Marshall – Today’s society on nearly every front is an assault on Christianity, whether it is allowing crime to go unpunished, pushing Christians out of employment because of their beliefs, destruction of the family, watering down the church’s long-held beliefs, erasing history, or the attack on childhood by the education system.
In his 2020 book, “We Will Not Be Silenced,” Erwin W. Lutzer, pastor emeritus of the Moody Church, addresses what the church’s response should be to the culture’s assault on Christianity.
In his 280-page book, Lutzer first explains how we reached this point in America. He says it starts with Marxism ideology used to destroy the nuclear family and using Marxism victimhood to say the working class has been victimized by the rich. He talks about Margret Sanger advancing the agenda, along with the help of willing dupes in the media.
He talks about rewriting the past to control the future. Lutzer references the prophetic book 1984 by George Orwell as a reference for things we see today, like the censoring of content on social media by big tech and the government and government-approved entities as the source of truth. He talks about the effort to erase our history by destroying monuments instead of learning from our past and how our nation’s founding fathers are condemned as racist and not seen as a product of their times, all in order to denounce western civilization.
He says people like Saul Alinsky use diversity to divide and destroy the country. He says that Alinsky would ask why the community organizers joined him. When they answered to help the poor and oppressed, he would scream, “No, to gain power.” Lutzer explains these groups don’t work to solve problems but to exacerbate them. White guilt is not used to point out inequalities in order to solve these and work together, but to pit the race against one another in order to keep us fighting one another. The Woke culture is meant to do the same thing. All the while selling it as a just cause.
Lutzer tells how speech is being used to control the narrative either by changing the speech, censoring the speech, or canceling those who won’t fall in line with the new speech guidelines. These people who won’t follow the new speech guidelines can not be tolerated. Thus, the approval by professors, members of the media, and woke students to shout down anyone they disagree with while refusing to debate rationally, all the while allowing anything anti-Christian forces might want to say.
There is a whole chapter about selling these things as a noble cause. In Orwell’s 1984, the slogan of Oceania (the fictional country in the book) is “War is peace; freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” Lutzer recounts visiting several of Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps, described as freedom camps where the gates bore the slogan, “Work sets you free.”
He then addresses how children are being sexualized by the internet, culture, and now the public school system. He addresses the influence of LGBTQ+ in the classroom starting in kindergarten. He also talks about the trans movement in the school to reject parents’ concerns in favor of the woke agenda of the culture in helping to confuse more those students with gender dysphoria.
Lutzer details how capitalism is being taught as the disease and socialism is the cure, as Carl Marx’s ideology is espoused by liberal professors no longer teaching how to think but what to think. How evil capitalism is, even though it has lifted more people out of poverty and has caused the borders of the United States to be overrun by those who long to join this capitalistic system.
He believes these forces are joining with radical Islam to destroy America and that people who believe in traditional patriotic values are being vilified.
He ends each chapter of the book with a prayer. He also offers hope to the church by waking up to what is happening and strengthening what remains.