Rebuilding Christendom and the Consideration of the Alternative

Rebuilding Christendom and the Consideration of the Alternative

As we slowly, but I trust surely, rebuild Christendom, i.e., push back and defeat secularism, Christians and the church in general need to rebuild the Christian plausibility structures of Western society. I recently wrote about the role Jordan Peterson is playing in doing just that. Few of us have the kind of platform Peterson does and can make such a sizable contribution, but each one of us has our own sphere of influence, and every piece of the plausibility puzzle matters, even the smallest piece. What exactly, you may ask, is a plausibility structure, and why is it so important? Good questions.

The term was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his books, The Social Construction of Realty (with Thomas Luckman) and The Sacred Canopy. As a sociological construct (i.e., what it means to live with and among human beings and the culture and meanings they create), it simply means what seems true to us, and the social structures that contribute to that seeming. A simple example is that for many of our neighbors, God seems no more real than Santa Clause  Whether God is real is not the point; what seems real is.

Society creates the plausibility structures that contribute to God and Christianity being plausible to us, or not. These structures are built into our educational systems, media, entertainment, etc. In the West, God is persona non‑grata, unwelcome; if he exists at all he is merely a personal preference. We call this secularism, and our job is to discredit the secular plausibility structures, and put Christian ones in their place. God has been providentially ordering this to happen since, as I argue in my latest book, Trump came down the escalator in 2015, but this started happening before Trump. One could date it to the election of Barack Obama and the takeover of the Democrat Party by the woke left. With him, the media went all in with Fake News, and the security apparatus of the deep state, and its bureaucratic minions became tools in the hands of the party. The reactions of the Tea Party were the rumblings of the awakening, but they were stillborn because those patriots were a threat to Uniparty globalist establishment in power, Democrat and Republican.

As I also argue in the book, secularism is an experiment in society without God in Western culture, and it has failed, miserably. It has nowhere to go. And as nature abhors a vacuum, something must fill the plausibility hole left in its wake. That would be Christianity. What Trump, or the reaction to Trump, exposed was how brittle a veneer secularism is to hold a society together  in a post-Christian world. Thus the opportunity and need to re-Christianize the culture.

This rebuilding and tearing down of plausibility structures must first, of course, start with us, then our families, then out from there (my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, is how I did that with my children) . This means we have to know not only what we believe, but why we believe it. The latter is what we call apologetics, the defense of the Christian faith. The word and the charge to do this comes from I Peter 3:15:

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.

The word for “answer” in Greek is apologia, which means a reasoned argument or defense that presents evidence supplied as compelling proof. Ancient Greek lawyers used apologia when defending a client in court. I wonder how many Christians are actually “prepared” to give an answer as to why they believe Christianity is the truth. I’m afraid it is not very many, but that is why we ourselves need to become prepared, and to encourage others to as well. You are now officially encouraged!

The Consideration of the Alternative
Thus we come to the purpose for this piece, the consideration of the alternative, probably my favorite apologetics tool. I realized how powerful it is using it on myself over the years as I dealt with the inevitable doubt that comes from faith. I’ll get more into faith later as I flesh out that concept, but there were times in my four plus decade Christian journey when Christianity didn’t seem so plausible to me. Over time I began to realize an inevitable conclusion that comes from doubt: if one thing isn’t true, something else has to be. First for the concept. Tim Keller in The Reason for God points out something so obvious I wondered why I had never thought of it myself:

But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternative beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B.

As I began to understand the inevitability of having to choose one belief or another in life, it slowly dawned on me how important it is for defending the veracity of Christianity. This comes down to an issue of epistemology, of knowing, which we’ll discuss, but think about it. I have a choice to believe or trust in almost every encounter in life. I can choose to either trust the doctor, or not. When I go to the store and buy food or go to a restaurant, I can choose to believe the food is safe and won’t harm me, or not. When I drive, I can choose to believe the other drivers will abide by the rules of the rode or not. In any case, we can never be absolutely certain, the importance of which we’ll get into shortly.

But before we get there, prior to understanding all this this, I went through a period of what I call plausibility insanity in my Christian journey when I could almost see why not believing in God was plausible to some people. By this time I’d been a Christian for over 30 years, and you would think I would have a solid grasp on why I believed in it, but I hadn’t studied apologetics since my seminary days when I was in my 20s, and at that time I’m around the half-century mark. In 2009 after a pathetic apologetics experience with a co-worker, and I was really bad, I decided I had to get back into it, and started listening and reading everything I could get my hands on. But a plausibility structure isn’t built overnight, thus the insanity.

For example, I would be in church seeing people praying and singing hymns and wonder if they were just doing that to the air. Mind you, intellectually I absolutely believed Christianity was truth, and materialistic atheism was not, but we’re talking about plausibility here and what seems real, not what we believe is real. The question is, of course, is it real. Does God exist, and is Christianity the truth, or not. There is no in between. The choice is binary as we say nowadays, either/or. Another question logically, inevitably follows from this, one very few have considered: If Christianity isn’t true, then what is? Something has to be true about the nature of reality, so we are forced to deal with “the consideration of the alternative.” What exactly would that be. Ther are, as we know, many alternatives, but not as many as we think.

Let’s Consider the Alternatives
I’ve come across skeptics who will trot out the well-worn line that there are thousands of religions so who are you to say yours is the only absolute truth. Well, I didn’t say is it. Jesus, the foundation upon which Christianity is built, said it. And the Bible from beginning to end means to be taken as the ultimate truth about the nature of things. So, what are the alternatives to Christianity? Starting with the big picture, there are only three: theism, atheism, and pantheism. Every religion falls under one of these three. I will share how I deal with each one.

Atheism, which simply means the material is all that exists, is the least plausible of the three. Whenever I wonder if it’s all real, I simply look outside and think to myself, “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is a product of chance. Impossible!” Is it really plausible that everything we see and experience is the result of a mindless, purposeless, cosmic accident, matter in motion crashing into itself to create . . . . all of it? Really? The human heart, the human brain, the human nervous and immune system, all merely a product of chance, a cosmic accident. I know instantly that is absurd, which is why there are so very few atheists in the world. It takes far more faith, a Grand Canyon sized leap of faith, to believe the atheist worldview than to believe in the all-powerful Creator God of the Bible.

Pantheism, from a definition in Britannica, is

the doctrine that the universe conceived of as a whole is God and, conversely, that there is no God but the combined substance, forces, and laws that are manifested in the existing universe.

Thus the universe, as in atheism, is impersonal. Which is odd when you think about it because how could a universe have a world filled with persons itself be impersonal? This would mean that everything is God, the rat, the tree, the spider, the sun, the moon, the stars, you, me, the dirt, all of it. Animism is a form of pantheism in that all things are imbued with some kind of spiritual essence, although impersonal. African and native American religions, for example, were animistic, but Africa is now becoming maybe the most Christian continent on earth. Pantheism is the least credible of alternatives to modern westerners.

