Last week Cal Thomas wrote an article, Shedding Light in Dark Places, with the basic premise being that Christians should spend less time criticizing the culture, and instead, use their energies to start infiltrating it.

Culture is starving because too many with a worldview that differs from the prevailing one have withdrawn their nurturing influence. It doesn’t help when such people are persuaded it is better to criticize institutions and their products, rather than going them one better.

How are academia, law, filmmaking or journalism improved when not enough believers in God become professors, lawyers, filmmakers or journalists? “Hollywood” does not suddenly begin making better movies when it is criticized for making bad ones.

In response, Dappled Things asked, How do we go about “shedding light in dark places”?

With respect to Cal Thomas, Bet from Dappled Things, and most Christians reading my commentary now, the questions you are asking are all wrong. The reason that our country is marching happily down the Wide Way to hell is not because Christians have withdrawn their influence from popular culture, but precisely because Christians are engaged in popular culture and there is no difference.

We should not be asking how we can best shed light; instead, we should be inquiring more fundamentally, why are our lights are so dim? Christians, on the whole, have digested the same worldview our public institutions have fed us. And we are licking our lips. We swallow the lie that academia and such are morally neutral and, therefore, can be separated from faith.

We Christians believe humanistic teachers when they say, “Plants need light and water to grow.” We God-professors gleefully sit under a Godless professor who declares, “1 + 2 = 3”, nodding our heads and patting ourselves on the back because the government finally got it right. No! The reason that a plant grows is because God ordained that plant to grow and sustains its very life, every atom and molecule, in order to bring Himself glory. He just happens to use light and water as a tool to accomplish that end. Furthermore, it is Jesus’ one, and Jesus’ two, that makes Jesus’ three. All of life, academia, media, art, science is under the domain of a great God, and to separate God from any of it is to commit cosmic treason.

So, going back to the article, Christians do not need to get off their comfy couches and “get out there and make a difference.” It would be nice if it were that easy. No, in order to begin making a difference, Christians must begin the process by being different. And that requires a lot more than just getting off the couch.