Growing up, my parents had the newspaper delivered every day. After supper, I’d make a beeline for the comics and spend a joyful ten minutes chuckling over the adventures of Hagar the Horrible, Dagwood, Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace, and — my favorite — Calvin and Hobbes.
One of my favorite storylines involved Calvin and his trusty stuffed tiger Hobbes playing Calvinball, a game made up by Calvin. The game only had one rule: you never play the same way twice. In other words, they made up the rules as they went along. While Calvin and Hobbes certainly enjoyed their crazy game, it made it almost impossible for anyone else to join them.
Society today resembles Calvinball more and more. At one time, most people knew and understood the rules of society, what the goal was, and how to get there. But over the past several generations, Western culture has thrown off the morals and values of its predecessors and started to make up the rules as it goes along.
What rules has society discarded? When did the rules change and the slide into chaos begin? In the U.S., it is hard to pinpoint an exact time society definitively changed. The Puritans who immigrated to the New World in search of religious liberty tried to establish a new society based upon strict interpretation of the Scriptures and regimented observation of self-imposed rules.
However, by 1702, Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister and the prosecutor for the Salem Witch Trials, found himself disappointed by the direction society was taking. In Magnalia Christi Americana he wrote, “Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother.” Mather noticed the same Protestant work ethic that enabled persecuted immigrants to survive and thrive in the New World also caused its downfall by enriching the people and filling the churches with complacent congregations who listened to sermons exhorting them to earn yet more wealth as a sign of God’s favor. Mather pondered, “There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness.” Three hundred years later, it appears our errand into the wilderness has been almost entirely forgotten.
In France, where we live and work, it is easy to pinpoint an exact time society turned its back on God: July 14, 1789. The storming of the Bastille prison is regarded as the spark that lit the wildfire of the French Revolution. It terminated a decade later, after tens of thousands of deaths, with Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état.
Unlike the American Revolution, based primarily on the desire for freedoms of religion, press, speech, and self-representation, the French Revolution was an explosion after centuries of pent-up frustration with the monarchy and the Catholic Church. French revolutionaries were so desperate to throw out anything smacking of monarchy or popes, they executed their own king and queen, killed thousands of Catholic priests and nuns, changed their calendar to a secular one with no relation to the liturgical calendar, and took over churches and cathedrals, turning them into temples of reason and destroying priceless works of religious art. This hatred for anything religious stemmed from the close ties between the Catholic Church and the monarchy, and the control the church wielded over taxation, forced tithing, and land ownership.
Many factors propelled both the American and French Revolutions. If I were asked to summarize their primary difference, it would be this: while both revolutions had the goal of separating church and state, the reasons behind the goal were completely different. The American Revolution was fought to obtain personal liberty and to protect, among other things, the right to practice religion without interference from the state. The French Revolution was fought to free the peasantry and middle class from an oppressive monarchy, heavy taxation, and a state-sanctioned church that imposed a heavy financial and moral burden on the people. The French wanted to protect their secular state from interference by the church.
France kicked God out of their country 235 years ago and slammed the door.
And they have never let Him back in.
But France is not the only country in Europe adrift from its moorings. According to the Joshua Project, “post-Christian Europe is home to the fewest Christ-followers and is the most unreached continent on the planet.” Less than 3% of Europeans have a personal relationship with Jesus. Considering the greatest Christian movements our world has ever known originated in Europe, this statistic is gut-wrenching.
In the space of only a few centuries, the continent that produced Martin Luther, John Calvin, Protestantism, Count Zinzendorf and the Moravian missionaries, William Tyndale, and John Wycliffe, now prides itself on its secularism and tolerance. In Europe as a whole, 461 unreached people groups reside, 37 in France alone. Over the past 19 years, the share of French people not believing in God has risen from 44% to 56%.
The current cultural mixture of hedonism, nihilism, and tradition led us to the divisive display during the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. I watched from my living room, eager to see how France would show off its contributions to the world in the realms of art, music, food, language, architecture, fashion, and joie de vivre. Instead, we were treated to a disjointed, somewhat chaotic display of hedonism.
