Culture WAR! Who gets to decide the culture of a nation?
I was a teenage culture warrior. I grew up in a fairly conservative social group that believed that the root of the nation's problems was moral depravity. We needed to bring prayer back to school, protect our guns, and make abortion illegal again. I sat in more than one Sunday school class where the teacher drew two parallel lines moving in the downward direction. The higher line was “The Church” - followers of Jesus. The lower line was “the world”. We were then admonished to keep God’s standards as written rather than settling for being just a little bit more righteous than those around us. The world was going to hell in a handbasket, and it was my responsibility to preserve and honor the values my parents taught me. Righteousness was under attack, and it was my duty as a priesthood holder to defend righteousness on a societal level. The primary cultural conflict of my teen and young adult years was marriage rights for “the gays”. I was an enthusiastic cultural warrior who tirele...