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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Revolution Comes To Kansas

'The ground has cracked and is splitting beneath our feet'
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I was struck by this comment from reader KW, on a previous thread. S/he begins by quoting a previous poster, on the subject of our rapidly changing culture:

..There’s a war being waged out there, baby. Have a nice time at the river. But eventually the hard freakin’ reality is gonna catch up with Kansas too.

KW responds:

I live in Kansas; it’s here. I appreciated the OP’s sentiments and, on one hand, agree with them. On the other hand, the ground has cracked and is splitting beneath our feet. In Kansas, I go to the grocery store and notice the cashier has “preferred pronouns” on her (posing as as a “his”) nametag, a problem if you reflexively address strangers as “sir” or “ma’am.” One local school is having its gym massively renovated in part to accommodate the gender confusion social contagion. My town passed an ordinance to let boys in the girls’ room before it even became a national issue. Yes, it’s in Kansas.

I’ve been playing music here semi-professionally for nearly 3 decades. I used to play at a lot of weddings; I knew I had to quit doing that once the writing on the wall was plain. The current legal standing of not playing same-sex weddings doesn’t enter into it; word travels fast and I would be cast into the outer darkness, so to speak, if I was inevitably offered a job at such a ceremony and begged off taking it.

The ground has cracked. It’s cracked in my own family, my town, my state. Now anyone who is not on board with the state of things has to get out the old maps to chart a new course. I don’t take any joy in realizing that or repeating it.

I appreciate how succinctly the reader has stated a core argument of The Benedict Option: that everything is changing, and changing rapidly — and it’s not the kind of thing that politics can deal with effectively, because the change is cultural.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a state or federal law is passed that guarantees traditional Christian musicians the right to refuse to play at same-sex weddings without suffering any penalty under law. That will mean very little. Those musicians will be shunned professionally, and pay a heavy penalty for their faith. This is something that’s very, very hard to get Christians to understand — the total nature of this revolution.

To borrow a line from KW, The Benedict Option is about charting a new course. I have a feeling that the book is going to stay in print for years, as reality catches up with the kind of Christians who shunned it as alarmist.

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