In a cosmic battle with both winners and losers, as Christians, we know who wins—and who has already won— the war. In fact, it was no contest at all. The winning of the war was ordained before the Creation of the world by God Himself and it took place two thousand years ago at the cross.

That being said, as Christians, we are compelled by the cross to pursue the things of God, to love what God loves, and to hate what He hates. And while we know it is not possible that the entire world, every living creature, turns to Christ, our responsibility is to see to it that the gospel goes forth and reaches these people—all of them.

Admittedly, it is difficult to make a case from the New Testament that the Church should be primarily fighting culture wars. We see in large part the Paul and the Apostles not fighting against a wicked government, but pursuing their Evangelistic responsibilities in the midst of it, and often being punished for doing so.

But we also see the Apostle Paul using the legal system to his advantage when necessary, laying out a legal defense of himself in front of Agrippa. But then, we also see, that his ultimate purpose for doing so wasn’t as a means of self-defense or to get out of trouble but to reach Caesar and the people around him with the gospel. It was the gospel itself as the motivating factor for everything Paul did.

And it is the gospel that should be the motivating factor for all that we as Christians do in fighting our culture wars. It should not be for the purpose of self-preservation, our retirement accounts, or our “American dreams.” While these are not necessarily bad things, and while they may be effects of winning the culture wars in a free society, they should not be our motives. As Paul said in Philippians 1:21, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

So should Christians be involved in the culture wars? Former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), Russell Moore, says no. But he’s wrong, and we’ll explain why.

Russell Moore writes, from his new post at the progressive Christian-ese magazine, Christianity Today, in an article titled The Cross Contradicts Our Culture Wars, “Culture wars and outrage cycles might fuel ratings and clicks and fundraising appeals, but they cannot reconcile sinners to a holy God. They cannot reunite a fragmented people. They cannot even make us less afraid in the long run.”

Of course, this came after several paragraphs of lambasting conservatives who are suspicious of the secular progressive-controlled government’s motives against them. Keep in mind that Russell Moore himself spent an inordinate amount of time fighting the culture wars when the government was controlled by Donald Trump. In fact, he railed against Donald Trump so much that it landed him on national news after the soon-to-be president responded to him calling him a “very nasty guy with no heart.”

During Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton, Moore tweeted relentlessly about how immoral and unfit Donald Trump was for the presidency. Moore even penned a piece at the far-left rag outlet the New York Times lambasting Trump while at the same time saying that he wished his wife were more like Hillary Clinton.

Throughout his entire tenure at the ERLC, Moore turned the entire Southern Baptist denomination into a culture-war machine against what he and his progressive fellows called “White supremacy.” Moore single-handedly introduced Critical Race Theory—a secular Marxist ideology destitute of any biblical warrant—into the Evangelical Church and mainstreamed it to such a degree that nearly every major Southern Baptist institution has embraced it.

Whether it be Moore’s breaking bread with the gay community, his softening tone on homosexuality, referring to Jesus as an “illegal alien,” promotion and teaching of inherent “white guilt” by sole virtue of skin color, yoking with Democrats and socialist groups, serving as an editor for a Catholic magazine, coddling the transgender community, partnering with animal rights groups and referring to animal rights as a “gospel issue,” fighting for the right to build an Islamic mosque, accepting donations from billionaire leftists like George Soros to advance open-borders and amnesty, publishing articles claiming that the Bible affirms gender fluidity, or making the absolutely asinine claim that Western culture is demonic, one thing is for certain, Russell Moore has most definitely been fighting the culture wars—he’s just been fighting it from the other side.

Yet now, all of a sudden, he wants Christians to stop fighting the culture wars. Make no mistake about it, Moore does not believe, not for one second, that Christians shouldn’t be involved in culture wars. He simply wants conservatives to stop fighting culture wars because when conservatives fight culture wars, it causes his progressive side to lose ground.

The fact is, Christians and conservatives should absolutely be involved in culture wars. But again, our motive should not be self-preservation—it should be the furtherance of the gospel and obedience to Christ. Here’s the fact of the matter: the world is increasingly growing in chaos. It is becoming increasingly more antagonistic toward the conservative Christian worldview. But the Scriptures, and Christ Himself, clearly commanded us to raise our children in the faith, to go into the world to make disciples, and to teach them all to obey the commandments of God.

As Christians, we understand that God’s purpose cannot and will not be thwarted—not by Nero and not by Joe Biden. But that isn’t the point. The point is that as Christians, should be teaching our children how to think biblically about cultural issues facing us. This will be extremely difficult to do if the government is afforded full custody of our children and disallows Christian schools and homeschooling.

This is certainly a right worth fighting for.

Our churches should be teaching members how to think biblically about cultural issues, particularly those around issues of justice and morality. And many are, but the fact remains is that many are not. Many, like Russell Moore, are teaching secular ideologies and methodologies for facing these cultural issues and then lambasting the true Church when they do teach rightly.

I’m not arguing that Christians necessarily need to be in the streets of the nation’s capital protesting every issue, or every law that we don’t like that was passed. Some may be called to do that and there is certainly a time and a place for that. But Christians absolutely have a moral and a biblical duty to speak to the conscience of the culture with force and the authority of God’s word, to call the nation to repent of its idolatry and its immorality, and to take a stand against the forces seeking to destroy the conservatism upon which this nation was founded that has made possible, by the grace of God of course, that has made the freedoms afforded the Church in America.

For some Christians, that may mean running for public office. For some, that may mean writing or blogging. And for some, that may mean organizing protests and rallies to legally stand for the values that protect our rights to worship freely.

But once again, it cannot be stressed enough that the motivation should not and cannot be selfish, our motivation should be the advancement of the gospel.