‘The darkness hates the light’: Why Christians must persevere in the public sphere

While a majority of Americans identify as Christians, many of them have been misled to believe in a version of Christianity that is not biblical — for fear of how they’d be treated in the public square.

“We are told over and over again that if you, as not just a Christian, but a conservative Christian, bring your worldview into the public square, into politics, if you allow what you believe about the Bible to influence your politics, you are a fascist, you are a dictator, you’re trying to bring in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ you are a Christian nationalist,” Allie Beth Stuckey tells author and apologist Natasha Crain on “Relatable.”

However, the opposite is true for progressives.

“If you’re a progressive that uses some decontextualized Bible verse to support your immigration policy or your abortion policy or your socialistic policy, that’s not Christian nationalism, that’s fine, that’s true, good Christianity,” Stuckey continues.

“It’s only when a Christian might say, ‘Well, you know, Psalm 139 makes it pretty clear that babies inside the womb are valuable or made by God, so I don’t think that it should be legal to murder them,’ all of a sudden that is prohibited in a form of tyranny,” she adds.

“I think Christians get very confused on this because we see that there’s so many different ideas out there of what is good. People start saying that what we believe is harmful and toxic and that we’re misogynous and we’re oppressors,” Crain says. “We have all these insults that are hurled at us because of our ideas about the common good.”

“What the world calls good may be evil, and what the world calls evil may be good,” she adds, noting that many Christians get dissuaded from preaching what they believe is good because others don’t like them for it.

“Jesus said, ‘If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own,’” Crain says. “So he was warning his disciples before they went out on mission. He didn’t give them warm and fuzzies and say, ‘Hey, this is going to be great.’”

“He actually gave an explanation for why they would be hated by saying, ‘If you were of the world,’ and to be ‘of the world’ literally means to be under the governing rule of Satan. Scripture is very clear that you are either of Satan or of God. You’re a child of Satan or a child of God,” she continues.

“Those who are children of Satan, they want to go their own way. It’s their own wills, their own desires. They are slaves to sin. And people who are slaves to sin are always going to hate those who are slaves to righteousness, who are children of God, because the darkness hates the light,” she adds.

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