The purpose of Mohler’s book is to identify how secularization has impacted various parts of society. He wants Christians to see the reality of it, then to consider how to stand strong, how to exercise moral courage, and how to honor God as the storm gathers. “One of Winston Churchill’s great virtues was his ability to see the storm and then to summon the courage and conviction to go into the storm. That is the challenge faced by Christians in the United States today—to see the storm and to understand it, and then to demonstrate the courage to face the storm.”
If you know much of anything about Albert Mohler, you’ll probably be quick to understand the title of his new book, The Gathering Storm. Mohler is a lifelong student of Winston Churchill and has borrowed the title from the first volume of Churchill’s massive work on the Second World War. However, he hasn’t merely borrowed the title, but also the central argument: “the first task of faithfulness lies in understanding reality. Understanding the storm and seeing it for what it is turns out to be a necessary first step.” But where Churchill was writing about the gathering storm of Naziism on the European continent, Mohler is focused on the gathering storm of secularism in Western society. Hence where Churchill’s book was summarized as “how the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to return,” Mohler’s is subtitled “Secularism, Culture, and the Church.”
Through his books, writing, and daily The Briefing podcast, Mohler spends much of his life examining and interpreting the intersection of church and culture. He, like many others, is concerned about the increasing and increasingly-obvious secularization of the Western world though, as an American, the United States is his first and greatest interest. But as he shows, what happens elsewhere does impact America, for “Americans had long believed that we were an exceptional nation and that secularization was a European reality, not ours. We can afford that illusion no longer.
