I’m somewhere this week I’m not at liberty to name, in a room with some of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever been around and some of the bravest. The reason I can’t name it is not caution for its own sake. It’s for the safety of the people in the room. Think about that for a second.
The subjects we came here to discuss were mainstream not long ago. Whether a man can say what he believes out loud or whether a parent can raise a child in the faith without a hostile state grading the result. Every red-blooded American who darkened a church door a generation ago could have laid these out without blinking. Today, saying them plainly is enough to make some trans-activist zealot wake up and choose violence. That is the country we are living in now, one that looked hard at the Christian inheritance it was handed and decided that it would rather not keep it.
Meanwhile, the other half of the country spends the week dissecting a celebrity wedding. You already know the one. The men and women in this room are bent over questions with a longer shelf life. What is our posture supposed to be? How do we fight an enemy this patient and this embedded? How do we hand something durable to our children and our grandchildren? And if we can already see what the ground will look like should we stand by and do nothing, what do we do instead?
I want to tell you what I keep noticing in rooms like this one, because it surprised me.
The instinct, always, is strategy. The instinct is to reach for the machinery, for the campaign and the counteroffensive. When someone says we have to wage war, every head nods, and mine nods with them, because the war is real. I have no interest in pretending otherwise. But Scripture will not let me leave the sentence there. “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:3-4). We are handed a war and then told, in the same breath, according to this Scripture, that we have misjudged the weapons.
Here is what that does to a room full of strategists. It moves the decisive battle off the stage and out of the headlines and sets it down somewhere far less flattering. Somewhere like a kitchen table.
The people who will still be standing on solid ground in fifty years are being formed right now, and almost none of that formation is happening in a war room. It is happening in ordinary houses, on ordinary evenings, by parents and grandparents who refuse to subcontract their children’s souls to a culture that has already told us what it intends to make of them. “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6:7). That is not a slogan for a movement. That’s the foundation of a lasting civilization.
I have to confess the pull of the other thing. The war room flatters you. It makes you feel like the hinge of history, as if the outcome rides on your cleverness and reach. The kitchen table offers none of that. Nobody applauds the father who reads Scripture to sleepy children a hundred nights running with no visible result. It is slow and hidden, and it is the actual front line. I have caught myself wanting the version that feels important over the version that is faithful, and I doubt I am the only one in the room.
My son got married last year. Grandchildren are no longer a category I get to think about from a comfortable distance. And when asked what I want to hand them, I already know the honest answer, which is that I cannot hand them a winning culture. I may not get to hand them a friendly country at all. What I can hand them is a faith they’ve watched cost me something, taught to them plainly by people who loved them, anchored in a church that actually disciples rather than merely entertains.
Because here is the picture if we stand down. It will not be a quiet handoff. It will be a free fall into a moral decay we are already battling on the fringe, loud and abrasive the whole way down. A generation inherits the word “Christian” with none of the weight, catechized by the feed instead of the faith, because we assumed one hour on Sunday could hold its own against ten thousand hours of formation pointed the other way. The culture is not waiting for our permission to disciple our children. It is already doing it, and it is unnervingly good at it.
So what do we actually do? We start smaller and closer than the war room suggests. Open the Bible at your own table tonight, and mean it. Find out what your children are being taught this year, then teach them something truer before the world gets the first word. Belong to a church that will still be preaching this text to your grandchildren, and give it your life instead of your leftovers. Take the ground within your reach.
The rooms matter. The brilliant people matter, and I am grateful to be among them this week. But the line does not finally hold in the room. It holds at the table and in the pew, in the unwitnessed faithfulness of people who decided the next generation was worth more than their own comfort and then lived like they believed it.
There is one more thing I cannot shake, sitting here listening to person after person describe what standing up actually cost them. Next to that, my own boldness starts to look like caution. The formation at the table was never meant to help us hide. It was meant to produce people who will stand in the open and confess Christ when confessing Him costs something. So I need to be more public about this faith and the way it gets handed down, and about why a freedom like ours is worth guarding, the freedom that once made this country a beacon of hope to the watching world.
But be clear about where that light comes from. The hope was never the land. The hope is the proclamation of Christ; strip that out, and the beacon goes dark. Clarity on that point is a war we can win. Not because we are clever, but because the weapons, like the hope, were never ours to begin with.
I publish here regularly to give you biblical clarity in a collapsing world. If this gave you something worth carrying, go deeper with the Inner Circle, a space for honest conversation, reflection, and formation as we work out what faithfulness asks of us now.
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