Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

A few weeks ago, a man who should remain unnamed but claims to be a Christian called The Hiding Place,

one of the most subversive books around.

According to his framing, Corey Ten Boom, who hid Jews during World War II, was a villain who cooperated with a communist and was guilty of, quote, shielding Christ's enemies.

He's a recent example of what are growing fringes from both the left and the right, who claim the mantle of Christianity while at the same time preaching a false and misleading gospel. Now, of course,

each side is quick to call out the other whenever they perceive them to be guilty of misrepresenting

Christianity. And there are plenty of examples. From the left come politicians such as James

Talarico and so-called Christian clergy who offer blessings for abortion clinics. In a 2023 book, The Godless Crusade, author Tobias Kramer, described right-wing groups in

Germany, France, and the U.S., who claimed to be fighting for Christian civilization, but made

the Christian part of that whole formulation quite secondary.

In Europe, there are even some political movements with Christian in their names

who openly oppose letting religious elements corrupt their social agendas. About a decade ago,

New York Times columnist Ross Douth acquipped, if you dislike the religious right, wait till you

meet the post-religious right. And the following year, Pascal Emmanuel Gorby described the post-Christian right as having more in common with a European right. And the following year, Pascal Emmanuel Gorby described the post-Christian

right as having more in common with a European secular blood and soil nationalism than the

philosophical and political conservatism that emerged in the English-speaking world. That kind of

conservatism is, as John Erritt put it recently, right-wing hierarchical thought shorn of a

Christian mooring. A so-called Christian worldview absent anything genuinely Christian is, he went on to say,

quite dangerous. Quote, the challenge of the post-Christian right is not that its ideas are

incoherent and confused, born of healthy instincts,

which simply need to be channeled in a sounder theological direction. The challenge is that

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