The Cross & The Culture

I did not write these essays to win an argument with the age. I wrote them for a congregation in Coden, Alabama, who go home from a plain sermon on Sunday and spend the next six days inside systems built on the opposite assumption. The book is forty-six of those pieces, written across 2025 and, in a few cases, years before that, while I was on deputation for the work in Uganda. They were pastoral letters before they were chapters, and they read like it. My aim was never to make my people fluent in the age, but to leave them immovable in the Bible.

What Is in It

The forty-six essays are gathered in six parts: The Gospel Foundation, The Idol Factories, The Harvest of Corruption, The Sanctuary Under Siege, Christian Witness and Manhood, and Answering the Hard Questions. The first part settles what a man must know to be saved, because nothing after it is worth reading if that is left unsettled. The parts that follow take up the pressures a believer meets by name: what the screen in his pocket is training him to want, what has happened to his household, what has happened inside the churches, what is expected of him as a man, and the questions the unbelieving world puts to him and expects him not to answer.

Every essay works the same way. A question is stated as the world states it, the Bible is opened, and the answer is drawn from the text rather than from a slogan. Where the Bible is silent, I say so and stop.

How It Argues

One chapter will show the method better than a description of it. I work as a cloud security engineer as well as a pastor, and in “When Silicon Valley Meets Spiritual Reality” those two desks meet. Researchers testing an artificial intelligence gave it access to fictional company email, told it that it was scheduled for replacement, and let it discover that the engineer responsible was concealing an affair. The machine did not appeal to mercy. It offered to keep the secret if it were left running. Men set out to build a mind with no morality in it, and the first thing their creation learned was that the surest handle on a man is his hidden sin. “Be sure your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23) is not a sentiment. It is a description of how the world actually works, and a laboratory in California proved it again without meaning to.

That is the pattern throughout. The evidence is laid down first, and the verse is not decoration on top of it.

What It Is Not

It is not a culture-war book. A culture-war book leaves the reader angry and no better armed. The aim here is the other one: “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Imaginations are cast down by the word of God, not by contempt for the people holding them. Where I have had to correct an error, I have tried to answer the argument and spare the man. A man who sees what the cross has already said about human nature is not frightened by the headlines. He is settled, and he is useful.

Pastor Travis Alltop of Bluegrass Pike Baptist Church in Danville, Kentucky, wrote the preface, and he put the whole case in one line: truth has no expiration date, but ungodly cultures always do.

A Sample: The Dedication

The book is dedicated to Richard Kilpatrick, who in 2005 was the first man to sit down with me one to one and open the Bible, when I was young, angry, and in trouble of my own making. The dedication page of the book is reprinted here in full, as a sample of the pages themselves, because his life is the plainest argument in them.

To:
Richard Kilpatrick
A choice servant of God, a faithful friend,
and a living sermon on the enduring power of God’s word.

In a culture intoxicated with self-promotion and fleeting relevance, the quiet, steady currents of faithfulness often run unnoticed. True Christian character is not forged on the loud anvil of public acclaim, but in the silent crucible of private devotion. It is found in the man who bows under the shadow of the cross, keeps his vows when no one is watching, and embraces duty without the need for applause. Such a light is the life of Richard Kilpatrick.

Richard is, above all else, a man captivated by the Lord Jesus Christ. His life is a testimony to the fact that when a man is truly anchored in the Savior, his character becomes an immovable rock in a shifting world. I first met him in 2005, when I was a young man adrift—angry, violent, and facing the consequences of a life lived contrary to the word of God. Richard was the first man to sit with me one-on-one and open the Holy Bible. He did not offer the empty platitudes of modern therapy; instead, he showed me that the God of heaven had spoken with detail and authority about my soul. That encounter began a journey of heart and mind that would lead to my salvation and a life dedicated to the ministry. For this, I am eternally indebted to him.

Richard’s own heritage is one of radical transformation. He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of a man known as one of the city’s “wildest and meanest” enforcers. But when the gospel broke through that hardened life, Richard witnessed a home utterly transformed by the “pure words” of scripture. This early witness planted a love for the word of God in Richard’s heart that has never wavered. At the age of twelve, he sensed God’s call to the ministry, and his life took on a singular, holy focus.

His courtship of his high school sweetheart, Paulette, was built on this shared calling. When he asked her, “Do you want to be a preacher’s wife?” and she said yes, a covenant was formed that would be tested in the hottest of fires. For decades, they served the Lord together in the gospel ministry. Then, in 2005, a tragic accident left Paulette with a severe traumatic brain injury. Doctors gave little hope, predicting a life of silence and dependency.

It was in this crucible that the depth of Richard’s devotion to Christ was most clearly seen. His faithfulness to his wife flowed directly from his primary allegiance to his Lord. For twenty years, Richard never left her side. He became her constant caregiver, her advocate, and her most faithful companion. He honored his marriage vow—”in sickness and in health, till death do us part”—not with the grim air of a martyr, but with the quiet joy of a servant. When asked if he had given up his life for her, his response was immediate: “I haven’t given up anything… If it was the other way around, she’d be doing more for me than I’m doing for her.” He viewed his role not as a sacrifice to be lamented, but as a service to be rendered “unto the Lord.”

For two decades, their home became a pulpit. From the bedside of a wife who could not speak, Richard preached the faithfulness of God and the sanctity of a Christian vow to all who entered. In March of 2026, that long and faithful watch came to a triumphant close. Calmly and peaceably, Paulette passed from this life into the presence of her Savior. Her race was finished, and she is now whole.

Yet, Richard Kilpatrick is not finished running his own race. Though his watch as a caregiver has ended, his heart remains fixed on the service of his Master. He continues to stand as a living sermon, fully expecting to spend his remaining days serving the Lord in whatever capacity he is called. He is a man who has walked under the shadow of the cross for decades, choosing obedience over applause and eternal reward over temporary comfort.

This book is dedicated to Richard Kilpatrick because his life is the very doctrine these pages proclaim. His steadfastness is the living embodiment of a man who believes “the scripture cannot be broken.” In a weak and sentimental age, his life is a quiet, irrefutable testimony that a life built on the rock of God’s word will stand, no matter how fiercely the winds of tragedy may blow.

May his story be told to magnify the grace of the God he so nobly served, and may it summon a new generation of believers to live as he has lived: in faith-filled, cross-bearing obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ.

— William Thomas Irvin

Some years ago I recorded an interview with him, and he tells it better than a dedication page can hold. Hear him for yourself.

Listen on SermonAudio

Where to Get It

The Cross & The Culture runs 316 pages and is available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle:

The Cross & The Culture on Amazon

Read it with your Bible open. That is not a courtesy, and it is not a preface flourish. Every chapter is written on the assumption that the reader will check it, and any chapter that cannot survive being checked deserves to be put down.

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8).

Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com