What Hath Tim Keller Wrought?

Opening Announcements and Book Promotions

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We do have somewhat of a deal still running. Just to remind everyone at worldviewconversation .com, if you don't have your copy of Christianity and social justice, religions and conflict, you can get that.

You can get Social Justice Goes to Church. You can get E .D. Robles' book, Social Justice Pharisees still. All of them still on sale at worldviewconversation .com. I'll put the link in the info section for those who wanna check that out.

That's all I have for announcements. I wanna get into this. It's not a piece. It's actually a portion of a book called The Prodigal God, which was published in 2008 by Tim Keller. And the reason I'm doing this is because I saw a tweet.

And the tweet, I guess, was from 2018, so 10 years later. But it was reposted by someone very recently on, I think I, I don't really go on Twitter, but I think that's where I saw it. I think I was, I don't know why I was there, but I happened to be there and I happened to see this tweet and it was, and I thought it was recent, but it was from 2018, but it was a quote from a book, like I said, from 2008.

And the quote just, it seemed in my mind to encapsulate Tim Keller and just what, like everything that Tim Keller has said. I mean, there's been a whole book written basically against his theology by Presbyterian scholars and pastors.

And there's so many different issues in that book. And of course, I've written a chapter or an appendix in Social Justice Goes to Church, the New Left and Modern American Evangelicalism. At the end, there's an appendix on Tim Keller.

And I didn't even touch any of those issues. I talked about separate issues. There's so many. And there was this quote though. And I just thought, you know what, this like, this seems to be in my mind, probably the motivation.

And it's bigger than Tim Keller. So many people love Tim Keller, listen to Tim Keller, read Tim Keller. So many influential people in not just the Presbyterian denominations, but also in the Southern Baptist Convention and non-denominational circles, that I think this quote that I'm gonna read to you, it says so much about all kinds of things we're seeing right now.

Just think about all the issues that are controversial right now. And then listen to this quote. Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing religious people of his day.

However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people.

The licentious and liberated, or the broken and marginal, avoid the church. And that can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on the people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.

So this is the quote I saw. I think I read a little bit more than that, but it might've been an abbreviated quote. It started off with how Jesus attracted the irreligious people and offended the Bible-believing people, and then, we have a problem today because our churches don't do that.

And we're not having the same effect as Jesus, therefore, we're doing it all wrong. And I looked at this quote, and I just thought, that's so much of what we see. It is a fear of attracting the wrong kind of people.

There's a fashion, a style, an image that we want to generate about. And when I say we, I probably shouldn't say we. There's an image that a lot of American pastors want to generate about themselves and their church that sometimes isn't accurate.

And if, usually, it's not, but if it is, it's saying to the world, it's a message directed at people in the world that we're cool, we are not prudes. We are very relatable people who live the same kind of life you do, except we are happier than you because we have Jesus, that kind of thing, right?

And some of this is probably familiar to the seeker-sensitive movement that preceded the social justice movement. And maybe the shoe fits in that. But I just sense that a lot of the motivation behind it, you think of Tim Keller right now, the hermeneutical spiral, right?

The way that he interprets scripture, what he got from Harvey Kahn, which is abysmal. It's just, it's subjective. It's not a grammatical historical hermeneutic. His social justice stance, what Tim Keller believes about white privilege and how he thought that he had it when he was confronted by Elword Ellis as a seminarian, and how he now promotes the same kinds of things.

He promotes Michel Foucault. He promotes James Cone. He promotes some of their teaching. I'm not saying everything they've said, but he promotes aspects of their teaching, which to be honest, especially with James Cone, are heretical.

He promotes, I mean, he's on camera talking about, if you're born white, it's worth a million dollars. And his book, Generous Justice, right? The whole premise of that book being that you need to engage in some kind of a social justice type thing.

And if you don't, it's really, you're not being authentic to your Christianity. And there's so many things that I could just ramble on about with Tim Keller. His softening of the doctrine of hell. The way he even talks about sin in such a soft way of brokenness.

