Skillet frontman John Cooper has received praise from Kirk Cameron, Eric Metaxas, Dr. Michael Brown, Frank Turek, and others for his new book “WIMPY WEAK AND WOKE – How Truth Can Save America from Utopian Destruction,” which released today (Nov. 14).
Cooper told ChurchLeaders that although his book’s title might give someone the sense that he is merely attempting to rile Christians up, he is taking a stand because he feels “we are in dire straits” and he cares “about people, their eternal state, and the suffering of mankind.”
“I don’t think the average person quite understands that we really are on the precipice of a civilizational turn of events,” Cooper added, “a civilization crisis,” to be more specific, “that is going to make it so difficult to live, that is going to be making difficult to preach the gospel, and that is going to have worse outcomes for everybody”—Christians and non-Christians alike.
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Cooper said that the book has over 645 footnotes and digs into what postmodernism really is so that readers will understand just how incongruent it is with the worldview of Christianity.
“We are living in a time where the culture in our nation is influencing the church in America more than the church is influencing the culture,” Cooper said. “I think that a lot of our institutional church leaders have done nothing but bash the Christian culture where in.”
In other words, “I believe that we are falling off of a cliff into the abyss, and I think that the institutional church leaders are driving the bus,” Cooper said. “They have this idea of this therapeutic Jesus that was a hippie, who was Mr. Nice Guy and Mr. Tolerance, and they’re just driving us off the cliff…And whenever somebody speaks the truth, those Christian leaders come out and typically rebuke them.”
Cooper said that church leaders who have chosen to remain silent regarding the sin present their churches are sinning by not calling people to repentance.
“They’re supposed to be training his sheep and teaching his sheep and caring for his sheep. Part of caring for the sheep is teaching the sheep how to please God,” Cooper said. “I mean, that’s their whole job.”
Many pastors are “swallowing the oppressor/oppressed narrative by not actually just saying what is true,” Cooper said, expressing his belief that the “only reason you wouldn’t say what’s true is because you feel like it’s a little bit mean. And if the truth is mean, that would mean that God is mean—which would make God the ultimate oppressor in the situation—and he would never want somebody to be unhappy.”
“We say these dumb things, like, that aren’t biblical ways to think,” he added. “Therefore, I think that their silence is sin. I mean, what they are creating is basically a church that really is not different than the world.”
