Picking up the pieces.

One of the things that I think all Christians should address is political correctness. It is part of the "establishment" sense of "tolerance." Two admittedly small things caught my eye last week. One was the seemingly ubiquitous use of "their" (common third person plural pronoun) instead of "his" (masculine and neuter third person singular pronoun) or "her" (feminine third person singular pronoun) and "them," similarly for "he" and "she." This is, and always has been incorrect English grammar. It has gained widespread acceptance because the feminists among us insist (wrongly) that this is "sexism" in language. I know this seems like a little thing, but when we show ourselves to be vulnerable to little things, we are set to die the death of a thousand cuts. The other change in modern usage is the substitution of BCE for BC as in the year 161 BCE as opposed to 161 BC and the similar use of CE for AD. BCE stands for "Before the Common Era," and CE stands for "Common Era." Again, this looks trivial. I used those terms myself several years ago, thinking that doing so somehow made me more "scholarly." But BC and AD are designations based upon the central event of human history, i.e., the advent of Messiah. And I finally realized that BCE and CE are nothing less than a secular (and politically correct!) sneer at Him about whom absolutely nothing is common. Maybe it is time for Christians to "be offended." We are swimming in a sea of such little things that succeed in tainting and undermining not Christianity, but the Christian consensus that for centuries has defined Western Civilization. Ask the old timers, those who were around before the Hippies came out of the woodwork. They can list hundreds of similar changes.