And just, he takes the personal responsibility so oftentimes out of it and speaks about it in a way that makes it sound like we're the victims of our circumstances. And to some extent, look, sin causes victimhood.

We're victims and culprits, right? In many ways. But when it comes to the sin in our own hearts that we're responsible for, we're culprits. We're not victims. So Keller has a way even of talking about truth, where he softens it.

Anything that the world is doing or that the world wants or believes, he tends to want to appeal to them in some way. That's my perception of Tim Keller. And I've read a numerous number of his books, listened to a number of his sermons, read a number of his sermons.

This is the sense I get from Tim Keller. He's on this mission to try to appeal to those people. And he knows he's gotta soften some things in the Bible. And he's also got to open up certain concepts in the Bible to now include and sort of pack into Bible verses concepts that aren't there that the people in the world will like.

And so he does this to make it more palatable, I think. That's what I see. He does these kinds of things and that's the effect it has, to make it more palatable to people in the world. And if they think for a moment, I'll give you one example of this.

If they think that Christianity is somehow bigoted or offensive, then he does sort of, some people call it the fortune cookie thing, right? Tim Keller has this fortune cookie, like, oh, let me give you a wise sayings that you have to take three Advil to understand sometimes and try to figure out.

But he does this kind of like intellectual thing where he tries to explain how you're misunderstanding Christianity. And then he represents it in what appears to be the more authentic version. You believe the fake version, the pharisaical version of Christianity.

Let me give you the authentic version and you'll like that. And the example I was gonna give is the years ago, he had this, I think it was Martin Bashir, asked him about homosexuality, whether it was a sin.

And it takes Tim Keller like, what is it? 10 minutes or something to answer the question in this roundabout way. And that's where he says, and J .D. Greer has quoted him, I think, that heterosexuality doesn't send you to heaven.

So homosexuality can't send you to hell. And so he does these little mind games things you don't see in scripture. He can't just answer the question straight with here's what the Bible says. He's gotta do this kind of this soft peddling, this making it palatable thing.

And that's what I see encapsulated in this paragraph from his book, The Prodigal God. This is before he wrote Generous Justice, I believe. This is before he wrote Every Good Endeavor. This is a book that really, I think, put him on the map with a lot of people, made him very popular in evangelicalism in general.

And I'm just saying, even as far back as when he first started, because some people have said, well, he's gone off the rails in the last few years. No, you can see seeds of this going back a long ways.

And certainly I think you see it in this book, The Prodigal God. And so what's wrong with what he said, right? This is what I wanna get to. What's wrong with it? Doesn't that sound good? Isn't he right about Jesus?

So I want to put this in context because if it was one tweet, we could analyze it, but it wouldn't be fair in my mind because he said a lot more than just that one tweet. I wanna get the full spectrum, if we can, of what he said.

The Older Brother and Younger Brother Framework

So we're gonna read through just this section, why people like Jesus, but not the church. That's the section in The Prodigal God, why people like Jesus, but not the church. Both older brothers, he says, and younger brothers are with us today in the same society and often in the very same family.

Frequently, and by the way, I'm the oldest sibling. So maybe I'm biased with my analysis. Just my social location prejudices me against the younger and middle siblings. Anyway, frequently the oldest sibling in a family is the parent pleaser, the responsible one who obeys the parental standards.

The younger sibling tends to be the rebel, a free spirit who prefers the company admiration of peers. The first child grows up, takes a conventional job, and settles down near mom and dad, while the younger sibling goes off to live in a hip-shady neighborhood of New York and Los Angeles.

Funny enough, I am the oldest, but I did live in Los Angeles for a short period of time. For the last four years, I have not been home, quote-unquote, near my parents. My brothers, though, have pretty much, they have been for most of their lives at home, or in the region of being near, in the same vicinity as my parents.

So I guess maybe I break that stereotype a bit, but maybe this is true. Maybe to some extent, older siblings do do this. I don't know. But he says that that's his stereotype. And he says, these natural temperamental differences have been accentuated in more recent times.

