The church works best as a force of resistance, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm's length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message.

A news event in 1995 shocked both sides in the culture war controversy. Norma Leah McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" in the famous Supreme Court case of 1973, converted to Christ, got baptized, and joined the pro-life campaign.

The gospel transforms culture by permeating it like yeast, and long after the people abandon belief they tend to live by habits of the soul. Once salted and yeasted, society is difficult to un-salt and un-yeast.

The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.

Because of our failure to live out our beliefs, our own lack of moral clarity, and our meddling with partisan politics, Western culture no longer looks to Christianity as its moral source.

To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion," cautioned T. S. Eliot.

Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counter-culture of ordinary pilgrims who insist on living a different way. We can make the world stop and think before pulling a trigger, or exacting revenge, or neglecting the vulnerable, or practising euthanasia on those it deems 'devoid of value'.

Alcoholics Anonymous discovered long ago that the path toward cure involves more than a quick-fix solution based on increased knowledge. In fact, it involves a change that seems more theological than educational. Somehow the "victim" of addictive behavior must regain an underlying sense of human dignity and choice, a profound reawakening that usually requires much time, attention, and love.

Unlike the scary movies and sermons from my youth, not one of them focuses on personal salvation as a way of escaping hell in the afterlife. Rather, they present how the good news about eternity should transform this life. The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.

A similar cycle has recurred throughout church history. Christians present an attractive counterculture until they become the dominant culture. Then they divert from their mission, join the power structure, and in the process turn society against them. Rejected, they retreat into a minority subculture, only to start the cycle all over again.

Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.

do worry about the recent tendency for the labels "evangelical Christian" and "religious right" to become interchangeable. Increasingly Christians are perceived as rigid moralists who want to control others' lives.