After decades of steady liberalization, society appears to be having second thoughts about some aspects of America’s (im)moral revolution.
For instance, between 1996 and 2022, the percentage of U.S. adults in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage increased by 44 points, from 27 percent to 71 percent. But in 2024, the figure began to drop and, according to Gallup, has marginally declined each year since. Today, the number in support is 65 percent.
Similarly, the percentage viewing gay or lesbian relations as morally acceptable has dropped to its lowest point in a decade (62 percent). And the share of Americans who consider changing one’s gender to be morally acceptable has declined eight points over the past five years, down to 38 percent. Acceptance of several other issues—having a baby outside of marriage (58 percent), gambling (57 percent), sex between teenagers (35 percent)—has also declined in recent years.
The shift is encouraging until you realize what caused it. Those of us who have spent years (or even decades) arguing against immorality would love to take credit for changing people’s minds. The reality, though, is they changed because the consequences arrived.
Reality Is the Great Persuader
For example, few Americans were argued out of approving of gambling. Instead, they observed the consequences after the Supreme Court opened the door to sports betting in 2018. When the casino moved into every young man’s pocket, when calls to gambling addiction helplines surged, when sportsbooks turned every game into a wager, the problems associated with ubiquitous, legalized gambling became harder to ignore.
The eight-point drop in support for gender transition also didn’t come because we won the debate. It came from undeniable evidence of harm and from the testimony of detransitioners whose stories could no longer be dismissed. In each case, the danger had to become manifest before the public would reconsider its support.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, writing about why AI regulation will likely arrive too late, notes that “the nature of human beings is to react against a technology only once its harms become undeniable; we respond best to dangers made manifest, not threats hypothesized.”
“The regulations that tamed industrialization were fitted to the abuses of the age,” continues Douthat, “the movements to restrain nuclear proliferation would have looked very different absent the object lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the recent backlash against smartphone use by kids couldn’t have been ginned up in 2010.”
“No doubt in an ideal world the response would precede the bitter lesson,” he adds. “But in this world, for the humanist skeptic of A.I. no less than Skynet-fearing safety-ist, some version of the Bad Thing probably needs to be not just visible but undeniable before the world will act.”
Douthat is describing technology, but he could just as easily be describing morality. And describing the church’s long, frustrating experience of warning a culture that wouldn’t listen.
Why We Warn Anyway
The world is full of moral slippery slopes, situations where saying yes to something you want (e.g., legalized gambling) makes it much easier for others to bring about something you oppose (e.g., gambling taking over sports). We tend to assume the most effective way to avoid slipping down such slopes is to win the argument in advance. If we can point out where acceptance of immorality leads, we can avoid the Bad Thing. But this approach almost never works.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t try. We should, since forewarning is a common biblical pattern (see Ezek. 33’s watchman, Acts 20:26–27, and all the prophets). But like the prophets, we should expect our hearers to almost always ignore the warning until it’s too late. Our duty is to be faithful, and the watchman is faithful whether or not the city listens.
Like the prophets, we should expect our hearers to almost always ignore the warning until it’s too late.
When we recognize that warnings are necessary but rarely heeded, we can shift from “How do we make them listen?” to “What should the church be doing in the long interval between the warning and the reckoning?”
When the consequences of embracing immorality finally land and people go looking for a different way to live, the task of God’s people is to have already been living the alternative. We need to provide a visible, functioning way of life that they can embrace for themselves.
In doing so, we’re following another biblical pattern, the one found in Jeremiah 29: build houses, plant gardens, get married, seek the city’s welfare. Keep practicing the long faithful presence inside a culture you can’t yet fix.
Exile Strategy
But what does “long faithful presence” actually do? It can feel passive, even defeatist. It can feel as if we’re giving up on changing the world. But it shouldn’t mean this. All it really means is changing the world by a different, often underused, mechanism.
The three main ways we change the world are through influence, instruction, and imitation.
Influence is the exercise of persuasion and pressure—shaping opinions, winning arguments, mobilizing votes, gaining cultural leverage. Instruction is the transfer of knowledge—teaching, preaching, explaining, warning. Imitation is change through embodiment—living in a way that others can observe, and eventually copy, when they go looking for something better.
For the past several decades, the American church has bet heavily on the first two. We built or attempted to capture institutions of influence to win the culture. And we invested in instruction, providing an endless supply of warnings about where the culture was headed.
Neither labor was necessarily wasted, but neither was all that effective either. Both shared the assumption that people change their minds before they change their lives. That relied on the mistaken notion that if we say it clearly enough and loudly enough, society will turn around before the inevitable crash.
Imitation works on the opposite assumption. It doesn’t require the world to be convinced in advance; it only requires our neighbors to have somewhere to look when conviction finally comes. It’s the difference between hearing a lecture on nutrition and observing a friend who actually got healthy. You can nod along to the lecture for years and change nothing. But when your own health starts failing, you’ll call the friend and ask what she did.
Show, Then Tell
This isn’t to say that influence and instruction don’t have their place. But they tend to work better when bookended by imitation. It’s akin to the “life → truth → life” pattern to discipleship advocated by Mark Dever: “Your life should attract people to listen to you; your teaching should then work for their transformation; their transformed lives should then illustrate what you taught, which in turn attracts people to listen to them” (emphasis original).
Influence and instruction have their place. But they tend to work better when bookended by imitation.
Dever didn’t invent that pattern, of course. He got it from the One who embodied it.
Jesus didn’t say we would argue the world into belief. He said, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). The pattern was show then tell, since a life observed makes a message more believable—and more obviously livable.
If people respond only to dangers made manifest, then the church’s most neglected strategy is a biblical one: Be the thing that’s still standing when the wreckage becomes undeniable.
The Gospel Coalition