In comparison with its past achievements, it is safe to say that evangelical Christianity today is in a pathetic state of decadence and decline in the West. It is, to a large degree, fragmented, watered-down, and retreating from relevancy. For the past two centuries, too many evangelical Christians have lived on the periphery of responsible intellectual and cultural existence. We have traded in Milton's Paradise Lost for Left Behind, the arias of Bach for contemporary Christian music, and Rembrandt for Thomas Kinkade. It is not my intention to denigrate Tim LaHaye or Jerry Jenkins, the contemporary Christian music industry, or Mr. Kinkade. However, the fact of the matter is that much of what passes for Christian art and literature today fails to rise to the same level of quality and achievement as that of historical Christian artists and writers. It is this substandard quality that necessitates the subcultural category now necessary to identify Christian art and literature as its own category.

So-called Christian art and literature no longer serves as the creative benchmark for mainstream art and culture. The fields of creative and intellectual expression once dominated by Christians have been largely abandoned, taking with them any objective standards by which we can judge the true, the good, and the beautiful. Modern evangelical Christianity has to a large extent become pietistic and legalistic; it has forgotten beauty, relativized truth, and, in many respects, reduced Jesus into nothing more than a marketing tool to sell music, T-shirts, and jewelry to an increasingly irrelevant subculture. Even the most casual observer of society and culture surely must recognize that consciously Christian ideas and values no longer direct any of our cultural institutions. The trend of every institution of American culture over the last fifty years has been a decidedly liberal drift, including some mainline Christian denominations. Welcome to post-Christian America!

Instead of engaging the intellectual and cultural challenges that we must in order to be salt and light in a world desperate for hope and meaning, the vast majority of evangelical Christians have abandoned the hard work of apprehending and pressing the truth into every sphere of life and culture. As a result, we have surrendered, by default, our influence in society to secular humanists and others who reject the truth and centrality of Christ to all of life.

From the public school system to the universities, the sciences to the humanities, films to the fine arts, politics to philosophy, Christians have, for the most part, abandoned mainstream culture and withdrawn to the confines of their churches, creating an elaborate Christian subculture with its own language, symbols, entertainment, and literature. To think, then, that we can venture out into the "real" world from this irrelevant subculture and reach people with the truth of Christ is naïve. The fact that the most important truth ever revealed to humanity has been successfully consigned to the margins of society has only strengthened the implausibility of the gospel story!

In the meantime, the truth claims of Christianity have come under vicious attack from all sides. The possibility of miracles, divine revelation, and the Incarnation is both questioned and categorized as a primitive, out-of-date interpretation of reality. The deity of Christ and the existence of God are either rejected altogether or reduced to a practical deism in which God set things in motion but has little to do with everyday life and social existence. The historical and scientific accuracy of the Bible is repeatedly attacked. One only has to recall the recent wave of critics and so-called theologians who weighed in on Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ or recent prime-time specials on Jesus and Paul —all dismissing the historical and supernatural truth of the biblical revelation and Jesus as God. The success of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, with its outrageous and false claims of conspiracy and cover-up as the impetus for the early founding of Christianity, promises to further weaken the plausibility of the Christian faith and message.