In the early 19th century, industrialization gave rise to a new middle class, the bourgeois, which sought legitimacy through an ethic of hard work and moral rectitude. In response to perceived bourgeois hypocrisy and rigidity, communities of bohemians arose, from Henry Merger's 1840s Paris to the Bloomsbury Group of London, the beats of Greenwich Village and indie rock scenes of the day.

Bohemians stress freedom from convention and personal autonomy. So you get a little cultural here, right? I think people feel smart sometimes. Even Tim Keller's, the level at which he writes is probably lower high school, I would think.

But he has a lot of references that he puts out there, pop culture references, philosophical references. And I think where he is in New York City, I think that's appealing to some people. There's a sense in which, this is just a totally offhanded remark, but I get this sense when I've listened to his sermons that it's like, people are like, ooh, like that's, you know, he's talking about, you know, Foucault, and it's really philosophical.

You can't get this preaching just anywhere, right? To some degree, he says the so-called culture wars are playing out these same conflicting, actually, and I'll stop, I'll interrupt myself. I'm gonna read that again.

It's like a TED Talk. It's like a TED Talk, that's the thought I had, when the way Tim Keller preaches and the references he makes is very similar to a TED Talk. Anyway, to some degree, the so-called culture wars are playing out these same conflicting temperaments and impulses in modern society.

Now, why does he say the so-called? Like there's real culture wars. In 2008, there were real culture wars. Marriage was even being fought over in 2008. I don't know why he calls it the so-called culture wars, but it's almost like it's there, it's beneath us.

It's fake, it's what ignorant people maybe, I don't know. It's what certain demographics think is happening, but really, you know, is it really a culture war? Maybe our, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know why he calls it that.

More and more people today consider themselves non-religious or even anti-religious. They believe moral issues are highly complex and are suspicious of any individuals or institutions that claim moral authority over the lives of others.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the rise of the secular spirit, there has been considerable growth in conservative Orthodox religious movements, alarmed by what they perceive as an onslaught of moral relativism.

Many have organized to take back the culture and take as dim a view of younger brothers as the Pharisees did. Now, listen to what he's doing here. It's in 2008, Tim Keller's doing this. He sets up, there's an older brother and there's a younger brother and they're different, right?

There's probably positive qualities and negative qualities with both, but they're just different. It's a personality thing. And then he's injecting the villain. The villain is the church who, they side with the older brother, the responsible one who takes care of mom and dad and doesn't go off to LA or New York and run around with friends and live like the devil.

And they look down, they judge that. And that's what the religious people are trying to do. They're trying to judge that. They're afraid of moral relativism. So they think the problem is represented in the younger brother personality.

And so this personality, it's just an inhibition. It's just the way someone's wired. It's the result, it's determined by the rank or the sequence in which they were born. It's something amoral, but they make it a moral issue.

They say that that's the problem, right? See how he's setting this up. All right, this is cunning in my mind, the way that he's framing this and getting people to think about it. So now you're gonna think of like religious people who have moral standards, they're judging something that's determined.

That's not even really a moral issue. They're going after personality. It's bigoted ignorance. That's the insinuation here. It is hard for us to realize this today. But when Christianity first arose in the world, it was not called a religion.

It was a non-religion. Imagine, so this is what he's doing now. Hey, for those who think of Christianity in this, now that you're realizing I'm with you, I also look at these religious people and I think, man, they're intolerant, tight wads.

They're just narrow-minded, not seeing the full spectrum of personality and flavor and diversity God's created. And so they wanna just constrain things so everyone's an older brother. They want this cookie cutter.

This is how we're supposed to be, okay? So now you have that image in your head that that's what conservative Christians are who are involved in the culture wars, right? So who are opposing homosexual marriage and abortion and whatever immorality, pornography, all these kinds of things.

