats, and watering down the Bible’s teachings so he can be popular and well-liked. For pastors like this, Christianity is primarily a vehicle for signaling virtue. They talk about the parts that make people like them, they affirm non-Christians in their rebellion against God. To them, Christianity is not about being faithful, or being an ambassador. It’s not about self-sacrificial obedience at all.

Since Christianity is so easy for these “don’t judge” and “just love everyone” pastors, they have no idea what happens to people who tell the truth (with evidence) about things like abortion, socialism, atheism, feminism, Darwinism, LGBT, etc. They can’t understand it. How could God allow anything unhappy to happen to people who “just love everyone” they wonder.

I brought up the case of Bill Dembski to one of these people recently. Dembski advocated for intelligent design, and was thrown out of Baylor University, because they were committed to naturalistic Darwinism. He said “Dembski got what was coming to him. He wasn’t collegial enough with his Darwinian colleagues”. They don’t think of people who take a hit to their reputations or careers to stay faithful as heroes. They don’t understand them. “Why would you even talk about origins?” they wonder. “Why not just say happy things, instead of knowledge things?”

Anyway, I don’t want any of my readers to be this naive about what happens if we listen to these virtue-signaling pastors at election time. If you let the secular left become the government, then you will lose your liberty to even make a case against the secular left on controversial issues. How do you stop the secular left from becoming the government? You learn how to make an evidential case for the truth claims of the Bible that will be convincing to people who won’t believe the Bible, but will believe the evidence. Even Jesus told people who didn’t believe his words to believe his works. That’s our model.

Whatever it is that the secular left is talking about: global warming socialism, radical feminist misandry, abortion and infanticide, LGBT, etc. you have to be ready with convincing evidence from outside the Bible to convince them that Christian position on these issues is reasonable. Otherwise, they will think we are irrational idiots and trample over our rights. We have to get to work, and step one is to stop listening to people like J. D. Greear, Russell Moore, David French, and the like. They are not interested in providing evidence to non-Christians, and advocating for free speech and religious liberty. They are out for their own happiness and popularity.