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What do you hope to accomplish with Being the Body?

If it does nothing else than break Christians free of this dreadful individualism and let them realize that you cannot be a Christian without being deeply committed to a part of the church, then it will have served a good purpose.

In the early '70s, some observers argued that the reason conservative churches were growing was that they demanded high standards of behavior, belief, service, and stewardship. Recent studies suggest that conservative churches are by and large no longer so demanding. Has there been a cultural shift in conservative churches?

There are still conservative churches that make greater demands on their people than mainline churches do. But I have seen an increasing tendency toward recruitment instead of repentance—an idea that we have to somehow get the postmodern generation into the churches and that somehow their postmodern frame of reference will be engaged by the experience.

I think postmodernism is the enemy of the church. I don't think you can befriend it, come alongside it, or use it. And I think the seeker-sensitive movement—which is a good thing—can go over the edge and be so sensitive that we don't bring the demands of the gospel to bear. Churches need to be countercultural. And if we are, I think we'll get a terrific response.

I believe people are still hungry for orthodoxy. Take Colleen Carroll's book, The Young Faithful—that tells you that this generation is searching for truth. Everybody is searching for truth. They get told there is no such thing as truth, and it's intolerant to believe there is, and so they suppress "the natural truth that cannot not be known" that's in us, as J. Budziszewski puts it.

Believers are bombarded every hour by advertising messages, news programs, and entertainment that all presuppose a materialist worldview. What is the role of the church in helping its members cultivate a Christian worldview?

You're hitting my hot button! Understanding the cultural commission of the church is as important as understanding the Great Commission. When we are redeemed, the cultural mandate is given to us anew. Therefore we're giving people only part of the gospel if we talk to them only about salvation and discipleship. If we don't tell them how to think critically about the world around them, we are betraying our responsibility to them. I don't believe that any pastor who misses the opportunity to inform his congregation and discipline them in a biblical worldview is being faithful to his call.

And one thing we're not doing well enough at the seminary level is teaching people how to penetrate the postmodern mind and to think critically about modern culture. Therefore, we lose the culture.

We used to call the worldviews that compete with Christianity by names such as Marxism, Freudianism, or Darwinism. Now you write about Donahuism and Oprahism. Why are these media figures more of a threat than unbelieving philosophers?

The utopianism of the 20th century has been pretty well shattered. Marxism has been discredited. Humanism has suffered some serious body blows. Most of the utopian notions of the 20th century are on the ash heap of history. There is a shift in worldviews in America. The great battle is between secular naturalism and biblical theism. (And between biblical theism and Islam, a subset of controversy between Islam and modernity.) There really is a clash of civilizations.

Oprahism and Donahuism represent a form of materialism that is very seductive because it is pervasive. It makes people believe that they'll find happiness. It appeals to the "imperial republic of the self," as George Weigel called it, and therefore is very insidious. What is dangerous today is the postmodern vacuum in which we amuse ourselves to death with Oprah and we substitute feeling better—the therapeutic model—for really facing ourselves.

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May (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47