You have this image, this negative image of them now as you're reading this. And now he's introducing you to the pure authentic Christianity. He's making a contrast. He's saying, hold on, this is what we have today in the church, but back in the day, back in the first century, the real authentic, true, pure, new Christianity was not even, people didn't even think it was a religion.

They didn't view, the image you have, no one thought of that when they thought of Christianity. They just thought of Christianity as this non-religion. In fact, it's more like today's secularism is probably what you're gonna draw from this.

Oh, you know, real Christianity is closer to today's secularism than it is to what calls itself Christianity today. So he's setting up a moral posturing and he's putting himself, he's kind of with the crowd who's going, they're actually the ones judging.

They're judging these conservative Christians who wanna be involved in the culture wars, quote unquote, the so-called, he says, culture wars. And he wants to condemn them. And then while condemning them, do a little sleight of hand like the magician would do and pull the bunny out and say, but look, we still have Christianity.

So he's gonna save Christianity, I think. I think that's really the motive of the people following Tim Keller too often, that they wanna save Christianity. We're gonna have Christianity, but we're gonna reimagine it.

It's gonna be totally different than what you think of it. And we're gonna go back to the authentic Christianity. So what is the authentic Christianity? Well, it's imagine the neighbors of early Christians asking them about their faith.

Where's your temple? They'd ask, and the Christians would reply that they didn't have a temple, but how could that be? Where do your priests labor? The Christians would have replied that they didn't have priests, but the neighbors would have sputtered, where are the sacrifices made to please your gods?

The Christians would have responded to that. They did not make sacrifices anymore. Jesus himself was the temple to end all temples, the priest to end all priests and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

Now this all sounds good, but let's be honest. There's real answers to some of this stuff. Where do you worship, right? He says, where's your temple? Okay, we don't have a temple, but you could say our bodies are the temple for the Holy Spirit.

Or you could say that actually there, we do have a place we meet. It's over there at Philemon's house. We're meeting over there. And Tim Keller probably wouldn't wanna mention that there's a guy named Onesimus that Philemon and him get along now because they're brother and sister in Christ.

And they happen to have a slave master relationship, but you don't tell the people that. That would cause problems. Don't tell them that all the leaders in the churches are male as well. The people that have elder authority or are apostles.

Don't tell them that either. This is, see, so there's all the kinds of things, hangups that the world has with the church. Tim Keller tries to sidestep some of those. And then he tries to make the case that actually the things that evoke a negative response from worldly people today about religion and the bad experiences they may or may not have had or what they've seen on TV that tells them religion's bad or Christianity's bad in particular.

He's trying to show them that that's even, pure Christianity though isn't that. It's not a religion, it's a relationship, right? But he's saying it in a more way, sophisticated way. And I don't even know if actually maybe he doesn't get to the relationship part.

He's at least saying it's not a religion, really. But they would have had answers to some of this. Hey, we worship over there at Philemon's house. They would have said, you're a priest. Well, we don't have priests, but Jesus is our high priest.

But we do have a hierarchy. We do have leadership. We do have apostles. Hey, Paul was just here. This is what he said, this is what he preached on. We had a guy fall out of the window and die. I mean, and Paul raised him back.

They could say these things. So, you know, why aren't you making sacrifices? We make sacrifices all the time, but it's not to, our bodies are the living sacrifice. We live in such a way to obey God. And the final, the sacrifice that pays for our sins, that puts us into a right relationship with God is the one Christ did.

So there's answers to this. But he's making it out like Christians just, it's unlike anything in the ancient world. Well, yeah, there are differences, but look, they still met, they still had a place.

They still had leaders. They still had hierarchy. They still had rituals they did and these kinds of things. It was a religion, okay? It still is a religion in the purest sense of the term religion. They fed orphans, they clothed or they clothed orphans.

They visited widows in their distress. It's a religion, okay? It's more than that, but it is a religion. No one had ever heard anything, Tim Keller says, like this. So the Romans called them atheists because what the Christians were saying about spirituality was unique and could not be classified with the other religions of the world.

