The greatest cultural””and ecclesial””challenge we have to confront is the loss of a palpable sense that God’s life makes all the difference in the world to our social and political decisions. Many things have made this witness more and more difficult in our era, and they touch the wider world as much as they do local American concerns. That witness ought to be First Things’ focus.
I am not as certain as R. R. Reno is, for instance, that theological liberalism has lost “decisively.” To be sure, what was once called “liberal Protestantism” as a set of vital institutions has been withering rapidly, and with it some of the most common tropes these institutions generated.
But many of the corrosive aspects of liberal Protestantism””its ways of conceptualizing God as a benign projection of our human hopes, for example, and of approaching Scripture as a malleable human or cultural construct””have been adopted not only by mainstream secular culture but by “conservatives” and “Evangelicals” across the board, as the rapid shift in American attitudes regarding sexuality demonstrates.