Theism is really the only game in town. Of the varieties of theism, we can cross polytheism off the list from the start. The ancient Greeks and Romans blew that up, and when Alfred the Great defeated the pagan Viking heathens from the north, paganism finally died in Western culture. It seems, however, that the Hindus didn’t quite get the message, but our discussion is specifically in the context of Western civilization, and thus Hinduism doesn’t qualify, although it is indeed as discredited as the polytheism of old. We can also cross off the list the seemingly infinite variations of religions that pilfer from Christianity. As I say in my book, Uninvented, everyone wants a piece of Jesus. Sorry, you can’t have him! Why should I trust Mohamed, the bloodthirsty raider who came 600 years after Christ, more than the Apostles? I won’t. Another of the ancient theistic religions that doesn’t steal from Christ is Zoroastrianism because it developed in Persia five centuries before Christianity, but it too has no appeal in the West, and doesn’t make claims to ultimate universal truth as does Christianity.

What is most fascinating about every other religion, and philosophy for that matter, save Christianity and Judaism, is that none gives us any kind of plausible explanation as to where evil comes from. For most of them, it just is, now we have to figure out a way to deal with it.  None of the answers are satisfying because they don’t deal with the central issue, man’s rebellion against his Creator. Man’s nature, who he is in his fundamental being, is the problem, not his circumstances or others, but himself. Every other religion or philosophy seeks to change man’s behavior or thoughts, but can’t change his being, his natural inclination to sin, to do wrong. Only God in Christ promises by His power and initiative to do that, to change our sinful rebellious hearts of stone to flesh, that we might be born anew with the ability to change what we do and think because God Himself in Christ has changed who we are. As Paul says, when we are “in Christ” we are a “new creation, the old has gone, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17)

Nothing else satisfies our deepest plausibility need, the thing we can grab on to which seems real, which makes sense of everything, like Christ. A C.S. Lewis quote I use all the time says it perfectly:

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Jesus of Nazareth is the reason Judaism by itself can’t claim the mantel of ultimate truth because it’s a story without an ending, and that ending is Christ. All of Isreal’s religion and history pointed forward to him, as Jesus himself told us after he rose from the dead (Luke 24).

Epistemology, Faith and Doubt: It’s All About Trust
This is the title of a section of my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, because what we know, why we know, how we know, are all important in raising our children in the faith, thus epistemology, or the study of that knowing. Rene Descartes wrote in the 17th century that absolute certainty was attainable by reason alone, but that proved as attainable to catch as Moby Dick, and as dangerous to try. When reason was exalted over revelation, knowing became the Holy Grail. Prior, philosophers had started their quest with being or ontology, and thus God and metaphysics came first. Now with the knower, man, coming first over his Creator, epistemology dominated intellectual discourse. God slowly became irrelevant because fallen man will always tend toward Babel if he doesn’t start with the God revealed to us in Scripture and creation.

Faith and doubt are an inescapable part of knowing because to know something requires faith to know it. As finite creatures absolute knowing is a chimera, an illusion which far too many think is possible. Yet how many people believe they have attained absolute certainty a la Descartes? One is too many, but alas they sprout like weeds in an untended garden. We can know things. Knowledge in Scripture, being able to know and trust what we know, is assumed throughout, but what I’m challenging is a specific definition of knowing: that to “know” a thing is to be absolutely certain about it, and that we can only “know” via our reason.

Which brings us to faith, a concept that is not intrinsically religious. All human beings utilize faith every day, or they wouldn’t get out of bed. It basically means trust, and when we exercise faith we generally do it with justified warrant. That is, there is enough evidence to justify putting my trust in something or someone. Since we are finite, limited in every way, human reason is incapable of achieving knowledge of an absolute sort. Much of what we “know” is not the result of some kind of logical process, deduction like a syllogism, or rigorous inductive reasoning. What we “know” can’t be proved in the final analysis. Rather what we “know” must be accepted by faith, which is warranted trust based on evidence. When we get right down to it, faith, and the acceptance of its inevitability in life, is to pay homage to our finitude. But human beings are not fond of admitting they are finite.

This refusal to accept our created nature makes perfect sense in light of what we read in the first few chapters of Genesis. We learn that our Creator is God and that we are not (shocking to some, I know). We learn that the fall from our esteemed created state was instigated by the temptation of wanting to be like God, to usurp his place as the one who defines reality, good and evil. The first temptation of man, that which caused all the suffering, misery, and death, was epistemological. The insistence that we ought to have absolute certainty and that we can reason our way to perfect knowledge, is an indication that we are by nature rebels who refuse to accept that we are contingent beings. We are dependent on God, as the Apostle Paul told the Greek philosophers in Acts 17, for life, breath, and everything else. That pretty much covers it all, including our knowing. Thus I conclude, we ought to pray for epistemological humility, which as we learn from I Corinthians 8, is knowing exercised in love for the service of others.

To a Thousand Generations: The Triumph of the Covenant

To a Thousand Generations: The Triumph of the Covenant

I was born and raised a Catholic which was my religious life until I went away to college at 18 and was born-again into an Evangelical and Protestant faith bearing little resemblance to Catholicism. The primary reason I embraced this new version of Christianity was because I learned the Bible stated clearly, many times, I could be assured when I die I would go to heaven, that such assurance was mine if I trusted in Christ. How come, I wondered, I’d never been told this in my 18 years as a Catholic. The fear of going to hell when I died was a very real presence in my life, and as I understood the Catholic faith I could not have assurance of my salvation. When I learned of this I was not a happy camper, and became virulently anti-Catholic for a number of years.

I was born-again into a typically Baptist environment of the 1970s “Jesus Revolution,” and like my boomer brothers and sisters was dunked and re-baptized because I guess I thought the first one didn’t take, or something. Being a Baptist was among the anti-Catholic responses of my young faith, and baptizing babies made no sense to me, or any sense to anyone I associated with in the first five years and four months of my Christian life. Then by God’s wonderful providence, I met a man named Steve Kennedy. One evening I went to his house in Newport Beach to meet him for the first time, and he introduced me to Reformed Theology. He would become a mentor of mine, and change the course of my young life (I have a wife and three children and two and a half grandchildren because of this secondary cause). I could accept TULIP, that made sense, but baptizing babies? No way! That was Catholic!

One Sunday morning not too long after I met Steve I went to a Reformed Baptist church, of course, and it so happens, also in God’s wonderful providence, they were doing a baby dedication that morning. I had learned from Steve the biblical concept of covenant, something rarely discussed in the non-Reformed circles I’d been involved in. As they were dedicating their babies a thought unbidden crashed into my brain; they are treating their children as strangers to the covenant! And it ticked me off. I have no idea where the thought came from, but it was powerful and I was instantly converted to paedobaptism. I could see in an instant that the faith of our fathers was, is, and always would be a generational faith. The Lord thought this idea was important enough that just prior to the Israelites going into the promised land after 40 years wandering in the wilderness, He felt the need to emphasize the specifically generational nature of the faith. We read this in Deuteronomy 7:9, and there are many more, but this specific verse gives us the practically eternal nature of His covenant faithfulness:

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.

If a generation is 20 years, that would be 20,000 years! We’re just getting started!