Now, hold on, we'll stop right there. Think Acts 17, Paul's on Mars Hill. What's the hangup for them? What are they saying? Wow, we've never heard of this before. The resurrection, that's the hangup. The gospel is foolishness to Greeks.

He's identifying the wrong thing here. He's saying they were out of step with the Romans because they weren't religious. That's not why they were out of step with the Romans. They were out of step with the Romans because of the actual teachings of their religion.

He said, this parable explains why they were absolutely right to call them atheists. So the Romans, so the common slander against the Christians was that they were atheists and that they had incest and homosexuality at their love feasts.

And there were all kinds of things like this. Cannibalism was something that they were accused of, but they would not make the sacrifice to Caesar. So the other religions, most of them at least, if not all, they could have their gods and then they could also make the sacrifice to Caesar.

The Christians said, no, there's only one God. And because the other religions had such a pantheon of gods that it was to the polytheists, it looked like they're atheists. They don't even have a statue to their God.

So identify that. Where's the idol to your God? We don't have an idol, but the Jews didn't either. So it's not unique for the reasons or it's not limited to the reasons that Tim Keller thinks Christianity was unique.

And he's totally skipping over the real reasons that they were in conflict with the Romans or it was a unique thing for the Romans to see. The irony of this should not be lost on us. Tim Keller says, standing as we do in the midst of the modern culture wars, to most people in our society, Christianity is religion and moralism.

The only alternative to it, besides some other world religion, is pluralistic secularism. But from the beginning, it was not so. Christianity was recognized as tertium quid, something else entirely. Now I'd have to look that up.

I don't know, tertium quid. It must mean something else entirely, I guess. In Latin, I think. The crucial point here is that, you see, I feel smart now that I pronounced that. The crucial point here is that in general, religiously observant people were offended by Jesus, but those estranged from religious and moral observance were intrigued and attracted to him.

We see this throughout the New Testament accounts of Jesus' life. In every case where Jesus meets a religious person and a sexual outcast, as in Luke 7, or a religious person and a racial... So Luke 7, I think, is the healing of...

Actually, let me look it up. I think he heals the centurion's child in Luke 7. Religious person and racial outcasts is in John 3 -4. So John 3 is Nicodemus. John 4 would be the woman at the well. Or a religious person and a political outcast, he says, as in Luke 19, which would be Zacchaeus.

The outcast is the one who connects with Jesus and the elder brother type does not. Now, let's stop here for a moment. He jumps from, hey, look, early Christianity, out of step with the Romans, and guess what?

It attracted kind of these marginalized outcasts, right? Don't you feel like you're an outcast from the church? You would be attracted to the real Christianity. And the thing is, though, there were wealthy members of the church, the early church.

There were, in fact, I mean, even look at Paul, who trained under Gamaliel, Pharisee of Pharisees, right? Is he an older brother or a younger brother in this? I mean, God called people from all kinds of every tribe, tongue, nation, but also different strata of society and socioeconomic backgrounds.

That's what you see in the early church. And so I don't know that that dog hunts, but then he tries to say, well, it's just like Jesus, right? Jesus was like this too. The religious people didn't like him, but you know what the outcasts did.

And the thing is that he brings up John 3 and 4. John 3 is all Nicodemus. And later on, we find out that Nicodemus helps Joseph of Arimathea bury Jesus and donates a lot to that effort. He would be considered religious.

I mean, I don't know how else. He would be a religious person. He would have been a wealthy person, a person that certainly drew within the lines. And yet, I don't know. I don't know if he's trying to imply here that Jesus didn't connect with the elder brother types or they didn't connect with him.

The outcast is the one who connects with Jesus and the elder brother type does not. Well, wouldn't Nicodemus be the elder brother type in this? So yeah, there's examples certainly of the Samaritans, gospel going to the Samaritans.

There's examples of him. But look, even at the things he says though sometimes when Gentiles are around. Hey, I wasn't sent to you guys. Hey, you don't feed the children's food to the dogs. I mean, he says stuff like this.

