This False Religion Threatens Our Sustainable Freedom

Long-term sustainable freedom is at risk from the false religion of secularism, a religion in every respect. Secularists worship a deity and have their own tenets of faith, doctrine and ethical code, as do Christians: “One day they led Him up Calvary’s mountain/ One day they nailed Him to die on a tree/ Suffering anguish, despised and rejected/ Bearing our sins, my Redeemer is He/ Hands that healed nations, stretched out on a tree/ And took the nails for me.”

What’s happening in America comes down to a clash between two mutually exclusive religions: Christianity and secularism. Each is inherently broad, comprehensive and evangelistic, operating in proximity to each other. Yet, one is true and the other is false. Since secularism is false, its only chance of survival is to maintain a death-grip on the levers of power in regard to America’s cultural mountains of influence. The path to that power often leads through America’s youth. Still, a word from Jehovah, and its death-grip becomes a death rattle.

Secularism’s disciples maintain that their ideology connotes absence of religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such a self-deception will solely beguile the credulous and the ill-informed. It will also conceal secularism’s true nature and objectives. Secularism’s sectarians currently hold sway over the spiritual, intellectual, educational, economic, vocational and moral warp and weave of society.

“Culture is the public manifestation of religion,” insists Dr. Joseph Boot. “There is no culture, no society that is nonreligious. The first sign of a culture in decline is that it loses control of its young people.”

The aggrandizement of secularism has come at an astronomical cost: the ruination of a virtuous nation. Although never perfect, America’s founders were deeply intent on creating a righteous society. Today that dedicated endeavor has been adulterated with the pagan-infused fermentation of secularism, with its hard-to-miss devastating derivatives: academic failure, rampant drug use, violence, criminality, sexual deviance and fatherlessness, to name a few. The teaching of transgenderism to children attending kindergarten is part and parcel of the libertine hedonism advanced by secularists, with state-sponsored education presently holding the principal seat of idolatry in America’s every town and hamlet.

A pronounced recent example of similar idol worship that made headlines for days concerns the scurrilous “megan-o-mania” of some lesbian members of the U.S. Women’s World Cup soccer team. “Go gays!” blared U.K. newspaper The Guardian following USA’s World Cup women’s quarter-final defeat of France. “With homophobic attitudes on the rise in the U.S., the exploits of gay American heroes on the pitch in France are a welcome sight.”

As an aside, if homosexuality is indeed sin, isn’t then a call for tolerance by public education bureaucrats, television network executives, Hollywood hobnobs and the National Education Association greatly misplaced?

This sorry state of affairs has come to pass because contemporary Christianity has lost its way and its mission. It has changed from what Jesus said He would build—the ekklesia, namely how faith is to be applied beyond the four walls of the church building—to something heretical and beyond recognition.

According to A.W. Pink in Gleanings From Joshua, conflict is God’s perpetual ordinance in both Old and New Testament: “It would indeed be strange if we apprehended how that on the one hand Canaan was a free gift unto Israel, which they entered by grace alone; and on the other that they had to fight for every inch of it!”

Dr. Bruce K. Waltke’s 2002 Christian Book of the Year, Genesis, provides doctrinal interpretation: “The serpent’s final defeat under Messiah’s heel (Genesis 3:15) is delayed to effect God’s program of redemption through the promised offspring. In the interim, God leaves Satan to test the fidelity of each succeeding generation of the covenant people (Judges 2:22) and teach them to fight against untruth (Judges 3:2).”

The drama surrounding the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup highlights the battle in other ways. Mass media’s adulation of Megan Rapinoe was over the top; that is, to all but viewership. “Women’s World Cup Final viewership cut nearly in half as more clips of obnoxious, egocentric antics roll in,” headlined BPR Business and Politics.

“According to numbers out Monday, nearly 10 million fewer American viewers on average tuned in for this year’s historic FIFA Women’s World Cup Final than tuned in when the U.S. team went up against and defeated Japan in the otherwise equally historic 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final,” writes BPR. “The audience was down 43.8 percent from the 2015 final between the U.S. and Japan, which averaged 25.4 million viewers. … While the AP seemed to suggest that time differences may have played a role in this notable discrepancy, others believe the true culprit was the U.S. women’s soccer team stunning arrogance, ego, obnoxiousness and anti-Americanism.”

How can secularism’s long march through America’s once-Christian institutions, public schools, universities, press and media, and world of entertainment be halted?

“Could it be that we have confined to four walls once a week what is designed to be a 24/7 people movement out in the marketplace, transforming our cities and nations?” asks Ed Silvoso, to continue by adding: “Ekklesia is specifically empowered to disciple and to transform them. Businesses, schools and governments, injected with the leaven of the kingdom of God, are experiencing what until now was conceived as possible only inside the four walls of the church.” Jesus’ ekklesia directive “looks like a church, walks like a church and does things that a church does, but in the marketplace.”

As we have moved away from the model that Jesus promulgated—the ekklesia (Matt. 16:18), Christians operating in the secular arena—we have sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind (see Hos. 8:7a).

“The first sign of a culture’s decline is that it loses control of its young people, because education cannot be neutral, it is a field of conflict, a battle for the minds of the young and a dispute regarding the shape of the future; it is a conflagration in which there can be no neutrality,” says Joseph Boot.

Upon anything less than Christians returning to America’s public square, revived with the determination that drove the founders to Jamestown in 1607—”… to reach the People within these shores with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to raise up Godly generations after us, and with these generations take the Kingdom of God to all the earth,”—and America as we know it may cease to exist.

Retaking the public square and public education will require weapons of warfare that are spiritual rather than material.

The jury is out on the future of Western culture as of this writing.

God be praised that Gideons and Rahabs are beginning to stand.