When a terrible fire engulfed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, many people were rightly outraged over politicians declaring this as an opportunity to “reimagine” the historic landmark. There were horrible “conceptual” drawings of Notre Dame being rebuilt into a modern glass and steel monstrosity instead of the transcendent beauty of its medieval French Gothic architecture.

Well, Kim Hirsch at the Victory Girls blog reports that there’s good news and bad news. The restoration work is advancing, and most of it is intended to painstakingly restore the original structure. The bad news: some parts are being changed to include politically correct modern themes such as multi-culturalism and environmentalism, and in a style that’s being compared to Disney’s Epcot Center.

https://victorygirlsblog.com/notre-dame-cathedral-restoration-is-going-woke/

Incredibly, the areas getting these inappropriate updates were parts of the Cathedral that suffered the least fire damage and would have been the easiest to restore to their original condition. But restoring a 900-year-old cathedral whose creators intended it only to glorify God and lead people to Christ must take a backseat to leading people to the political causes that constitute the new religion of the left.

Maybe the current climate activist Pope believes that mixing PC causes with religion will draw people to Christ, but there’s not a very successful track record of that. Generally speaking, the closer a church hews to the Bible, the more likely it is to have a growing congregation, and the opposite is true for those who embrace secular views and liberal political causes.

John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog has a good example: his own church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/get-woke-empty-the-pews.php

In a post titled, “Get Woke, Empty the Pews,” Hinderaker notes that as the ELCA has become more and more liberal, its membership has shrunk from over 5 million in 1988 to 3.3 million today, and falling. And it’s doubtful that a recent pastoral letter from a presiding bishop that condemned the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal and claimed that the “idols of our society” are “guns, violence and white supremacy” will reverse that trend.

I like to believe that most people in our society still believe in the Ten Commandments, which means they have no other gods before the Lord and they make no idols or graven images. Those are, after all, the first two. And I think the churches that are growing by bringing more people to Christ are the ones that remain aware of that.