The Bible teaches us that baptism, and this includes baptizing babies, is more about God’s covenant faithfulness than it is about our personal decision to trust Christ. As the Westminster Confession says, it is a “sign and seal of the covenant of grace” (28). When Christ came, God’s covenant promises didn’t all of a sudden become solely focused on individuals, but were now capable of being fulfilled to the generations because of what he accomplished on the cross. Jews in the first century, including Jesus, were incapable of seeing their ancient faith in individualistic baptistic terms because God’s covenant promises to His people was always about “you and your children” (Acts 2:39). Our generational faith is rooted in the concept of covenant.

The Centrality of Covenant in Biblical Religion
I can say this with absolute certainty: There is nothing as important in the redemptive history found in our Bibles as the covenant. There is actually more than one, but they are subsumed in the ultimate covenant of redemption made between the Triune God in eternity past. Jesus in John 6 gives us a glimpse of what happened in this covenant when he says:

38 For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.

Jesus was given his name (Matt. 1:21) to accomplish what he shares with us here, that “he will save his people from their sins.” His people, the ones he will save from their sins, are the people God the Father gave the Son in eternity past, specifically to raise them up at the last day. Those given by the Father will believe in the Son, will come to faith in him. You can theologically call this whatever you like, but I call it biblical, and it is bound up in God’s covenant promises revealed to us in redemptive history.

I will contrast the biblical concept of covenant with the primary competing alternative in the modern West, secularism, later, but its centrality to redemptive history happens immediately after the fall in Genesis 3. When Adam and Eve rebelled and introduced sin and all its consequences into the world God reveals that the solution to this catastrophe has already been put in place, and notice who is calling the shots:

15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.

I like the NIV using “crush” for the second “strike” but the Hebrew uses the same word. Clearly, striking a head will be more damaging than striking a heal, and ultimately cause fatal damage. We also learn from this promise of God that humanity will be divided into two mutually exclusive camps, the offspring or seed of the woman, and the offspring of the serpent. As much as we might not like the implications, this was all determined before God even created the world, and we’re playing our part in this cosmic drama.

The covenant next appears with Noah in Genesis 9:

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Although this isn’t specifically a promise related to salvation from sin, notice again it is to Noah and his descendants, as are all the covenant promises of God to His people.

God’s covenant implementation starts in earnest with Abram in Genesis 12 when He calls him out of his homeland to another land and that he will make him “into a great nation.” The covenant will be made official in chapter 15, but in chapter 13 showing Abram the land he will inherit he says to him:

16 I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.

The promise, the covenant, is always to Abram and his offspring. In chapter 15 the Lord promises Abram that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars in the sky, and then he performs a very strange ceremony to modern sensibilities to confirm the covenant with Abram. Covenants were legal agreements in the ancient world with blessings and curses as stipulations, shown vividly in this ceremony. The strange thing about this ceremony isn’t just animals being cut in half, which was common at the time indicating that if the stipulations were not followed, may that party end up like the animals. What was strange is that the Lord in the ceremony indicated he would be responsible for both sides of the agreement. It was a unilateral covenant for two parties because man could never hold up his end of the agreement.

In chapter 17 the Lord confirms his covenant with Abram through the sign and seal of circumcision and changes his name to Abraham. The key point is that God’s covenant promise to Abraham is generational:

Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. 10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised.

When Isaac is born, the Lord puts Abraham to the ultimate test asking him to sacrifice his son, his only son, and when he passes the test by completely trusting the Lord in the face of such an absurdity the covenant is yet again confirmed:

17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

The Lord confirms his covenant with Isaac and Jacob, and the details yet again make the point that God’s covenant promises have always been, and continue to be, generational. This did not stop with the New Covenant. As I quoted Peter above, it is and always will be, “to you and your children.”

The Appeal of the Redemptive Covenant Story to the Next Generation
All Christians of whatever theological tradition want to pass their faith on to the next generation and generations to come, but this isn’t happening to the extent it should be. Thus the rise some years back of the “nones,” those who pick “None of the above” when asked on surveys about their religion. This is unacceptable. Why is it happening? When I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, starting in 2015, the “nones” were big news. When I read my first story of what we now call a “deconversion,” I was livid. How in the world, I thought, could the competing faith of secularism, a life where God is secondary or not welcome at all, be more appealing to young people raised in Christian homes than Christianity? If we can’t sell our children on the attractiveness of the Christian story, something is wrong. Or we’re not trying, thinking their faith will take care of itself. Many parents take their children to church and assume that will take care of them, but it won’t. As I title the first section of my book, “It’s All About Parents.” We determine whether their faith is generational or not. And for those who don’t like the sound of that, we are as responsible in our lives as God is sovereign over them. How do we do that?

The answer is actually quite simple. It’s all about the story. Apologetics, or defending the veracity of Christianity is crucial, but that is all part of helping them see the grand narrative structure of the story we as Christians are part of. Every human being whether they consciously think about it or not, and most don’t, see themselves as part of some kind of narrative, a story arc, that gives meaning to their existence. In the 21st century post-Christian West the competing story is a ubiquitous all pervasive secularism. Either we sell our children on God’s covenant story in history, or the secular culture will sell them on its story. And the secular culture is selling them twenty-four/seven. Thankfully, the secular story is weak and pathetic, but it’s up to us as parents to make the case to our children, and it’s a very easy case to make.

Since the so-called Enlightenment, Western civilization has had two diametrically opposed origin stories, and thus two ways to read history. As rationalism ascended post Descartes in the mid-1600s, and God was relegated to the fringes of society as persona non grata (an unwelcome presence), there needed to be some other plausible account of things. The most common question in all of human history, why? will be asked and must have an answer, even if it’s one as absurd as everything came from nothing for no reason at all. Enter Satan’s greatest post-fall invention into the stream of history, Charles Darwin and his 1859 Origin of species. It’s brilliant! Perfect, really. As atheist Richard Dawkins said one hundred and fifty years later, evolution has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist—albeit a deluded one. But the insidious beauty of Darwinian evolution was that in the 19th century it was a plausible explanation for heathens who insisted man gets to be his own god. Looked at from the scientific knowledge of 2024, however, and it is almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic.

Survival of the fittest was sinful man’s attempt to imbue life with meaning, hope, and purpose where it inherently has none. Without God the Creator, all we are is star dust, a chance collocation of meaningless atoms, so much lucky dirt, a little more than mere animals who by some freak chance of “natural” selection can talk and think. We have to make our own meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe, between two poles of meaninglessness, as the Great RC Sproul put it, where we came from, meaningless, and where we’re going, meaningless, back to dust. We have to build our hope on circumstances we think we’ll like, and create purpose in trying to attain them, all the while knowing we are hurdling toward inevitable death, turning into the dust from which we came. How inspiring! Life is basically a Woody Allen movie. One of my favorite scenes is in his 1986 hit movie Hannah and Her Sisters. Allen, unsurprisingly, plays a hypochondriac and he’s convinced he has brain cancer. This scene on the sidewalk is right after the doctor gives him a clean bill of health. He’s skipping and jumping saying he’s not going to die, then it hits him.

