I don't get it. . .

So it would seem that Christianity poses an existential threat to the world.  There is a growing backlash against the Church as if somehow the Church was vibrant and powerful enough to compel unwilling unbelievers to either abide by the tenets of Christianity or to convert.  At least that is how it reads.  Our society is replete with warnings about Christian nationalism, about a Christianity enforced by government and aided by law, or about the imposition of a willing faith upon unwilling people.  Except where is that happening?  Where is Christianity rising up to become the kind of social or political force that would cause liberals and progressives to issue warnings?  At least in the West?

It would seem that the Church is actually at its weakest today than ever before.  Christians do not seem to have played a pivotal role in the ruling which made abortion no longer a constitutionally protected right.  Christians seem to have lost the war against the diversity of sexual desires and gender identities which we perceive as normal.  Christians have watched as marriage has dropped in popularity and children virtually disappeared in the homes of most of us yet some are warning against the Church somehow taking away the freedoms so jealously afforded by the liberal and progressive forces in our land.  Indeed, the whole of the West seems to be on the same page in this.

But somehow those same liberal and progressive folk seem content with Islam.  According to the evidence and the state of affairs in the Middle East (though not alone), Islam appears to be the greater threat to the great American way of life but you would not know it.  Muslims have done a profound job of compelling or forcing the hand of those on the forefront of culture war yet liberal and progressive Christians have little to say in protest to this.  On the other hand, Christians are positively demonic in the eyes of the liberal West.  Who represents a greater threat to the status quo of the world?  Is it Islam with its militant repudiation of all the liberal and progressive values OR is it Christianity, which, by and large, has seemed to accommodate the secular values that it is supposed to reject?  The world has decided that Islam is a victim that needs to be protected from the big, bad Christian demon -- just like all the liberal and progressive values that Western culture holds dear.

Honestly, I wish that Christianity acted like the institutional threat it is generally seen to be by liberal and progressive Western culture.  Of course, there are pockets of threat but Christianity has hardly provided a uniform and solid front against the liberal and progressive secular culture.  Yes, I do believe that Christianity is an existential threat to the values and ideals held by secular progressivism and even the shallow and tepid Christian form of the same thing.  I just don't see how the world around us can judge us to be such a threat since so much of Christianity has capitulated to those values and positions.  That is my sadness.  I wish we were something to threaten the world with a real difference and not just a lukewarm version of ourselves.  Oddly enough, I guess, the stereotype of Christianity feared by the liberal and progressive West is actually worse than the reality.....