All Lamb, No Lion: Why a Defanged Church Needs the Whole Christ Back

"You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?" - Matthew 5:13

"The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion." - Proverbs 28:1

In 1950, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (LWW) gave the English language one of its most beloved stories, and the culture received its Christ figure the way the author designed him. Seventy-six years later, the culture intends to rewrite him, and the church's response has been a round of angry posts.

The author was C.S. Lewis, a former atheist whose friends, J.R.R. Tolkien among them, argued him back to Christ. Lewis put that faith at the center of LWW's Narnia, and he was firm about it. Its central figure, Aslan, was Lewis's answer to what Christ might become in another world, made a lion as a nod to the Lion of Judah. And it's that image the world is now looking to defang.

Netflix's new adaptation keeps Aslan male, but redesigns him in the image of David Bowie, a rock icon whose fame was built on androgyny, and gives the voice that speaks Narnia into existence to Meryl Streep, who doesn't believe in the power of prayer and follows no doctrine. Remaking Lewis's Christ in the image of Bowie and handing His voice to someone who, by her own account, stands outside the faith is no accident.

"They exchanged the truth about God for a lie." - Romans 1:25

The Lion keeps his image and loses his purpose. It's like I wrote about in The Fourth Chair: keep the name, soften the authority, until the symbol no longer means what it meant. Netflix's Narnia is an allegory for how the church has defanged itself. Somewhere along the way, it became all Lamb and no Lion, and built an ecosystem where Satan could not only fill fourth chairs but strip Christians of their birthright.

"The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him." - Romans 8:16-17

The church, and Christianity writ large, has to stand firm with the Lion, who IS inherently important. The Lamb and the Lion are one Christ, and only valuable together. The Lamb's sacrifice matters because we are fallen, and it's the Lion's authority over truth and sin that makes that sacrifice necessary. That is why the Lion is intent on fulfilling the mission: bringing people back to salvation through the grace of Christ, which we do not deserve and cannot achieve ourselves. The Lion and that mission are the masculine part of the church. A church that gives them up doesn't influence the culture; it adopts the culture.

So how was the Lion defanged, and why did so many pulpits willingly go quiet? What has it cost the church body, and what does it mean to be Christian? And what will it take to breathe life back into the church?

The Cost of Sacrificing the Lion

"Fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes." - Nehemiah 4:14

The Lion wasn't taken from the church; the church gave him up. Somewhere along the way, faith became a private venture, kept out of cultural and political conversations and even out of the home, because a faith with teeth creates conflict and tension with the world. But Jesus never offered that option.

"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." - Matthew 10:34

And He told us what happens to a church that makes that trade: salt that loses its taste is "no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled." In the early 1990s, about 90% of American adults identified as Christian. Today it's 62%. In 1999, 70% of Americans belonged to a church; by 2020, it was 47%, the first time below half since Gallup began asking in 1937.

That's the church being thrown out.

The trampling has unfolded slowly, as the culture decayed around a church that had removed the Lion. First, faith in public became less acceptable: the share of Americans who feel their beliefs are at odds with mainstream culture rose from 42% to 58% in just five years. Then the rhetoric hardened, until openly Christian conservatives were routinely branded radical, fascist, hateful, and bigoted. And since at least 2018, the rhetoric has turned into action, with attacks on American churches climbing from 50 in 2018 to over 400 in 2024.

The outright violence is only part of the trampling. Institutional pressure has come with it:

• Children shot during Mass at a Catholic church in Minneapolis
• Charlie Kirk assassinated on a college campus
• An FBI memo that flagged traditionalist Catholics as potential violent extremists, later withdrawn after an inspector general found it improperly conflated religious belief with extremism
• Pro-life Christians prosecuted under the FACE Act, including Mark Houck, a Catholic father acquitted by a jury and later awarded a settlement of more than $1 million
• The federal government arguing a church could be sued over whom it chose as a minister, rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court
• The Little Sisters of the Poor, nuns who care for the elderly poor, forced to fight a federal contraception mandate all the way to the Supreme Court
• A high school football coach who lost his job for praying on the field, vindicated by the Supreme Court
• A Christian baker punished by a state commission the Supreme Court found showed hostility toward his faith

Meanwhile, radical and political Islam is met with the kind of feminine empathy Lamb-only Christians extend at their own expense. Ironically, that same grace is rarely extended to fellow believers. In fact, having given up the Lion, much of the church has now taken the world's side against him, and its harshest condemnation is often aimed at anything that reflects him: the masculine, the leader, the protector, and the fighter. The one who is meant to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil.

That condemnation doesn't stay in the abstract. It leaves real destruction and a real vacuum in its wake.

