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The best explanation, as usual, comes from the best source of moral authority, the Word of God. In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, he writes:

“Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who create dissensions and obstacles contrary to the teaching that you learned. Avoid them! For these are the kind who do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By their smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of the naive.” ~ Romans 16:17-18

The original may also be translated, “Note those who cause divisions and offenses, contrary to the doctrine which you learned”.

It is not authentic Christians who are being offensive or divisive. It is not Bible-believers who soberly object to mixing false religions like aboriginal animism with true Christian doctrine who create obstacles to the Gospel.

While people who hold fast to the Biblical definition of marriage, the biological meaning of sex/gender and the unpolluted preaching of the Gospel are accused by people in the world of being “divisive”, it is those who deceive whom Paul identifies as the cause of polarisation.

The enormously hateful, dangerous thing about liberal, progressive “Christians” is they deceive naive and innocent people into thinking they’re Christians, people who are not at all willing to call Jesus Lord and submit their will to His. Their churches are full of false converts.

But don’t just take my word for it.

I know how I sound with those dramatic pronouncements to those who may never have considered the problems with “easy believism” and “seeker-friendly” churches. Those shepherds who lead “attraction model” churches may indeed be true converts and sincere in their motives, but the spiritual and cultural carnage of suppressing the Truth of our doctrines is even being noticed in the world.

Listen to what Kirsten Powers, a New York Times best-selling author, left-wing columnist and on-air political analyst at CNN, had to say about attending one of the most popular churches in New York.

“I entered Tim Keller’s church, Redeemer Presbyterian, as a fairly committed atheist. I had long ago dispatched with my Episcopalian upbringing and other than the boyfriend who brought me to church, there were very few religious people in my Manhattan friend group, which consisted primarily of people working in or dedicated to Democratic politics.

Sunday was for brunch, not church.

A year later, I was all in with Christianity. And not just any Christianity — I had signed up for Tim Keller’s brand of evangelical Christianity, or at least what I thought was Tim Keller’s brand of evangelicalism.

“It was his focus on the eternal issues of life — of issues of meaning — that really hooked me. Nowhere else was anybody I knew talking about these things in the way that Tim was. He illustrated his points through philosophy, art, pop culture and yes, the Bible. But it was a Bible I had never been introduced to, despite attending church and Sunday school every weekend of my childhood. He brought it alive and showed how it was actually relevant to my life.

So why are my feelings complicated?

Ultimately, evangelicalism ended up being quite harmful to me and to many people I care about, and I can’t imagine I would ever have signed up for it but for Tim’s expert apologetics.

When I say I signed up for Tim Keller’s brand of evangelicalism, I mean I signed up for what I heard from the pulpit, which never included teaching about homosexuality or abortion being a sin or men being the head of the family. But as I became more involved in the church, I learned that these were in fact core teachings. It was more through peer pressure than any sermons that I started to conform to teachings that left me feeling unsettled and confused.

Slowly, I lost myself as I attempted to conform to a theology that had the effect of disempowering me and alienating me from myself and many important people in my life. I am not alone in my experience. But many people who leave evangelicalism (and really it’s white evangelicalism for the most part) end up defining themselves in opposition to the world they left. They bring the same religious fervor once marshaled in favor of evangelical theology and deploy it to demonize their former faith community. It’s still a paradigm of good versus evil, only now the evangelicals or believers in general are the evil ones.”

Miss Powers was, apparently, a false convert. She was never presented with the unapologetic Lordship of Jesus Christ over every area of her life and this world. She was deliberately denied the violent confrontation of the Gospel with the culture.

Instead, she believed in a false god – a woke Jesus – who scratched her itch for something more spiritual than materialism, but not uncomfortable; something which allowed her to claim to understand the Bible – while rejecting its absolute moral authority, especially where it didn’t accommodate her progressive worldview.

She wanted something more tolerant and inclusive.

Instead of what Jesus preached: a narrow gate and a difficult, unpopular Way which leads to life everlasting, her church tried vainly to make her “Christian” by pretending the gate is wide (inclusive) and the way is broad (tolerant). Of course that would be popular, but Jesus taught that way leads to destruction.

“Enter by the narrow gate;
for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction,
and there are many who go in by it.
Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life,
and there are few who find it.”
~ Matthew 7:13-14

Filling our churches with false converts to bolster numbers and the appearance of church growth is a tempting alternative to the Biblical model of discipleship. But the gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher weren’t for notches in a belt. Sunday morning church service isn’t for evangelism by trying to make church “nice” enough that people will realise Christians are cool. These gifts were given for discipleship.

