Once the world establishes that you, the Christian, don't really understand anything, it then blames you for all the things that get broken by trying to hold onto a Christian worldview in a secular society.
The church's definition of marriage between a man and a woman, and the saving of sex until marriage, is the reason everyone feels uncomfortable in their own skin.
The church's insistence on grace is why justice is having so much trouble.
It's the church's fault that young people can't function in a real society because they don't understand the most basic things about life.
The church has been blamed for electing politicians that challenge the world's narrative, thus "setting us back" decades, if not centuries, in all the "progress" we've made.
(The same book I referenced yesterday takes vicious aim at "evangelical" voters for electing Donald Trump and thus destroying the fabric of everything as we know it. But in the same breath, it also states plainly that evangelical voters make up roughly 25-30% of all voters in America and that only 81% of evangelicals actually voted for Trump. If you do the math, that means less than half of Donald Trump's votes came from evangelical voters...and yet, the church takes all the "blame" for his election.)
The church gets called out for trying to "legislate its morality" when Christian lawmakers speak, act, write, and vote on the basis of their Christian conscience. The world fails to recognize that it, too, legislates its morality - it speaks, acts, writes, and votes on the basis of its conscience, which is guided by something, even if it's not God. It has simply arbitrarily decided that whatever guides its conscience is not offensive, whereas God is highly offensive.
The church is chastised for "always looking for evidence that backs up what it already believes." But, again, the world does this, too. It ignores everything that is contrary to its own narrative and constantly seeks to back itself up. The world accuses the church of being easily duped into conspiracy theories, but if you look objectively, you'll see that the world has formed its own great big conspiracy about the church.
You'll notice this, by the way, in a lot of these books and conversations about "deconstruction" - there's nothing salvageable in the church. The church has completely destroyed those who have left it. Its ideas about the world and about humans and about morality are so backward that they, ironically, cannot be saved. There's no conversation, no voices, from those who have benefitted from the church or those who have effectively put its doctrine into a livable lifestyle.
The conversations these days have taken everything a step further, and now, we're not just seeing the "church" blamed for everything that's wrong with society, but we're seeing the "white church" blamed for it. I recently saw the "white church" named as the culprit in some kind of "war" on homosexuality, as though sexual orientation and race are so intertwined.
It's the way that our world uses language. That's all it is. It's the postmodern use of language as a weapon. It's the belief that if you say something loudly enough, with enough venom, and repeatedly over time, it makes it true. And indeed, that's what we're seeing in the hearts of those who are "deconstructing" - they have heard the world call out Christianity over and over again, and the message is so loud that they can't ignore it any more.
They start to think this world might be right about something, and they adopt this narrative that it is the church, not the world, that is broken. That it is the church, not the world, that is holding us back. That if the church would just get out of the way, we'd be a better people as a whole. And even, as the world tries to throw in there, more like Jesus. More like Jesus would want us to be.
That's the real deviousness of the whole thing. Throughout it all, the world just keeps telling us that because we hold a different morality, because we maintain a different understanding, because we hold to an inherent dignity, because we believe in certain standards of living, that we are not like Jesus at all. Then, they throw words like "love" in our face and dare us to do anything but spit.
And now, here we are.
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