The Unavoidable Pulpit: Why the Church Must Offer a Cultural Apologetic in a Hostile Age

By Michael R. Grigsby, Editor | Somerset-Pulaski Advocate

(C) 2025 Alexander Mass / Pexels. All Rights Reserved

Somerset, Kentucky (SPA) ----The murder of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, raised an important question with which most churches are wrestling: should your minister, pastor, or church be discussing Kirk, or politics, or even, for that matter, culture in general?

     However, your church handled the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, the short answer to the broader question is unequivocal: the church absolutely must engage with culture, government, and politics. These forces exert an enormous influence over the people God has entrusted to your care. To ignore them is to fail in the duty of a faithful guide.

    The dominant ideology of many of America’s institutions, progressivism, has become increasingly hostile toward the Christian faith—questioning it, reshaping it, attacking it, and subverting it in a thousand ways. For believers to stand firm in the twenty-first century, they need strong leadership with the moral authority to speak to the issues of today. They need churches that boldly present a cultural apologetic for the Christian faith.

    While many ideologies oppose biblical Christianity, the escalating anti-Christian hostility of progressivism demands that we help our people understand and respond to it directly.

The Threat of Progressivism

     Multiple ideologies and systems threaten the Christian. Secularism has eroded the West’s capacity to comprehend the world’s spiritual landscape. Islam poses a growing challenge to Christian identity, especially in Europe, where its expansion consistently correlates with the mistreatment of Christians. Even certain streams within the American right risk subverting the faith by conflating the kingdom of God with the kingdom of man.

     Yet, in the West today, progressivism stands as the greatest rival ideology to the Christian faith. It is openly hostile, seeking not just to undermine Christianity, but to proscribe it and even punish it. Any compelling cultural apologetic must therefore address progressivism head-on.

     Progressivism, the dominant ideology of the Western left, differs from classical liberalism. Liberalism, true to its name (liber, or "free"), traditionally argued for freedom in the public square, a view famously reflected in the American Constitution’s refusal to endorse a state religion. Progressivism, however, is a more recent ideology that conglomerates grievances around two powerful social movements: cultural Marxism and the sexual revolution.

    From cultural Marxism, progressivism adopts a binary worldview that divides all of society into two groups: oppressors and the oppressed. The primary mandate in this schema is for the oppressed to seize power from their oppressors. This framework explains the left’s obsession with segmenting society into identity groups and condemning any perceived slight against them: racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, and an ever-expanding list of "phobias" and "-isms." And who is the oppressor class that must be toppled? In the progressive view, it encompasses Christians, who hold to our biblical convictions on sexuality, family, truth, and freedom.

“Progressivism seeks to undermine Christian faith—including the faith of your church members.”

     From the sexual revolution, progressivism derives its core belief in what sociologist Philip Rieff termed “expressive individualism”—the conviction that life’s purpose is to discover and express one’s authentic inner feelings. This not only dismantled the family structure in the West, unleashing a wave of poverty and mental illness, but it also destroyed the classical view that the goal of life is to be a good person, not simply to have a good life. Progressivism insists that the goal is to invent who you want to be and then demand state-supported freedom to become that person. This explains the left’s fixation on the anti-reality claims of transgenderism. These views are fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith, yet they have subverted the convictions of millions.

Progressivism is an ideological rival to the Christian faith. Progressivism knows this. Do you?

Forging a Bold Cultural Apologetic
     Presenting a cultural apologetic is deeply rooted in Christian history. When Gnosticism threatened the early church, Paul wrote Colossians, and John wrote 1 John. When Rome persecuted believers, John wrote Revelation and Augustine penned City of God. The Reformers offered a cultural apologetic against the corruption of their time.
Today, we need a similarly courageous response. Some models, however, are insufficient for our moment. Charlie Kirk did great work on the front lines, taking the argument directly into the heart of progressivism on university campuses. However, his blend of conservative politics and Christian faith is not a model for the pulpit. If you tie your church to a political party, you will be forced to defend the compromises and failures of its politicians.
     The "third way" model of Tim Keller, which studiously avoided partisanship while presenting winsomely Christian principles, had a profound and positive impact. But as Aaron Renn has insightfully argued, Keller’s winsome approach was suited for a time when America was more neutral toward Christianity. [6] In an era of aggressive progressivism, where hostility is the norm, it can appear naïve or even weak.
     We need a bolder cultural apologetic—one that preaches Christian principles as they apply to culture and government with confidence and clarity, while maintaining a prophetic distance from any political party.

A Time for Strong Moral Leadership

     Whether you mentioned Charlie Kirk from your pulpit is a matter of local context. But what is not optional is addressing the serious ideological threats your members face. They may not watch the news every night, but they know they are being called bigots for their beliefs. They know specific jobs may be off-limits to them. They know their children are being lured into sexual deviancy. They feel Western civilization unraveling, and they are looking to the church for help.

    This is our time to present a courageous, Jesus-like apologetic that defends the faith and nurtures the church. This is a time for solid cultural apologetics. This is a time for strong moral leadership that guides the people of God forward with joy and confidence.