Woody Allen movies were a great apologetics tool I used with my children as they were growing up. We can have Christianity, which gives our lives real meaning, hope, and purpose, and it also happens to be true, or secularism which promises everything and delivers nothing, and to add insult to injury, it’s a lie. Life becomes a Woody Allen movie, ending either in despair or mostly resignation.

The Christian covenant story, by contrast, of God working out his purposes for our lives, and our children’s lives, and the world’s redemption is epic. And as they said in the old boomer movie days in the 60s, it’s in technicolor! I could write and talk for days about the meaning, hope, and purpose Christianity gives our lives, but I will restrain myself, and not tax your patience. I will end with two quotes, one from the greatest apologist and story teller combo of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis, and the other from the Bible. Lewis, an ex-atheist realized in his 30s that atheism had zero explanatory power, meaning it has no plausible explanation for anything:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

We either give our kids puzzle pieces for a puzzle that doesn’t even exist, or we give them the story into which all puzzle pieces ultimately fit. The Apostle Paul said something about those pieces fitting together by the Puzzle Grandmaster in Romans 8:28:

28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

I used to joke with my children, and often still do, that Paul certainly didn’t mean all; maybe 95%, but all? Yep, every single thing, every moment of every second of every day, God is working in us, on us, and through us for our good and his glory. Talk about hope, meaning, and purpose! Add to that we get to change the world in our own little corner of it, to advance God’s kingdom on earth and His glory to this fallen world.

That, brothers and sisters, is an easy sell. And children raised with it, will never abandon their faith.

 

Evil and the Death of Secularism

Evil and the Death of Secularism

In a comment on Facebook recently I said, “Secularism is dead,” and I got this not unreasonable response:

Not sure why secularism is dead, but post-modern thinking and critical theory are alive and well.

Looked at as a snapshot of the current historical moment, of course the commenter is right. Secularism in the form of woke cultural Marxism is at the moment of its greatest triumph in Western culture, but this triumph reveals its inherent weakness. Secularism promised a religious free pluralistic Utopia where the strife and conflict caused by religion would disappear. Religion would be allowed to have its place inside a worship building or home, but it has no place in the public square, a neutral place where religious claims are unwelcome.

There are various versions of secularism where religion is allowed some relevance, but only as a competing force with no inherent authority. In its purest sense, God in secularism is persona non grata, unwelcome because the God claimed by Christians was supposedly responsible for the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. When Descartes declared in 1637, “Cogito Ero Sum,” I think therefore I am, full blown secularism was inevitable. The Enlightenment, so called, made man’s reason the ultimate source of knowledge, and God’s revelation in creation and Scripture eventually completely discredited. Man was now on his own, and in due course we would we see what he could accomplish without God.

As I argue in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, secularism has been weighed on the scales and found wanting. In America, for example, now a thoroughly secular society, some 50,000 people every year kill themselves, and over one and a half million every year try! Americans by the tens of millions take anti-anxiety and anti-depressant drugs. Divorce has decimated the family to the degree that most children grow up in broken families. Fetal genocide has butchered over 60 million babies in their mothers’ wombs, and it is actively encouraged as a moral good by one of our political parties, while the other party treats it as a secondary issue, at best. America’s biggest cities are practically unlivable, with death and violence a common occurrence. One could go on, but secularism clearly hasn’t delivered.

Thus I come to Evil. No, not that evil, the unpleasant reality we encounter in the world as the opposite of good, but a television series with that name. My wife and I recently watched all four seasons on Paramount+. The series first premiered on CBS in September 2019 but later moved to Paramount+ for its subsequent seasons. Unfortunately, that means the F-word started showing up, but that seems to be a requirement for streaming TV shows nowadays. What Evil represented to me was evidence for the failure of secularism as an explanation for the world we actually inhabit. Secularism, remember, is an explanation for reality that doesn’t require God, or any kind of spiritual reality. Charles Taylor in his magisterial work, A Secular Age, explores how reality in the modern world has been “disenchanted,” flattened out, immanentized. That flattened out world is what Evil wrestles with, and I think quite effectively.

Evil and the Poverty of Secularism-No Such Thing as Unbelief
The show has a trio of protagonists, actors you wouldn’t know, but as the series progresses you come to love. The Catholic Church, which we all know, plays a staring roll in the series as the backdrop for the demonic and spiritual war human beings experience whether they acknowledge that or not, and two of the main characters refuse to acknowledge it. One is a scientist, Ben Shakir, a confirmed atheist from a Muslim background, and the other, Kristen Bouchard, a psychologist who goes between atheism and agnosticism. The third of the trio becomes a Catholic priest, Father David Acosta. The dynamic between the three is fun and fascinating to watch.

Evil is often campy, as in the definition of the word, absurdly exaggerated, artificial, or affected in a usually humorous way, but never to make fun of or demean the idea of a spiritual reality we can’t comprehend. On the contrary, the dynamic of the trio plays off of the battle each has to believe in a reality they can only possibly see if they believe in it, and even then not clearly. Oh, did I mention, their day jobs are working for the Catholic church as “Assessors,” to see if cases of apparent demonic possession are really demonic and don’t have some other “natural” explanation. Ben and Kristin use everything they can in their scientific and psychological tool kit to explain away the supernatural, but Father Acosta and the other Catholic characters treat the demonic as a reality that must be dealt with.

The writers do a good job of balancing skepticism with belief, two sides of the coin of belief, but they have a sly way of making the skepticism grow increasingly absurd as the series progresses. I use the coin analogy because there is no such thing as unbelief, and each character struggles with what they believe, be it in the supernatural, like David, or the other two who struggle with their materialistic assumptions. Faith is required for either view. The series, however, leaves no doubt as to which is real, and it isn’t the latter. The demons, in fact, are the chief protagonists in the series, and although they are portrayed as utterly bizarre figures (played all by one actor, amazingly), they are never less than evil. The most evil figure, ironically, turns out to be fully human, played wonderfully by Michael Emerson as Leland Townsand.

As we continued to watch Evil develop, I couldn’t help feeling that the writers were making fun of the secular worldview, showing how shallow it can be as any kind of ultimate explanation of reality. Ben and Kristin end up having an ongoing crisis of faith as much as David does, but David’s faith seems more grounded in what is real because the spiritual realm is real. The writers do a good job of showing everyone does in fact live by faith. There could have been a Christian in the writers’ room who knows something about apologetics, but that’s asking far too much of the current Hollywood. I have an idea. Why don’t we have a discipleship program for screenwriters, and then help them develop their careers writing screenplays that reflect a solid Christian worldview. The current younger generations gets this, while my boomer generation most certainly did not, but I digress.

James K.A. Smith wrote a little book about Taylor’s massive book called, How (not) to be Secular, and in it he explains how “the conditions of belief” have shifted over the centuries. What was once a spiritual taken for granted reality, has become a disenchanted secular reality. This quotation gets to the heart of the struggle we see explored in Evil:

It is a mainstay of secularization theory that modernity “disenchants” the world—evacuates it of spirits and various ghosts in the machine. Diseases are not demonic, mental illness is no longer possession, the body is no longer ensouled. . . . the magical “spiritual” world is dissolved and we are left with the machinations of matter. . . . this is primarily a shift in the location of meaning, moving it from “the world” into “the mind.” Significance no longer inheres in things; rather, meaning and significance are a property of minds who perceive meaning internally. . . . meaning is now located in agents.

