Because the Catholic and Orthodox churches do not rely on consensus to determine morality, it seems to me that you are speaking strictly of an American Protestant moral relativism. Yet the disestablishment of authority was fundamental to the founding Protestantism. So I don’t see how a singular and/or unified Protestant moral revival is even conceivable, given that individual relationships with Scripture are the only necessary religious institution. And I’m not referring to relatively minor doctrinal matters — how the sin of taking life is understoo and practiced diverges considerably from Southern Baptists to Quaker, for example.

Protestant relativism is unavoidable.

Amen sister. And so be it.

I don’t think that Christians, by and large, are acting like the secularist who claims to have no worldview bias.

“the reasons why we desire moral revival but why we continue to fail.”

If you want to look at it in terms of “failure”, then let’s realize that there’s a relentless Enemy who’s contributing signficantly to that “failure”.

“I believe we can actually separate how Christians engage moral conversations from the conversation about our form of government.”

Is the moral conversation of the Manhattan Declaration sufficient?

Suppose you received a well-intentioned critique that your post seems to be a call for a Christian theocracy. Or that you’re subtly promoting Christian theocracy by asking Christians to only support activities that explicitly reference the God of biblical Christianity as its foundation instead of a “generic god of politically correct conservative pluralism.”

How would you respond?

Is it realistic for Sarah Palin (or a Barack Obama, or a Mitt Romney) to achieve political change by calling on people to share and enforce her own highly idiosyncratic private views about morality?

More importantly, would this approach even be desirable? Imagine the dysfunction as each individual tries to gain political dominance for her own, highly specific, private moral views. Then, if some of these people should succeed, imagine the tyranny.

I have a young girl in my neighborhood who had her first child when she was 13 years old, her second baby at 15.

Her sin is ugly and ungodly, but we tend to not talk about that aspect of her sin, but applaud her not aborting her babies. And also simply overlooking her sin, and reaching out with baby clothes, and so forth.

If we do preach the sin of fornication in a case like this, then we are considered mean and un-Christian.

Speaking the truth with compassion is very difficult at times, but the Church needs to learn how to do it right.

Thanks for the excellent post. A lot of good points made.