$18 million worth of cocaine found in bananas

Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, President Trump stated that American culture is built on “deep faith.”

For evidence, we could point to Rolling Stone‘s headline: “A Christian Singer Is Bigger Than Drake and Ariana Grande This Week.” Lauren Daigle’s new album topped records by Drake, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj on the Billboard 200.

Or we could note Pew Research Center’s report that more than 70 percent of Americans identify as Christians. America’s largest religious demographic is “Evangelical Protestant” at 25.4 percent.

However, America’s second-largest religious demographic is “Unaffiliated (religious ‘nones’)” at 22.8 percent. This is a larger percentage than “Catholic” (20.8 percent) or “Mainline Protestant” (14.7 percent).

As a sign of our troubled times, the Washington Post reports that homicides in Washington, DC, have now surpassed the number of people killed in the city in all of 2017. As another sign of the times, a group of protesters heckled Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife inside a Washington restaurant, forcing them to leave early.

And authorities say bananas donated to a Texas prison had nearly $18 million worth of cocaine hidden in the boxes.

Is culture like the weather?

As God’s people living in a fallen world, God’s word calls us to embrace a transformative balance.

We are warned to “touch no unclean thing” (Isaiah 52:11, quoted by Paul in 2 Corinthians 6:17). Much of our culture is off-limits for sincere followers of Jesus.

As D. A. Carson notes in his perceptive Christ and Culture Revisited, some evangelicals liken the culture to the weather–we can’t change it, so we should focus on individual souls and leave society to itself.

However, others claim that we earn the right to share Christ with people by first responding to the systemic issues they face–poverty, sex trafficking, and so on. We must engage culture to engage those affected by culture.

Both…