The Western Churches these days have by and large outsourced their main callings to other institutions, mainly governments at various levels.
What do I mean by this? Put simply, churches no longer teach morality and the importance of obeying God but instead focus on salvation and God’s grace. If the subject of sin is brought up in a sermon, it is usually treated as a way to celebrate the forgiveness of God through the sacrifice and resurrection of His Son Jesus.
This is a wildly narcissistic view of Christianity as it absolves most people of their sins, mainly women, while at the same time alienating potential congregates who are looking for a fatherly church community, not a motherly one.
And yes, this does split along sex differences. Generally, women don’t like to be told that they are sinners. Even in more traditional churches which teach the importance of submission, women tend to group themselves into the holier-than-thou cliques. If a woman is caught behaving in a degenerate way, she is ostracized from the group.
Men, on the other hand, crave certainty in the world. We tend to be the ones concerned with stable moral codes and ethics which do not fluctuate based on their emotional whims. This is probably why it is easier for men to hear that they are sinners because we tend to be more concrete in our beliefs and moral ideologies than women.
Of course, this is not to say that men are superior to women when it comes to being righteous but I will say that it is very rare for God to raise up a woman as a prophetess in the Old Testament and that there were no Apostles of the female persuasion.
Why am I highlighting sex differences when I started talking about churches no longer teaching morality? Quite simply, it has to do with the fact that women are the primary focus of the church these days.
Sure a pastor can go to the pulpit on Father’s Day and bash men for not fulfilling their primary role as husband and father to the families they supposedly have abandoned. But that same pastor cannot stand on the pulpit and tell women not to divorce their husbands, despite the fact that divorces are primarily initiated by women and not men.
He cannot say that women should stay with their husbands no matter what, that their oath to God, which was made on their wedding day, had no loopholes nor escape clauses. That the husband was not responsible for her emotional state and that she should, as the Bible dictates, submit to his authority.
Because to say such things in a sermon means the end of his flock. I would not be surprised if people literally got up and walked out seconds after hearing such things.
But feminism and the pandering to womenfolk is not the only reason for the failure of churches to be the moral beacons of society these days. There is the fact that 501c3 organizations cannot engage in political discourse.
For example, a church cannot take a moral stand against abortion unless they wish to be audited by the IRS. And yes, that has happened in the past and will probably happen again.
On top of that, there are many laws on the books which criminalize sin. Now, I have no problem with laws dictating how to handle criminals, such as murderers, thieves, etc., but at the same time, we are using the law to punish adulterers, drug-users, prostitutes, and gamblers.
We are taking the hammer of government to attack spiritual sickness rather than bringing such people before God and letting His grace touch them.
In essence, the churches in the West have outsourced their responsibilities as moral teachers and preachers to the government, which determines its moral code based on the whims of the electorate and enforces it with a gun pointed to your head.
In order for the church leaders to become a force for good again in this country, they need to take strong and controversial stands against the obvious moral decay of our society. And not just the easy targets like sexual deviants or murderers but divorce, abortion, single motherhood, and a host of other societal ills which are currently praised rather than condemned.
Maybe then more and more people will take them seriously.