This is exactly what Ben and Kristen attempt to do at every encounter of something that they think they can explain from their naturalistic assumptions. As the series progresses, that becomes increasingly pathetic.

The Secular Crisis of Faith and the Great Awakening
Claiming secularism is having a crisis of faith has a strange ring to most people because secularism is so ingrained as our ultimate plausibility structure, religious or not, Christian or not. It affects all of us. As I argued, everyone lives by faith, and all people are “believers,” the question being what they believe in. After 300 years as an experiment of trying to run a society without God, secularism as a worldview is sucking air, showing its age, and I believe on life support. The evidence is everywhere; Evil is just one entertaining piece adding to the beyond a reasonable doubt conviction to come.

Billionaire savior of Twitter and free speech, Elon Musk, has been going through his own red pill experience in real time on Twitter, or X, take your pick. Recently, Musk posted something that tells us his red pill journey is taking a distinctly religious turn. Below is that post, as well as my comment on it on my re-post:

Here is Musk:

 

This is what a Great Awakening looks like in a secular age and post-Christian culture. It won’t look like the First and Second Awakening in what were thoroughly Christian cultures. The plausibility structures are slowly shifting away from a default secularism because it’s a poverty stricken worldview that promises everything and delivers nothing but misery and despair. Elon is on my heathen prayer list, and we will pray he makes it all the way to Jesus.

The premise of my book is that God used Donald J. Trump, the most unlikely of unlikely men, to trigger a 21st century Great Awakening. It isn’t Trump himself, mind you, but the utterly irrational reaction to Trump. Nothing like it has ever happened in American history. I would argue the reaction to Lincoln was as intense and obsessive, but it wasn’t irrational. The tyranny Lincoln exercised in the pursuit of the Union was real, whether justified or not is the eternal question. Trump, supposedly the second coming of Hitler, doesn’t have a tyrannical bone in his body, and we had four years of him as President proving that. It was this irrational response to Trump that opened my mind to him in the first place because I was no fan, to say the least. I thought nobody could be that evil, and decided to give him a real listen. The irrationality has only seemed to have gotten worse, which is opening even more people’s eyes to the truth.

This reaction began a red pill experience for tens of millions of Americans all over the political, religious, and cultural spectrum, including me. Covid was the red pill neutron bomb that for many rational people was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The lies in the service of tyranny, and for our good, remember, were just too much, and a huge number of people will never see government or “experts” the same ever again. This is directly related to the secular crisis of faith.

Secular, flattened reality, the perception that the material is all there is, or at least all that matters, is also coming increasingly into question for millions of people. It was the materialism myth born out of the Enlightenment that gave us the hubris of science and the rule of “experts” in the 20th century. This questioning includes some very famous people like Tucker Carlson, and Christian newbie, Russell Brand. Very different people from very different worlds, God broke through the flattened secular delusions of the post-modern world, and both have embraced the only faith that makes sense of everything, including fake pandemics.

You can watch any number of Tucker Carleson interviews and you will see the Great Awakening happening in real time. One is Tucker interviewing Russel Brand, and they pretty much talk about Jesus and faith the entire time. At the end of the interview, Tucker asks Brand to pray, and he gets up and kneels down in front of his chair to pray. This doesn’t happen before the Great Awakening. In another interview, I can’t remember which one, Tucker says how he grew up thoroughly secular, lived in DC for 30 years in a thoroughly secular environment, and God was never a topic of conversation. Now, he said, he’s having these conversations all the time which would never have happened five years ago.

The End of Secularism
One could multiply Great Awakening stories endlessly because secularism has played itself out and has nowhere else to go. There will be no more 19th and 20th centuries where mankind thought their hubris justified. Imagine, for example, going to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and what your reaction would be when they turned on the lights, something that had never happened in the history of the world. Everything was illuminated, instantly! You might be justified in thinking, is there anything with science and technology man cannot do? One would think the disasters of the 20th century made it abundantly clear that infinite progress and building Utopia on earth wasn’t in the cards, but secularism (life without God) hadn’t fully played itself out yet. That would only become apparent in the third decade of the 21st century.

It’s odd that God used Donald Trump, as I argue in my book, or more specifically the reaction to him, to jump start the awakening. I would not have had that on my bingo card. For some reason he broke the left, and the entire Uniparty establishment. He perfectly fits the bill of the bull in the China shop, and he wasn’t afraid to touch third rails like immigration, endless foreign wars, and the globalist elite decimating American industry. What’s even more ironic, is that God used this billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star to spiritually open the eyes of millions of people. This is where secularism comes in. The theme of the last nine plus years is lies. To the left, Trump was and is such an existential threat to their plans that lying was and is justified to accomplish their goal of ridding him as a political thorn in their side. Secularism is also built on lies, specifically that God is unnecessary for building a flourishing society.

The reason I say secularism has played itself out is because there is nothing secular on the other side of secularism. We can date the beginning of the secular experiment to Rene Descartes writing in 1637 “Cogito Ergo Sum,” I think therefore I am, and thus the began rationalism. Instead of God, man and his reason became the starting point of knowing, and over time among Western elites God became increasingly unnecessary, an unwelcome presence in society. It took until the mid-20th century for secularism to completely banish God from Western culture and by the 21st century secularism reigned supreme. Unfortunately for humanity, since secularism is a lie, there has been misery, suffering, and death. And what do our globalist elites tell us? Like the great Saturday Night Live skit, they proclaim, More cowbell! Yes, we need more secularism! That’ll do it! We’ll figure it all out without God getting in the way.

This claim has lost all its credibility, which is why an increasing number of people are turning to God, and specifically to the God in Christ of the Old and New Testaments. Keep in mind we’re almost 400 years into this experiment with secular societal organization, so rolling it back will take time, maybe a long time, but for an increasing number of people Christianity is now the only credible answer, and it’s time for Christians to step up. That means doing the hard work of thinking through and building what Christendom 2.0, as Doug Wilson calls it, will look like, and how it will all be implemented. We have a lot of work to do, but as I always say, work like it depends on us, but pray because it in fact depends on God.

The Rise and Fall of Dispensational Premillennialism in American Christianity

The Rise and Fall of Dispensational Premillennialism in American Christianity

When I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, I knew next to nothing about where the most popular Evangelical eschatology, dispensational premillennialism, came from or how it developed. The reason this is important is because eschatology matters. What we think about “end times” will color everything we think about current times. It determines how we interpret the past, present, and future, not just the end of that future, but everything in between now and when the end comes. If we think planet earth is destined for an apocalyptic dystopia guess how we’ll think of current events. I’ll explain why, but I didn’t believe eschatology mattered for most of my Christian life. The speculation surrounding eschatology coming from dispensationalism drove me to become an eschatological agnostic. Or as it’s often called, a pan-millennialist, as in, it will all pan out in the end.