You can see it in the pews. Across 53 countries, Pew found 53% of Christian women attend weekly, compared with 46% of men. A Lamb-only church stripped out the mission and purpose men come looking for and replaced it with a softer, empathy-first faith. Jeremy Boreing, co-founder of The Daily Wire, an ordained minister who by his own account pastored a home church in Los Angeles for more than fifteen years, has named it plainly on his show: the feminization of the church. Grace was preached as though it asked nothing of the one receiving it. Salvation comes by grace through faith, not by works (Ephesians 2:8 to 9), but Scripture makes believers heirs only "provided we suffer with him." Take away the cost and you take away the calling, and a man with no calling has no reason to stay.

And yet the men are coming back. In 2025, a major survey of American churchgoers found 43% of men attending church weekly, compared with 36% of women, the largest gap on record, led by 46% of Gen Z men and 55% of Millennial men. I read that as a search for belonging in an increasingly atomized country. Since 1990, the share of men with at least six close friends has fallen from 55% to 27%, and the share with none has risen from 3% to 15%. These men aren't only looking for a belief. They're looking for brotherhood, structure, and a path to marriage and family, the very things the Lion calls them to.

But belonging can be counterfeited. Movements like the Groypers borrow Christian language and traditionalist symbols to organize young men around grievance and racial resentment. That's a fourth chair from the other direction: the name of Christ without His authority. The question isn't only whether men are coming back, but whether they find the Lion or an imitation of him.

The Pulpit That Muzzled the Lion

"Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort." - 2 Timothy 4:2

The easy answer is the law. Since 1954, the Johnson Amendment has threatened churches' tax-exempt status for endorsing political candidates. In reality, however, the IRS rarely enforced it against churches for what was said from the pulpit, and the church's real softening and decline didn't begin until decades later. What the law did was provide cover for a church already defanging itself to fit the world's view. The law is an excuse, not a reason.

The real pressure came from inside. Barna, a data research firm focusing on Christianity, found that half of pastors feel limited in speaking on moral and social issues because someone might take offense, and most say that pressure comes from within their own congregations. George Barna, the firm's founder, who now leads research at Arizona Christian University, found that 90% of theologically conservative pastors agree the Bible speaks to the key issues of the day, yet fewer than 10% say they'll teach on them. Add the fear of losing members, and with them the giving that keeps the doors open, and silence starts to look like stewardship. It isn't.

Sixty-two percent of Americans call themselves Christian, but George Barna's research finds just 4% hold a biblical worldview. Pastors softened the message to keep the many who claim the name, at the expense of the few who live it. In doing so, they filled the pews with second-chair Christians, who want faith nearby but never in charge, and built exactly the ecosystem the fourth chair needs to thrive. That's cutting off the nose to spite the face, and it's no longer a warning. Pastors and leaders abdicated their duty, and the church is now reaping what they sowed. Jesus told us exactly where it leads:

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven." - Matthew 7:21

Paul saw it coming, too. He warned Timothy that people would turn from sound teaching and, "having itching ears," gather teachers to suit their own passions (2 Timothy 4:3). But the question was never whether the room was ready. It was what God called the shepherd to do for his flock. The pulpits weren't silenced. They willingly moved from the Light to wither in the darkness of the world.

Now, the world will define the premise laid out here as Christians trying to control politics from the pulpit. But this was never about political power for its own sake. Salt doesn't exist to win elections; it exists to change what it touches. Voting is one of the plainest ways a Christian's faith touches the world around him, and that faith is the moral core not only of the church but of Western civilization itself. By that measure alone, the quiet pulpit has cost the church immeasurably. In George Barna's post-election survey, Christian turnout fell from 64% in 2020 to 56% in 2024, and the most common reason Christians gave for not voting was that they simply never got around to it. Only about half of churches even asked their people to vote. Pastors ranked last among nine influences on how Americans voted. In practice, indifference was taught, and it raised second-chair congregations.

If the shepherd won't speak from his position, why would the flock?

But the Lion cannot be silenced entirely. He will always find a way to be heard by ears that are open to listen.

"I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out." - Luke 19:40

The Lion has found those ears in the pews of churches whose pulpits still raise him, and increasingly outside the formal church altogether. Take Charlie Kirk, for example. He carried the faith onto the college campuses most pulpits had long since abandoned, and politics was his tool, never his god. Asked how he wanted to be remembered, he answered, "I want to be remembered for courage for my faith." He was killed doing exactly that, and I'm convinced it was for the very things he refused to stop saying. Boreing asked the question that should haunt every quiet pulpit: what were pastors doing while Charlie Kirk did their job?

Resurrecting the Lion

"Be strong and courageous... He will not leave you or forsake you." - Deuteronomy 31:6

For practicing Christians, the first step is admitting what Jesus and the Bible describe plainly: there is a spiritual battle, and Christians are called into it, whether they like it or not.

As Paul put it:

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but... against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." - Ephesians 6:12

Recently, Jonathan Pokluda, lead pastor of Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco and author of Your Story Has a Villain, a book on spiritual warfare, preached on Ephesians 6 as a call to preparation, not fear. Each piece of God's armor is something a believer has to understand and use: walk in truth, not feelings; guard your heart with righteousness, because the heart wants whatever it's fed; stand firm in faith; and fight with the only weapon Paul names, the Word.