Tom Keller's not mentioning that. So his primary mission was to the lost house of Israel. But yes, he's foreshadowing and he's showing that there's a new covenant and that his ministry is extending out to Gentiles as well.

And they're reaping the benefits of this, which is the fulfillment of the promise in Genesis, that the seed that would bless the nations of the world. And so Tim Keller's trying to make that whole thing like Jesus is on the fringes, Jesus is on the edges.

He's not with the tightwad religious goody two-shoes types. Jesus says to the respectable religious leaders, Tim Keller says, the tax collectors and the prostitutes enter the kingdom before you. Now, who did he say that to in Matthew 21?

It was it to, yeah, okay. Respected religious leaders, yeah. But we're talking about scribes and Pharisees. We're talking about people who were self-righteous. We're talking about people who were legalists, who rejected him, rejected the gospel, rejected biblical teaching for the sake of what?

Their own tradition. It wasn't that they were holding so tightly to the Bible. They were holding tightly to their own traditions that had replaced the Bible. That's who he's correcting. So the image that you get in your mind after reading this from Tim Keller is that it's the people fighting the culture wars.

Those politically conservative Christians who are afraid of post-modernism and homosexuality and all of that. They're the ones that are just like the Pharisees. Now, that is a comparison. And I'm telling you, isn't that what you, when you read this or listen to this, isn't that the comparison you draw?

That is kind of disgusting in my mind, that people trying to uphold civil morality, cultural morality, are now just the prudes that are compared to Pharisees. Are there people that are fighting the culture wars who are Pharisees?

Yeah, of course. And I see a whole lot more of them, I think, that are fighting the social justice battle. I mean, that's the whole point of A .D. Robles' book, "'Social Justice Pharisees.". You can go in the link in the info section and order it or get it from A .D.

He offers it as well, I'm sure. That's the whole point of my book when I talk about the social justice gospel. I have a whole chapter of that in Christianity and social justice. And I just show these guys are Pharisees.

They're taking their social justice-derived law, merging it with the gospel, calling it the gospel. It's false teaching. That's a concern I have. And yeah, I mean, I'm concerned about legalists too that think that they're maybe political conservatism as part of the gospel.

I just don't meet people like that much. I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm just saying that those categories are usually not confused. And yeah, I'm sure there's conservative, politically conservative churches out there that are doing this.

But Tim Keller is operating on stereotypes here. He is trying to paint with broad brushes and create a black and white. Here's the conservative, politically conservative Christians over here fighting the culture wars, and they're the Pharisees.

And this is a tactic he's using. And he's used it so much. He uses it all the time. This is the whole, I'm not right, I'm not left, I'm a Christian, as if that actually communicates anything. So the good news of the gospel is that God saves people from all sins, including pride and including, yes, the prostitutes and the tax collectors, stealing and adultery and fornication, all of them.

God saves from all those things. Why can't you, why can't we just say that? He saves people from all social strata and the sins that they may be part of. He saves conservatives politically, saves even progressives politically.

But I guarantee you, if a progressive is gonna get saved, some things are gonna start changing. If they're politically, in this environment especially, they're politically progressive and they believe some immoral things.

I'm talking like Democratic Party platform. That's what I'm talking about here. They believe that. Yeah, God can, God will save them. He can and he does. They're gonna change though. Let's keep going.

Jesus, the Church, and the Culture Wars

Jesus, okay, so here's where we get into the quote that I read initially. This is the whole, so I read you, this is the whole context. And then we get to this. Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing religious people of his day.

Well, that justifies J .D. Greer and Tim Keller when they offend the conservatives in their own denominations. They feel justified. They're hitting the mark. They're being like Jesus, right? However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect.

Now, this was in 2008. I wonder if today he'd still say that. Probably would, but so churches that aren't, that are, if your church is not offending Bible-believing religious people, then you're in the wrong.

That's, we gotta start offending Bible-believing people and attracting worldly people. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones.