I’ve heard it called newspaper eschatology because it takes headlines and develops predictions from current events that supposedly tell us about when the antichrist will appear and the rapture will happen. These predictions have been going since the mid-19th century, and even though they never turn out to be accurate, that doesn’t seem to diminish dispensationalism’s popularity. At least as it is assumed by probably 90% of Evangelicals to be the truth about “end times.” When I became a born-again Christian in 1978, eschatology was a topic of conversation everywhere. The New York Times even declared Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, to be the bestselling “nonfiction” book of the 1970s.

 

I’ve been learning the fascinating history of how Evangelicalism got to this point in a book I first heard about in this interview of the author, Daniel Hummel by Al Mohler The book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation, has been a revelation for me. Most surprising has been learning that the development of this thinking in the 19th century was a direct response and repudiation of the dominant postmillennialism of the time. I’ll explain why, but I’ve been under the impression it was the horrific disasters of the 20th century that discredited the post-mill position, but that lamentable century was only the final nail in the coffin of its credibility. It was rather the distortion of the concept of progress in the 19th century with the development of knowledge and science. The distortion was a direct result of the secularism growing out of the empiricism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. God was pushed to the periphery of Western culture, and man enthroned as sovereign creator of progress and civilization. As God said of the builders of Babel, they believed “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”

Speaking of Lyman Stewart, the founder of Biola (Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1908), Hummel writes:

In his view, amillennialism was a battering ram to break up the postmillennial hold on nineteenth century Protestantism. With the growing popularity of theological modernism, which adjusted Christian teachings to the intellectual climate of the late nineteenth century, Stewart had identified his main rival.

The reaction against postmillennialism, however, goes back to the mid-19th century and, Irishman J.N. Darby. The earliest “new premillennialists,” as they were called to distinguish themselves from the old ones, are what we now call dispensationalists. To the new guys on the block, the world and the church were far too corrupt for the kind of progress 19th century postmillennialism promised. However it was Darby bringing his version of “end times” to America in 1862 right in the middle of the Civil War that dispensationalism’s march to dominance in American Evangelical Christianity began. There’s nothing like more than half a million of your fellow countrymen being slaughtered fighting each other to bring into question the very idea of progress. But it wasn’t only the trauma of war. As Hummel points out:

The days of postmillennial consensus ended in the 1860s. The Civil War’s violence and destruction helped shatter the image of the United States as the vanguard of the coming kingdom, but this was just the initial shock. Higher criticism of the Bible and Darwinian evolution, two academic discourses that permeated seminaries and universities after the war, began to unravel the biblical case for postmillennialism.

But as well see, the American obsession with progress would not die easily.

Progress and the Spirit of Nineteenth Century America

It’s striking to look back on this side of the unimaginable suffering and misery of the twentieth century, wars and numbers of dead, to realize just how much progress obsessed post-Civil War America. George Marsden observes that “in a nation born during the Enlightenment, the reverence for science as the way to understand all aspects of reality was nearly unbounded.” This reverence grew out of the heady Enlightenment assumption that science and reason could solve all mankind’s problems eventually. The stunning advances in technology seemed to justify the hubris.

All these changes were part of the industrial revolution after the Civil War transforming the largely agrarian society of America’s founding into a worldwide economic powerhouse. Along with change came problems. Industrialization and growing populations of immigrants flocking to cities along the East coast created deplorable conditions for a significant number of people. Christians thought Christianity provided an answer in what came to be known as the Social Gospel; a significant change in American Christianity was on the horizon. Many nineteenth century reformers, like the abolitionists, were Unitarians having rejected what they considered the illogical concept of the Trinity; their hearts were in the right place, but their theology wasn’t. German biblical criticism and its rejection of the Bible as reliable history and God’s authoritative verbal revelation had a profound effect on Christianity in the growing secular age. The also spreading rejection of orthodox historic Christianity in the mainline denominations, along with the suffering brought on by the industrial revolution, produced the response of the Social Gospel.

This struggle for the soul of Christianity (pun intended) playing out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to be called the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. The new premillennialists (the term dispensationalism didn’t get coined until 1927) were part of the broader fundamentalist movement that eventually came to dominate American Evangelicalism. On the fundamentalist side were an amalgamation of Christians loosely held together by a handful of orthodox beliefs about the historical veracity of the Christian faith, and on the modernist side were liberals who embraced the social gospel and a religion of progress. To say these two were incompatible is like saying water and fire are not compatible.

From the late 1870s to Word War 1, the leadership of mainline Protestant denominations slowly but surely gave up any pretense in believing the Bible was a supernatural document. They accepted the Enlightenment assumptions of empiricism and rationalism, including the inevitable conclusion of German biblical critics’ attacks on the Bible’s veracity. These were the liberals, and conservatives who stood against them came to be called fundamentalists from a series of twelve short books, The Fundamentals, written from 1910 to 1915. Even though he was a conservative, William Jennings Bryan echoed what almost all Christians believed prior to World War I:

Christian civilization is the greatest that the world has ever known because it rests on a conception of life that makes life one unending progress toward higher things, with no limit to human advancement or development.

As George Marsden adds, “evangelicals generally regarded almost any sort of progress as evidence of the advance of the kingdom.” The Great War was used to attack the credibility of postmillennialism, but it was World War II that put the nail in the coffin. The Soviet Union and Mao’s communist China didn’t help.

Dispensationalism’s Eventual Triumph
Regardless of Bryan’s conservative Christian convictions, he embraced a concept of postmillennialism that dispensationalists rightly believed came from liberal Christianity and a distortion of the Bible’s understanding of progress as the providential working of God in history through His people. A postmillennialism based on Enlightenment assumptions could never last because progress is a Jewish and Christian concept the pagans stole and bastardized. It’s almost like thinking a man can become a woman and a woman a man, not that anyone would ever think such a thing. The two versions of progress are as mutually exclusive as the sexes. But why did dispensational premillennialism triumph and become the dominant eschatology of 20th century Evangelicalism?

Before the nail was driven into the coffin by the horrors of 20th century war and death, revivalism and the great evangelist, D.L. Moody, paved the way. According to Hummell:

These two implications of Moody’s ministry—the popularization and fusion of new premillennialism with revivalism—could hardly be separated. They worked together to form a potent and wildly successful message. Moody’s ministry spearheaded an interdenominational evangelical ethos shot through with the influences of premillennialism.

It’s hard to imagine in post-Christian America just how popular and influential Moody was. When he embraced dispensationalism It gained instant credibility, which in due course would influence one of the most consequential Christians of the 20th century, Cyrus Ingerson Scofield. Scofield developed and published his reference Bible in 1909, which arguably became the most influential book molding 20th century fundamentalism which in due course became Evangelicalism. It sold a million copies in less than a decade and became the best-selling book in the history of Oxford University Press. Nothing like Oxford printing a book to give it max credibility.

