"Cool the day before yesterday"

Upon encountering a Pride month notice board for a Church of England parish, Carl Trueman wonders, "What Is the Church of England For?":

H. Richard Niebuhr famously denounced the liberal church of his day, summarizing its theology in a single withering sentence: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” What he did not note—but perhaps implied—is that such theology typically manifests in worship that is infantile, offering a pastiche of the wider culture’s predilections that would qualify as kitsch, if its purveyors had the wit to see it as such. The progressive church is always a poor imitation of what the world considered cool the day before yesterday. ....

Another irony is that churches that try to ape the tastes of the day in order to speak to the times typically fail to do so. They simply offer the standard fare of the surrounding culture in a cringe-inducing religious idiom and often with an enthusiasm that aspires to be shocking but is merely out-of-date. ....

Further, under the guise of prophetic courage, these churches are actually demonstrating cowardice, preferring to affirm the fashionable falsehoods of the sexual revolution to the truths of the faith they claim to adhere to. Christianity does not affirm the values of the earthly city, left or right, and then seek to blend them seamlessly into celebrations of the most disruptive moment in human history—the incarnation of God himself. Instead, it points beyond, to things above, to something better. Rather than calling people back to a true vision of humanity, progressive churches offer the fraudulent answers of a culture that will do anything but face up to its mythology—the cult of human autonomy, expressed most pungently in the sexual revolution. This is not the gospel of Christ; it is the mendacity of the age. .... (more)

Carl R. Trueman, "What Is the Church of England For?," First Things, June 18, 2026.