Abortion is unique among the “social” political issues in that a strong argument can be made against it without appealing to any particular religion. But the traditional tactics of the Christian Right in fighting Abortion - often ignoring this advantage and long reeking of the liberation theology that Pope Benedict recently condemned - suddenly seem questionable when cast in the light of the long-term effect on the Church.

Psalm 139:13-14 is a great rallying cry among believers for unborn rights, but picketing the Supreme Court with Exodus 20:13 signs is counterproductive. Christians cannot bank on a majority in America forever, and when the balance tips, any legislation passed on the basis of religious appeal will be just as easily turned back. If we are to make a lasting impact on abortion, poverty, discrimination, or any other social justice movement through legislation, we must recognize that the Church’s job is to meet the needy on an individual level, not to influence government on their behalf. Thus if Christian individuals feel led to make a difference in this manner, we must encounter the world on its own territory.

But the Church may not stand idle in an abortion-friendly legal environment. While individuals within and outside of the Church acting on their own behalf work the government, the Church itself needs to meet women facing abortion on an individual level. Pregnancy support centers exist all across America, and I believe it is every congregation’s and every Christian’s moral responsibility to support them. The battle of the Church is after all not for the culture or the legal environment, but for the individual souls of the people at this crossroads.

I am not a fan of hip hop. The appeal of that entire subculture remains a mystery to me. Yet Linkin Park, by shunning a “gangster” image even early on was able to get me hooked on (some of) their catchy fusions of hip hop with alternative rock, a genre in which I was somewhat more comfortable.

Their latest album, Minutes To Midnight, is a huge break - stylistically as well as thematically - from their previous two albums. The songs are more contemplative and less “noisy” for the sake of heaviness, and they’ve ditched their “troubled child” image (which at times seemed almost as ridiculous as the gangster image) in favor of something no less angry, but more respectable in its focus - not towards their immediate emotional discomfort, but to more far reaching problems in the human condition.

Though they promised at the album’s onset that they were moving past the nu-metal/rap-rock, rapping is hardly absent. One of the more interesting moments on the album was Bleed It Out, a rap song with a rock chorus set to a square dance beat. Hands Held High was another high point - a long and cynical, yet oddly inspiring rap ballad performed over the background of an organ and picked guitar.

The heaviness of previous albums is matched only in one song - No More Sorrow - a Falscher Heiland-esque spout of anger against a deceptive leader. More common is the sound of their single What I’ve Done - a milder (but hardly soft) rock infused not with full-fledged rap, but occasionally sounds and scratches still somewhat reminiscent of their hip-hop roots.

The album certainly has its low points - non-standout tracks like Given Up and Leave Out All The Rest, for example - but I think this is a promising new direction for Linkin Park - with another album or two like this they could conceivably shake off completely the angsty shackles of their first two.

For all the talk by and about the “Christian Right” as a political force in modern America, one should be inevitably drawn to question their very premise: Should Christians intentionally affect worldly governments, and what would be the ultimate goal of their action?

This article is the conclusion in specific terms of Saving The Church, which in a nutshell warned against the Church operating on the terms of the world and sinking to its level. But there is another danger to political involvement, and that is making culture operate on our terms. Thinking of political action in the light of long-term goals brings to light a mindset that sounds almost ridiculous when verbally stated, yet drives so much legislation: A land governed by Biblical principles will be more conducive to Great Commission activity. The “Protect the kids” line of reasoning is a much more popular and vocalized subset of it.

Yet even the idea of protecting the children proves counterproductive to Great Commission work. Protecting secular children from homosexuality in the culture, to use a hot-button example, or even instilling within them that it is for whatever reason wrong, does them no good without the Gospel. In fact, such a saturation of Christianity in the media and government may produce the exact opposite effect: an inoculation against the Gospel. If the idea (not necessarily the content) of Christ is drilled into the mass culture, as we see even now in incredibly large numbers, people close themselves off to hearing anything new - or, perhaps even more dangerous, falsely consider themselves Christians.