“And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head — Christ — from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.” ~ Ephesians 4:11-16

Counterfeit Gospel

Unity can only be achieved in the Truth. Preaching and teaching and overseeing the Truth in a congregation is what protects against the winds of doctrine, the trickery of men and deceitful agendas. Spiritual childishness is the result of limp-wristed, effeminate shepherding which makes room for conformity to the world. It is divisive.

“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” ~ Romans 12:2

It’s spitefully hateful to suppress the Truth in vain efforts to make the Gospel less offensive. Worse, it’s a terrible testimony and witness that leads many to leave the faith, having been sold a counterfeit, woke gospel.

Kirsten Powers, again:

“Long story short, it was an evangelical church that sought to be “seeker friendly.” They led with the good stuff: Jesus was an immigrant; a radical when it came to treating women equally and a champion of the downtrodden. It was an intellectually stimulating format, including sermons that were laced with poetry, art references, philosophy and pop culture.

“Invariably, the people running seeker movements hide what they actually believe. They focus on the things that will draw people in, and that ironically ultimately play a tiny if not nonexistent role in informing their lives or how the church runs. Once the person is embedded in the community and totally bought into a specific version of Christianity, the real beliefs are casually mentioned like they’ve been saying this all along. It can make you feel like you are losing your mind. The nature of becoming involved in a church community like this is intimate — so there is lots of trauma bonding and vulnerability, such that by the time you realize that this is not for you, it feels almost impossible to leave.

If the day I walked into that Upper East Side church service the pastor had given a sermon calling homosexuality a sin or said that women should submit to their husbands, I would have gotten up and walked out. I only learned that these were core teachings after I had been attending a year and a half and was in too deep. Abortion was never addressed from the pulpit (at least to my knowledge), but once I started asking, I found the church community fairly homogeneous in its anti-abortion beliefs, a view that the pastor expressed publicly many years after I left the church.

“In fact, one of the reasons I was so surprised when I traversed deeper into the theology was that the people in the church frequently made a point of distinguishing their brand of evangelicalism from what they saw as the intolerant, unsophisticated, overly politicized brand of evangelicals outside of major metro areas.”

That’s right. It’s the progressive Christians – those Christians who appoint themselves as some kind of “tone police” for people like me whose doctrines and policies they cannot coherently critique, Christians who claim to be removing obstacles to the Gospel – it is they who unrepentant sinners label as disingenuous, opaque and secretive.

It is those folks, some of whom may be well-meaning, who the Apostle Paul describes as offering smooth talk and flattery (affirmation) in Romans 16.

It is every Christian’s duty to win souls to Christ, not the preacher’s alone in Sunday morning services. It is there, in church, where believers should be exposed to application of the Word of God to the “winds of doctrine” and “trickery of men” being pumped into their ears every other hour of the week.

The great revivalist Charles Finney preached:

“If there is a decay of conscience, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the public press lacks moral discernment, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the church is degenerate and worldly, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the world loses its interest in Christianity, the pulpit is responsible for it. If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it. If our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it.”

It is unconscionable that a person could go years in church without hearing the Gospel confront the culture, especially on the hottest contested, most important public issues.

French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville studied American democracy at great length and observed:

“I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there; in her fertile fields and boundless prairies, and it was not there; in her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there.

Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

Our nation — in fact, all Western nations — is struggling in our legislatures and even our courts with the mind-numbingly stupid question, “What is a woman?“

Yet come election time, how many regular churchgoers will hear pulpits aflame with righteous anger over the obscene oppression and butchery of our children, demonically labelled “affirmative care”?

How many pulpits have thundered with prophetic outrage at recent votes by politicians to deny children born alive after failed abortions, even basic human rights afforded every other citizen born here?

How many pastors, prophets, teachers and evangelists have demonstrated their loving, resolute opposition to syncretism with the animism, spiritism, pantheism and occultism of many indigenous populations?

Progressive Christians – false Christians, often in leadership of denominations and ministries – will invalidly attempt to equate policies about the climate, refugees and poverty with the moral emergency of 100,000 Australians being industrially slaughtered in sterile, private abortion clinics.

There is no moral equivalence.

There is a growing polarisation of society, and it is not coincidentally growing with the suppression of Truth and pride in sin. We are divided by false doctrines and suppression of the Truth, and only a craven coward will dilute the Truth to please a human audience.

I cannot be united with deceivers and deluders. I am deliberately polarised: attracted to the True North of Christianity, and perpetually repelled by conformity to the world. I labour to please an Audience of One.

Whatever you want to call the enemies of the Gospel, there is a clear divide, and if your position is not clear to everyone who hears you, you are part of the problem. But you can become part of the solution, the answer a lost world desperately needs today.

For the sake of Australia’s unity in Truth, for the love of our neighbours: it’s time to repent, reform our religion, be transformed instead of conformed to the world, and preach the unadulterated Gospel of Christ and live the Scripture: I am not ashamed!