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(LifeSiteNews) — Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Van Maren Show. I’d like to wish all of the listeners a blessed New Year. This is our first show of the year.

So today I actually am not going to have on a guest. I just kind of want to take a look at where we are at the beginning of 2023.

One of the things that I want to take a look at briefly is just a cautionary note to those who are looking at emerging movements and thinking, “Oh, we can really win.” Because I think there are some issues where winning and where real victories are genuinely possible, and I think that the pro-life fight is certainly like that.

Here in Canada, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect we would get a law banning or even restricting abortion in the near term, possibly not in the long term. But every time we see somebody change their mind, every time we see somebody cancel their abortion (which we see happen very frequently), this victory is a total victory. It’s the victory in which somebody who was going to be killed and tossed out in a dumpster in pieces is now alive.

And so there are issues in which we can do tremendous things, things that are so impactful. It’s hard to fully recognize the sheer impact of saving five, 10, 15, 20, 100 babies from being dismembered, decapitated, and disemboweled by an abortionist. It’s why there’s the famous Jewish saying, “He who saves one life, saves the world entire.”

But there are other issues that I think it’s important for us: a) to fight on but b) to be realistic about the direction the overall culture is heading in. I’ve seen a lot of very encouraging think pieces over the last year-and-a-half, two years, declaring that wokeism has now peaked, that the progressive vandals demolishing Western Civilization are on the run. I think we saw with the U.S. midterm elections that that’s obviously not the case. Here in Canada, of course, Justin Trudeau in two consecutive elections has gotten fewer votes than the Conservative Party leader. At the same time, despite the radical social progressive agenda he has implemented, he has faced very little public backlash for that agenda.

And so although people might be a bit more reticent to say that the woke agenda is on the run, the reason I think it’s so important for us to be clear-eyed and realistic is to recognize that the way forward is going to be very much about building what are referred to as “thick communities,” being clear-eyed about the situation for Canadian churches and for American churches, about what we have to do in our families and in our broader communities, and to recognize that what we are talking about is an inter-generational fight, that we’re entering the post-Christian age and we’re in kind of this “pregnant widow” moment where we don’t know what comes next …

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