The economic and financial realities facing the new administration of President-elect Joe Biden are formidable. The national debt has skyrocketed under President Trump. This enormous increase resulted from President Trump’s tax cut policies and the staggering increase in national government spending to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic (over $3 trillion, all financed by debt). Furthermore, during the Trump presidency, the trade policies of the United States were radically upended. Both of these policy changes will have a profound impact on the direction of US economic and financial policies for both the near- and long-term.

The late Chuck Colson frequently would proclaim, “What was once unthinkable, becomes debatable and then gradually becomes acceptable.” I have always appreciated this declaration as a succinct summary of cultural accommodation. Cultural developments that only a few years ago were unimaginable are now mainstreamed as normal and legitimate in American civilization. Two recent developments illustrate this process of cultural accommodation.

Christmas is an intriguing and agreeable story: The tale of an unwed mother and an ostracized family, angelic messengers, noble shepherds, magi from the East and a tyrannical king. But, Christmas has a prequel; it only makes sense within the context of the larger story of what God is doing in the world.

Mary Eberstadt, senior fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute, has challenged us to think about the cause of the cultural disruption we have witnessed in 2020. “The explosive events of 2020 are but the latest eruption along a fault line running through our already unstable lives. That eruption exposes the threefold crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than half a century. Deprived of father, Father, and patrium [filial piety], a critical mass of humanity has become socially dysfunctional on a scale not seen before. Six decades of social science have established that the most efficient way to increase dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness. And this the United States has done, for two generations now. Almost one in four children today grows up without a father in the home. For African Americans, it is some 65 percent of children.”

In a recent article in The Atlantic, columnist David Brooks commented on the necessity of personal security for human flourishing to occur. Correctly, he observes the multi-faceted nature of “security.” It involves financial, emotional, social and personal identity categories, each of which demonstrates how complicated human beings are when it comes to what produces security in their lives.

How Americans view their history is important, for that narrative is what is taught in our schools and informs how we view current issues in their historical perspective. Until fairly recently, there was a consensus among most Americans about that narrative. No longer. There are at least two competing narratives that dominate America’s educational curriculums and the various media outlets.

When it comes to gender issues in Western Civilization, confusion reigns supreme. Arguably, the next dimension of the postmodern sexual revolution, indeed the next civil rights movement, is the transgender one. Kay Steinmetz of Time magazine writes, “Transgender people—those who identify with a gender other than the sex they were ‘assigned at birth,’ to use the preferred phrase among trans activists—are emerging from the margins to fight for an equal place in society.”

The late British theologian, J.I. Packer, reminds us of a profound truth: “Christians are not to think of themselves as ever at home in this world but rather as sojourning aliens, travelers passing through a foreign land to the place where their treasures are stored awaiting their arrival” (see 1 Peter 2:11; Matthew 6:19-20). We are citizens of Christ’s kingdom.

In early October 2020, Emmanuelle Charpentier (director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin) and Jennifer A. Doudna (professor at the University of California, Berkeley) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their 2012 work on Crispir-Cas9, a method to edit DNA. It was the first time the award went to two women. Their 2012 paper was a pioneering work on Crispr gene-editing.

The year 2020 has been an extraordinary year. For me as a Christian leader, two themes have dominated the complicated developments of 2020: Religious liberty issues inherent in a number of Supreme Court decisions and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.