Scofield systematized the dispensational hermeneutic, and with it as Hummell says, “Scofield transformed the new premillennialism [dispensationalism] into a full-blown religious identity for millions of Christians.” The Scofield Reference Bible was ubiquitous among the baby boomer generation of Christians. When I became a Christian in 1978, I remember it being spoken of in glowing terms, and highly suggested as a reference source. In fact in the early decades of its adoption, “it became a common marker of right belief in Moody movement circles.” This triumph was a long time coming for a new movement. It started with the Pietism growing up in 17th century Germany, made its way into a Brethren movement that eventually influenced Wesley, but importantly for the rise of dispensationalism, Darby, then Moody, then Scofield. His notes established the new premillennialism, revivalism, Higher Life teachers, and what are called Exclusive Brethren concepts as the default for fundamentalist Christians.

This peaked in the 70s with The Late Great Planet earth mentality, and I was born-again embracing every bit of it. For me it couldn’t last, thankfully. Yes, the 90s was the Left Behind decade, but when Kirk Cameron himself becomes post-mill, you know the jig is up.

Dispensationalism’s Pietistic Dualism
Although dispensationalism today has nothing like the credibility and awareness it had in the 20th century, it’s assumptions dominate Evangelical Christianity. It is those assumptions that led to Christianity’s cultural irrelevance in America. One of those is a type of gnostic dualism, a two-story Christianity, in Francis Schaffer’s words, which I learned in 1979 or 80 in his book The God Who Is There.  There are various ways to describe this two-story version of the faith, but it breaks life into two competing realities. Picture a house where upstairs is all the important stuff, the things that are truly meaningful and real, and downstairs is for the servants, the mundane everyday stuff. Even though it’s the same house it appears like two completely different houses, say upstairs is 19th century Victorian, and downstairs 1960s hip modernism. In Schaeffer’s words, upstairs “is above the line of despair.” Everyone without access to the stairs, is stuck downstairs trying to find meaning, hope, and purpose. If you do have a pass, you can go upstairs when you want to access the things that really matter in life.

This is where the Gnosticism comes in. This philosophy of Greek influence is a kind of secret knowledge which exists in the upper story, and it has little to do with what we experience downstairs. In fact, the stuff downstairs is only relevant as it points to and gets you the pass to the stairs. Then you can leave behind the servants, the Plebes, the hoi palloi, unless they too are given one of the passes, and they will get the knowledge that’s only had in the upper story. I’ve pushed the metaphor far enough, but you get the idea. Gnosticism, a version of Platonism, was a constant threat in the first few centuries of the church. It was the battle against this threat, among others, that forced the church fathers in response to develop the orthodox Christianity of the Nicene Creed we believe today.

After the Reformation, in due course the assumptions from dualism through Pietism, revivalism, and dispensationalism became the dominant worldview of Evangelical Christianity. Spiritual things were the important part of life, and the mundane and material a necessary evil, to be escaped through religious exercises like Bible reading, prayer, and church going. This was my born-again Christianity until I found Schaeffer and began my journey out of an upstairs/downstairs dualism of Pietistic Christianity. It took postmillennialism to finally eradicate it completely for me, but one doesn’t have to embrace that eschatology to escape from gnostic dualistic Pietistic assumptions. It’s just harder to do because these influences are ubiquitous in American Evangelicalism, like oxygen invisible and everywhere.

It’s fascinating to learn how this understanding of Christianity developed in its 20th century version from what came before. It’s impossible to overstate the influence of the development of fundamentalism in the first 30 or so years of the century, and how it’s become the default form of Christianity of almost all Evangelical Christians today. It informs, whether they know it or not, how they see not only the practice of their faith, but how they perceive the culture, including politics. The problem is that because of this Pietistic dualism, secularism completely took over American culture, and Western culture in general. I argued in a recent post that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin. (I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s ironic because a solid subset of the fundamentalists believed cultural and political engagement was a priority, but they eventually lost to the inherent dualism in their theology.

In the history of Christianity this kind of dualism was rare, although monastic life was a version of it. Reality for people in the Christian West was both material and spiritual. God and the spiritual realm of angels and demons was every bit as real to people in the Middle Ages as the material world they lived and worked in every day. It wasn’t until Pietism and the Enlightenment developed simultaneously in the 17th and 18th centuries, that secularism began its long march to dominance in the West. Christians, including me, often rail against secularism, and rightly so, but it was the dualistic over spiritualized version of Christianity in Pietism that gave secularism the cultural air to breath and grow. Even though Christians up to the early years of fundamentalism attempted cultural engagement, they didn’t stand a chance against the juggernaut of secularism.

To one degree or another Christians became so heavenly minded they were no earthly good. Add to Pietistic dualism an eschatology that sees evil and sin as inevitably growing worse until Jesus comes back to save the day, and you have a recipe for zero cultural influence, which is exactly what has happened. Thus we live in Wokestan. Cultural Marxism made it’s long march through the institutions with little or no push back from Christians and the church, and what pushback there has been, has been ineffectual. To bring Evangelical Christianity down to earth, both Pietism and dispensationalism need to be addressed critically for the inherent dualism they brought to the Christian faith.

A Christianity with cultural influence also requires an optimistic eschatology of victory, whatever you call it. Going into battle believing we’re going to lose is a recipe for getting more of what got us here in the first place. Embracing postmillennialism is what made all the difference for me and many others. It’s worth giving it a look if you have yet to consider it. The battle for the soul of Western culture is only just begun.

 

 

A Conflict of Visions-Reality as It Is or Transform It

A Conflict of Visions-Reality as It Is or Transform It

One of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries, Thomas Sowell, a black man and conservative, wrote a book in in 1987 called A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. I point out his race only to indicate that black conservatives, like Sowell and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas among others, are considered traitors to their race. It’s one of the reasons Candace Owens started an organization called Blexit in 2018 as a takeoff on Brexit when the UK declared independence from the EU. Among the many fruits of Trump has been many black Americans declaring their independence from black Democrat groupthink, escaping the plantation, so to speak. A conflict of visions explains this phenomenon and many other things we are experiencing in 2024.

Sowell’s book is one of the most important books of the modern era because it explains the fundamental dynamic at the heart of the perpetual and escalating conflict in America and the West. This conflict is nothing new, going back to the ancient Greek philosophers, specifically Plato and Aristotle, and has worked itself out in Western history to the present day. Respectively, these two philosophers correspond to the two visions Sowell lays out in the book, the unconstrained and the constrained visions. Plato’s work, especially in The Republic, is represented by his desire to create the ideal society or polis, the Greek city-state, ruled by a philosopher king. Aristotle’s philosophy and politics, on the other hand, was rooted in human nature as he found it. The former wants to mold reality to its wishes because its vision can’t be constrained by reality, the latter works with reality as we find it. 