That kind of preparation is exactly what a Lamb-only church never gives. Boreing called it the feminized church: comfort offered in place of readiness. Dallas-area pastor Josh Howerton has spent years making the opposite case, defending the Word without apology and arguing that Christians have been gaslit into staying out of the fight. That's why so many people feel the Lion's absence even when they can't name it. A Lamb-only faith tells them there's no war, then sacrifices them to it, unarmed and unprepared.

And yet the Overton window is beginning to shift. For thirty years, it moved away from the church. Now the Christian share of the country has held steady since 2019, and the share of Americans who say religion is gaining influence jumped from 20% to 34% in a single year. Young men are leading it. Gallup found that 42% of men ages 18 to 29 now say religion is very important to them, up from 28% just two years earlier. It's more renewed engagement than mass conversion, as researchers caution, but it's a hunger.

Nowhere was that hunger clearer than after Charlie Kirk was killed. The voice the world tried to silence on a college campus spread instead. Bible sales jumped 36% that September over the year before, and the head of HarperCollins Christian Publishing said Kirk's death "awakened a lot of people." Pastors across the country reported young adults walking back into churches they hadn't entered in years. The stones cried out. Men are looking for the Lion, even when they can't name him.

Lions in the Pulpit, Raising Lions to Light the World

"Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered." - Revelation 5:5

So what does this mean for Christians, and where does one start?

STEP ONE: Seek Churches That Hold the Whole Christ, Lion and Lamb. Look for biblical churches that don't shy away from Christ's call to carry the sword. In a recent episode of his Live Free podcast, Howerton described the American church as three circles: doctrinal churches built on the Word, attractional churches built to reach outsiders, and charismatic churches built on the power of the Holy Spirit. He isn't the first to see it. R.T. Kendall, longtime pastor of London's Westminster Chapel, has warned for decades of a "silent divorce" between the Word and the Spirit, and that genuine awakening won't come until the two are reunited. Paul described what that looks like: the gospel came "not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction" (1 Thessalonians 1:5). A Lamb-only church makes the same mistake as a divided one: it tries to separate what was never, and can never be, separate.

Paul asked, "Is Christ divided?" (1 Corinthians 1:13), and Scripture answers: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8).

A healthy church holds, values, and presents Christ as He said He is.

TWO - Keep the Lion's Authority, and Know Struggle From Surrender. Jesus loves every sinner, but He never lets sin become a home. When sin becomes identity, it stops being a struggle and becomes a refutation of Him, the world put in His place. To the woman caught in adultery, He said, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more" (John 8:11). The feminized church stops after the first sentence. It offers comfort, calls affirmation love, and avoids the "sin no more" that might cost it someone's approval. Jesus never did. Love and responsibility, in one breath. A church that offers only the first half isn't offering Jesus or representing Christianity at all. There is no "keep what you like, toss what you don't" version of the faith.

THREE - Find Lions, Raise Lions. Both in and outside of church. Find lions in the church and outside it. Be one in your family, and find others to build families with. It will cost more than a few uncomfortable conversations, but it leads somewhere atomization never can: to a full, joyful, meaningful life. It starts with church leaders and runs all the way down to the pews. Lead. Not with perfection, but with submission to Christ. Influence the world, or it will influence you.

FOUR - Be a Lion, Ready to Answer. That is what it means to be a Christian: not someone afraid he'll be asked to prove his faith, but someone ready for it. Peter told believers to always be prepared to give a reason for the hope within them (1 Peter 3:15).

Pokluda frames it this way: on a scale of 1 to 10, how certain are you that you'll go to heaven?

Anything less than a 10, he said, isn't ready for the battle Christians are in. A 10 isn't arrogance. It's trusting that God keeps His promises. Christians are heirs with Christ, provided they suffer with Him. You believe Him, or you don't.

When John is told to behold the Lion of Judah, he turns and sees a Lamb that was slain (Revelation 5:6). The Lion conquered as the Lamb, and the church was never meant to choose between them. It's the Lion's authority, His truth about sin, and His victory over it that give the Lamb's grace its intention and purpose.

Without the Lion, grace loses its meaning and becomes permission on the world's terms. And no son or daughter of God has permission to decide who He is based on their own comfort.

C.S. Lewis understood that. When the children in LWW ask whether Aslan is safe, Mr. Beaver tells them of course he isn't safe, but he's good. The same is true of Christ: never safe, always good. And when a young reader asked Lewis who Aslan was in our world, one of his clues was that He is "sometimes spoken of as a Lamb."

The church doesn't need less of the Lamb. It needs to be reunited with the Lion. It's time to end the silent divorce, so the light of the world can reach everyone God loves, and they may know Him.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." - John 3:16

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Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).

Researched and edited with the help of AI. The ideas, arguments, and convictions are my own. SEE MORE ON MY ABOUT ME PAGE