We tend to draw a conservative button-down moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church, that can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on the people that Jesus had, then we must be declaring the same message that, not be declaring the same message Jesus did.

Our churches aren't appealing to younger brothers. They must be more full of elder brothers than we'd like to think. So what he's saying here is that he's questioning their legitimacy as a church. You must not be on point.

You must not be sharing the gospel. You must not be, whatever your message is, if that's what you're, if you're not offending religious people, Bible-believing people, he says, social or people who are fighting the culture wars, that wanna, if you're not offending those anti-abortion and anti-transgender people, right?

You're doing it wrong. And you should be attracting the people who are not part of churches, who are secular, who are the younger brothers, who, I guess, according to Keller, they leave their families and they go run off with peer groups in major cities.

You gotta attract those people. Why? What's wrong with a pastor, let's say, yeah, I was just in a place, Grant, Nebraska, right? All these, pick Grant, Nebraska, out of a hat here. 1 ,200 people in Grant, Nebraska.

Things don't change probably a lot in Grant, Nebraska. People are farmers in Grant, Nebraska. The people who work in town would be supporting that industry. There's one grocery store. The community knows each other.

They get together for things. What would be wrong with someone who grows up in Grant, Nebraska and just says, I'm gonna live the way my parents lived? Same way, I'm gonna farm. I'm gonna dress pretty much the same way.

I'm gonna go to church. I'm gonna keep those traditions that they passed down to me and we're gonna follow the law of God here. And I'm gonna live my rest of my life in Grant, Nebraska. What would be wrong with that?

Is there sin there? You're attracting the people in your town. You're not going to New York City and finding the runaways who are worldly to come. Now you're open to them coming, but you're not tailoring your message to attract them.

So you mainly have traditional Bible-believing people who would be conservative against the progressive tendencies in the quote-unquote culture wars. And now, according to Tim Keller, you'd have to just go offend them.

And if you're not offending them, your message is off. You can see how this would split up churches. But it justifies those who wanna attract a certain demographic. And it's like fishing with a lure and you're only, I wanna just catch largemouth bass.

I don't care about the trout. I don't care about the sunfish. I don't care, just largemouth bass. Meanwhile, you could be using a lure called the gospel that attracts every tongue, tribe, and nation. That's one of the big problems with this.

Evangelical Drift and the People Who Want Stability

And so in this context, I wanna show you all something. See if I can pull this up. This is from the Pew Research Center. And I want you to think about maybe the possibility of this being a lost opportunity.

More white Americans adopted than shed evangelical label during Trump presidency, especially his supporters. September 15th, 2021, Pew Research Center put this out. Number one, there is no mass departure of white Americans from evangelical Protestantism between 2016 and 2020.

So there's this myth going around. I guess it's a myth according to them that evangelicals, it's just Trump destroyed evangelicalism. There's a mass departure. And it's saying, no, that's not really the case.

And it's saying white Americans aren't doing that. It says between 2016 and 2020, white Americans with warm views towards Trump were far more likely, so more likely than those with less favorable views of the former president to begin identifying as born again evangelical Protestants.

In other words, they didn't call themselves that. Since Trump, they've started calling themselves that. There is no clear evidence that white evangelicals who oppose Trump were more likely than Trump supporters to leave the evangelical fold.

Interesting. Trump garnered even more support in 2020 than in 2016 among white voters who identified as evangelical Protestant in both years and voted in at least one of the two elections. Number five, the share of non-white U .S. adults who abandoned the born again evangelical label in recent years is offset by the share who adopted it.

So the people who did leave, right, who get a lot of press, doesn't really matter. More numbers came in of people who want to be evangelical than who left during the Trump years. It's just like throws a wrench in everything the progressive evangelicals keep saying.

Now, why do I bring this up in the context of this Keller piece? The reason I bring it up is this. What about those people? Think about it. Why do you think they are identifying as evangelical? They're seeing their culture get destroyed.