Many conservatives seem to think the biggest battle in our culture is over which values we should embrace. They argue for "family" values or "Judeo-Christian" values, as opposed to "progressive" values or even "extremist" values. But to focus on morality or even ideology is to miss the boat. The real issue is theology. Values are determined by one’s understanding of what the universe is actually like; about what is real. This is a theological question. The debate must take place at that level and it must start with the churches being willing to think seriously again about doctrine rather than trying to provide an entertaining, comfoting enviroment for people who don’t want to think. As the amazing Dorothy Sayers points out in Letters to a Diminished Church:
It is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the
importance of Christian morality unless they are prepared to take their stand
upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does
not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that
Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that
it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless
to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and
consoling kind; it is, on the contrary , a hard, tough, exacting, and complex
doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to
imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a
little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian
country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the church
teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.