Here’s the first of two days of Bill Muehlenberg posts — in both he says what I’ve been saying for many years regarding the information war:
There are various reasons why the secular left seems to win so many battles, while their opponents are not doing so well. Obviously in the West today the mainstream media is by and large well onside with the various secular left agendas. That is because most people in the MSM are secular lefties.
And that is not by accident. The secular left has long known that in order to capture a culture, you have to take over its institutions of power and influence. So the cultural Marxists have targeted the media, politics, education, the arts, and even the churches for quite some time now.
And they have been very successful in doing this. Whereas one hundred years ago most of these institutions in the West basically shared the Judeo-Christian worldview, today almost all of them basically share the secular humanist worldview.
And again, this did not just happen, but it was deliberately brought about. The activists knew that if they were to win, they would have to be in the struggle for the long haul, and they would have to focus on the big picture. They had to see the bigger issues, and they had to be willing to work at it for as long as was necessary.
And because of that they have been scoring one victory after another. But when it comes to the culture wars and the bigger ideological wars, those representing conservative and Christian values have done far less well in this regard. They have not really looked at the bigger picture, and they have not focused on the longer term.
Too often they simply lurch from one crisis to another. They will react to the latest threat and mount a rear-guard action, but they have done so very little offensive work or preventative work. Thus each new attack they are forced to defend against, be it the so-called safe schools programs, the war against marriage, the porno plague, and so on.
And it is quite right that they respond to these attacks of course, and sometimes it is just the nature of the beast to be so often in defensive mode, with a relentless string of attacks coming from the other side. But they are launching their attacks from a position of strength: by and large they have already completed the long march through the institutions, and have captured the culture.
…
We keep losing by default because we are not even in the contest most times. We have relinquished our responsibility to be salt and light, and then complain as we see more and more secularisation, immorality, and anti-Christian agendas being implemented. Well duh, much of this is our fault. We are not even involved in these battles, yet we wonder why we keep losing.
Thus our schools, our media, our arts, our social and cultural institutions are all pretty much captured by the radicals. We handed it to them on a silver platter, and now we are trying to stem the tide. But to keep mixing metaphors, the horse has already bolted.
Read more: Culture Watch