The feedback from French friends the following day was mixed. Some were proud of the unique format. Others were disgusted by what they regarded as a missed opportunity to flaunt their country’s good points. This seems to be the reaction shared by many American Christians, some who even went so far as to boycott the entire games. An extreme reaction, I think, that stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the current state of Europe.
I’ve lost count of how many times Matt and I have been asked why we work in France. “Surely,” someone exclaims, “a country as cultured and beautiful as France doesn’t need missionaries!”
Au contraire, mon frère!
France has not been remotely Christian for three centuries. The many cathedrals are mostly empty and struggle to find enough priests to fill their pulpits. The gods of science and reason have long sat on the throne of people’s hearts and minds. The God of the Bible has disappeared into the annals of history, dismissed as artifacts of a less-enlightened era.
As of 2023, France’s population of evangelical Christians was 1.23%. That is about 795,000 people in a nation of 64 million. This is fewer than the citizens of Charlotte, North Carolina. Given the unreached state of most French people, the unavoidable question confronts us: what did we expect? As our own country slides faster and faster toward secular hedonism, producing more and more “art” that makes us shudder, why on earth would we expect a largely atheist society like France to produce anything less? We are right to be disgusted, but we should not be surprised.
I have heard the argument that we Christians have the moral obligation to be indignant when we see sinners behave in ways that violate Scripture. That we need to insist upon a standard of behavior that applies to all people in a culture. I wholeheartedly agree crimes against the innocent must be punished. But I don’t think that is the issue here. No crimes were committed during the opening ceremony, only behavior on display that goes against God’s revealed will for our lives.
The crux of the problem is when we get offended because someone
violates what we consider a
cultural standard of behavior.
Who decides that standard of behavior? From where does a culture obtain its landmarks and boundaries? In our American Judeo-Christian worldview, traditionally, we have taken our cues from Scripture. Our standards for decency, respect, appropriateness, value of life, and behavior all stem from belief in a Creator God who made us in His image and revealed to us His design for living holy lives.
Sadly, this foundational belief is being gradually chipped away, and today, much of what Americans consider “Christian” is merely cultural acceptance of behavioral norms. It is “normal” to go to church, get married, rear children, and love your country. While I love all these aspects of our culture, following these “norms” does not make someone a Christian. It does, however, allow a culture to maintain a veneer of godliness that covers up a stinking morass of evil.
When a culture strays so far from the Standard, it must make up its own rules to continue functioning as a society. Just like Calvin playing Calvinball.
Cultures like France, which rejected biblical standards centuries ago, have essentially made up their own rules to the game. Fortunately, the Catholic Church’s influence on family values and morality did not disappear immediately after the revolution. Obviously, today their Judeo-Christian impact has mostly evaporated.
Since nature abhors a vacuum, when society rejects one set of values, another set naturally takes its place. Thus, in France and much of Western Europe, that void was filled with the “gifts” of the Enlightenment: the gods of reason and science, skepticism of religion and religious hypocrisy, and reliance on self. In 2024, those “gods” reign supreme.
Tom McCullough and his wife, Patty, were missionaries in France for ten years before they returned to the States for health reasons. Tom became my professor of missions at Welch College. One day, during a cultural anthropology class, we discussed the link between cultural beliefs and behavior. Tom said something I have never forgotten: “People believe what they want to believe, so they can behave how they want to behave.”
That, I believe, is the root of the matter. All people everywhere are sinful. Unless they follow a standard of behavior beyond themselves, they will find ways to shape their beliefs to accommodate their sinful behavior.
This is why we are in France. This is why IM has been sending missionaries to Europe for more than sixty years. We want to show the French people the God-shaped hole in their hearts can only be filled by one Person, Jesus Christ. We are not here to guilt them into following a man-made standard of behavior. We want to introduce them to the holy One who loves them and wants the best for them, and whose rules for living are both logical and life-giving. We want to see France transformed from the inside out.
About the Writer: Cristina Price, along with her husband Matt and daughters Madeleine and Emilie, live and minister in France. They have served in St. Nazaire since 2018 after spending 12 years in Nantes. Learn more: www.IMInc.org