Protecting our own Christian children from cultural debauchery by legislation then is often simply an excuse for lazy parenting. Yet even if a child is diligently sheltered from worldly influences, whether by the government or by parents, that child must have some idea before leaving home of what’s out there and how to fight it in order to be an effective agent of change. Complete shelter is counterproductive for the very reason that when the influence is inevitably encountered, the child has no idea how to react or counter it.

Christians are defined by being different from the established cultural order. Our ultimate goal is to take people out of the culture - which is more a mindset than a group of people - not conform the culture to ourselves. Just as we cannot succumb to culture in our efforts, as was the warning in the prequel article, we cannot drag culture kicking and screaming to us. Though the culture itself ends up in dramatically different places in each of these situations, the end result is the same: the Church is no different from its surrounding culture. Jesus “did not come to call the righteous, but sinners”. If the culture becomes pure in our eyes, then what is there to convert from?

The Christian Right’s sociopolitical strategy is akin to treating the symptoms of a disease rather than the disease itself. Treating the symptoms gives the illusion of wellness, even if the patient consciously believes what the doctor says is true. Yet beneath the surface, the disease is still as deadly as ever. If they do succeed politically, the inoculation of America will be total and irreversible.

There seems to be a general feeling in some levels of theological Academia (or at least those represented by the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine) that the postmodern era has allowed the church to relax against some of the heresies of the enlightenment engendered by its singularly rational mindset - that a postmodern culture is inherently more friendly to the Christian church by virtue of being pluralist or relativist. From what I’ve seen, however, it doesn’t look like the church is in any better shape now than it was during the enlightenment, for several reasons that I’m surprised aren’t more publicized.

The Enlightenment period was by no means a walk in the park for the Church. The World at that point learned what Newt Gingrich calls Framing the Debate: It’s not important to win or lose an argument - what’s important is being the one to define the terms of the debate, and this is what determines the winner and loser. The Church in the Enlightenment era let the World define the terms of religious debate: deductive reasoning as the final authority. In Enlightenment thought, reason was the one absolute truth - what one can perceive and the conclusions one can draw from that. Several prominent theologians of that time even tried to prove the existence of the Christian God through these manners - by personal revelation and feeling, for example, or by natural observation and general revelation. Yet the specifics of the god deduced from these generalities always came up short: for the former, what if one does not “feel” God at a certain moment? And for the latter, deducing a God from science can affirm only the vaguest conception of God. The defining religion of the Enlightenment was in fact Deism, in which God created the world but does not interfere with it at all. These arguments for God may have been logical and may have arrived at the desired conclusion, but by submitting themselves to the World’s terms - by looking at the world and arriving at scripture from that rather than the other way around - they lost the debate before it had even begun.

Postmodernism with its plurality of voices - none necessarily “reasonable” in the Enlightenment sense of the word - then gives the Church the opportunity to frame its own debate, the Cambridge argument goes. Yet below even this seemingly benign concession that reason is not necessarily the end-all-be-all lies exactly the same sort of debate-frame as before in much subtler form: the one rule of postmodern pluralism-relativism is coexistence and coequality of ideas. Any idea, especially religious, (provided it isn’t completely out of the realm of reality, i.e., the Greek pantheon, though the ludicrous is becoming increasingly acceptable: the Flying Spaghetti Monster cult could be considered as much of a satire on religious pluralism as it is on Intelligent Design theory) is not only entitled to respect, it is entitled to be correct in its own domain. While this shields the Church from some degree of outside attack, bringing the Gospel to the world becomes that much more difficult - a trade I’m not sure was entirely advantageous in the long run. The importance of the question of religion has been diminished from a problem of eternal destiny to one of cultural expression or personal choice, even in the minds of believers who begin to doubt the imperative of the Great Commission.

By rising to the challenge of framing the debate itself, the Church opens itself back to renewed attacks from without, a challenge that postmodern pluralism-relativism has left us ill-prepared to accept. Yet if anything, a renewed core of the Christian church would shake off the complacency of those set in a view of religion as inconsequential - something that must happen eventually if there is ever to be mass-affect by the people of God on this Earth again.