It's Tuesday, January 20, 2006. I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Events continue to unfold in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Those twin cities have become something of ground zero in the latest front

in America's enduring culture war. Let's remind ourselves of the category, culture war. What are we

talking about? Not merely political conflict, not just moral division, but a coalescing of the

entire culture over moral questions at the very heart of any kind of cultural consensus.

The lack of that consensus produces division, that division is now very much concentrated in such a way

that you have a basic division in the American population. We talk about state by state,

red and blue states, we talk about liberal, conservative, left and right. All of those

are a part of the picture, but there's a division at an even more fundamental level. Now, as Christians,

we understand that this is over a basic worldview conflict, as clear as that between, say,

orthodox biblical Christianity and a hardened radical secularism. And you're looking at the fact that increasingly

the options in the middle are evaporating, and it has been that way for the better part of the

last several decades. That's becoming increasingly clear. What we now know happened on Sunday,

there in St. Paul, when at City's Church, a leftist activist mob, invaded the church,

basically stopping its worship service, even as the congregation was gathered for Lord's Day

worship.

That is unprecedented, at least in recent American history.

That kind of thing didn't happen even in the cultural conflicts of the 1960s and the 1970s. But we are in a very different stage of the

culture war. And what we have seen is that the increasing polarization between left and right,

liberal, conservative, theological and secular, this is becoming more and more an issue in which

people, particularly right now on the left,

are taking dramatic action.

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