At the core of Sowell’s analysis is his assumption that “ultimate truth” exists. As a conservative Sowell embraces the constrained vision. I’ve written here recently that the dividing line in Western culture is truth. The left stopped believing in truth a long time ago, and now they are fully invested in “the narrative,” a postmodern Nihilistic mentality that only believes in the will to power, their power. Liberals were always part of the larger left, often calling themselves progressives, and a certain percentage of those believe in truth, and reject the lies that masquerade as “the narrative.” Many things awakened them in the age of Trump, but believing in truth separated them from the woke leftists who currently dominate culture and politics in the West. A perfect example is Robert F. Kenney, Jr. endorsing President Trump. Here is a man who believes in Truth. He’s an old school liberal who believes in truth and can’t make common cause with the current Marxist Democrat Party that doesn’t.

Our Anthropology Determines Our Vision
Sowell starts chapter two with this sentence: 

Social visions differ in their basic conception of the nature of man.

To say this is important for how we live among people in society is akin to saying oxygen is important for life. Well, almost. How we view the fundamental nature of man, of what human beings are in their essence, will determine if we live a life of flourishing and God’s blessings, or if we live a life covered with the dust of death.

Anthropology is the study of that nature, who and what man is in his essential characteristics. Ultimately our metaphysics will determine this, how we see the meaning and nature of the universe. If Darwin was right and we’re merely clever animals, that will lead to certain assumptions about reality and man in it. If the God of the Bible is Creator and man his creature, on the other hand, that will lead to opposite assumptions, as in 180 degrees opposite, as in night and day, up and down, right and wrong, and yes, life and death. These assumptions lead logically to certain conclusions about life, what it is, and what it ought to be, and therefore two conflicting visions. Darwin leads inevitably to an unconstrained vision, while Scripture leads to the constrained vision. Let’s take a look from a biblical perspective how these two visions developed in history.

The Bible tells us man is constrained because he’s a created being living in God’s world. Man, male and female God created them, was created good, but in his rebellion man marred God’s image in himself and all his progeny. The fundamental fact of this story leads us to conclude that man is a flawed and limited being accountable to his Creator, but we need to inquire as to the nature of man’s fundamental flaw, and why it drives him in due course to this unconstrained vision. We learn about this flaw in Genesis three and the familiar story of Satan tempting Eve to disobey the direct order of God. This story is so familiar to us that we fail to realize how utterly unique it is. No other religion or philosophy tells us why human beings are so screwed up, so they have no answer for man’s fundamental problem; he is in rebellion to his Creator and needs to be reconciled to Him.

In this history of Christianity there is something the enemies of the faith have used to attack it called “the problem of evil.” This supposed problem asks the question: if God is good and all powerful why is there evil? The conclusion is, if he’s good he shouldn’t allow it, and if he’s all powerful, he should be able to prevent it. Since there is evil, God is neither good nor all powerful. If he exists at all, he can’t be trusted. This so called problem got its start in Western culture from French philosopher Voltaire in his 1756 poem titled, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, Or an Examination of the Axiom, ‘All is Well.’” The poem was Voltaire’s response to the horrific Lisbon earthquake where an estimated 40,000 people died. Let me read you a piece of Voltaire’s sardonic wit, worthy of the New Atheists:

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts–
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

Voltaire, in C.S. Lewis’s famous phrase, put “God in the dock,” and man became His prosecuting attorney. Instead of man having to answer to God, now it was God who must answer to man. Of course, there is no answer that would satisfy sinful, rebellious man, so God was declared persona non grata in Western culture which slowly secularized because of it. We call the 17th century in Western culture the Enlightenment, but in fact it turned out the lights, and Western culture has been groping in the dark ever since.

Why the Unconstrained Vision?
The unconstrained vision got its start in Genesis 3 with the fall, but it broke out in steroids in the 18th century with Enlightenment rationalism, or the idea that reason is all we need to figure life out and solve all our problems. We’ll remember the essence of Satan’s temptation to Eve:

For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

There it is, in one haunting sentence, the delusion that man could be God, he could call the shots, that he could mold reality to his wishes. This is further fleshed out in Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel where the people of God’s creation decided to build a tower “that reaches to the heavens” so they could make a name for themselves. In response, God confused their languages and scattered them over the face of the earth or, He said, “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” There it is, the vision that drives the left side of the political-cultural spectrum in Western culture, and the desire to create Utopia on earth by man’s own will and power. This word first occurred in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia which he published in 1516. More made up the word as a compound from the Greek words for “not” (ou) and “place” (topos) and thus meaning “nowhere” which eventually turns into Nihilism, a word coming from Latin meaning nothing, a gift to Western culture given by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nowhere leads to nothing, leads eventually to despair, and ultimately death. This is the vision of Western elites who don’t know Latin and believe they can be God.

If we go back to the so-called problem of evil, the unconstrained vision sees Utopia as something that is attainable by human effort and thinking. The fundamental assumption of this vision is that man is fundamentally good because there is no such thing as original sin if we’re merely material beings and a product of chance. Thus what corrupts man is external to him in society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher friend of Voltaire’s, believed back in the mists of time man was a noble savage who lived in an Edenic paradise that was uncorrupted by the influences of civilization. Man was innately good. Thus the answers to the problem of evil, of man’s fundamental dilemma, is found in molding reality to his liking. If the right circumstances can be created, humanity can be made right. It is assumed reality is malleable to man’s wishes, and thus Babel is a real possibility and “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” Or so they think. In their presumption of divinity, Enlightenment man thinks he is in fact God, and he alone determines what is good and evil. The utopian mind has led only to evil, misery, and death wherever it has been tried. Sadly the Utopians never learn their lessons, as we see in our day as the Democrats have embraced a Marxist version of Utopia; they are the unconstrained party.

But God in his mercy scattered the inhabitants of Babel so the misery could be constrained, not to keep his creatures from creating great things. God’s goal and purposes for humanity was always for his creatures to flourish. We see this in the dominion mandate prior to the fall, but post fall given we live by sight not faith, most people have a difficult time believing God still wants humanity to flourish. We know the truth of the matter because He revealed this to us in the very next chapter, 12, where he picks one man, Abram, out of all the Godless heathens in the world to create His very own people. What does he declare His purpose is for His people? He tells us in his promise to Abram:

“I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
    will be blessed through you.”

Why the Constrained Vision?
The key theme from these verses is “blessing for the nations.” God is specifically establishing his covenant with Abram so through him and his offspring the nations will be blessed, all of them. We might say the foundation of God’s revelation to man is the theme of the first book of that revelation, blessing, used over 65 times. I heard someone once define blessing as empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers them to do a wide variety of things, as he put it, “God empowers people to flourish.” God wants to bless His people. That’s always been the plan. Secularists, by contrast paint Christianity as repressive and intolerant, but what it represses and doesn’t tolerate is sin! Sin destroys everything it touches and makes true flourishing impossible. It is by definition dis-empowering. Jumping forward two thousand years, Jesus says the same thing (John 10:10):

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

Through the Israelites, God gave humanity the law with the express purpose of allowing His creatures to flourish in obedience to it. God’s law is the means of his blessing the nations. Through Israel we learn that sinful humanity is incapable of obedience to the law and thus being blessed, so God enabled that obedience by becoming a man himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to pay the penalty for that disobedience, and sending His Holy Spirit to enable obedience in His people. The law fences in fallen man’s unconstrained tendencies, and it is wise to head the words of one of the great wordsmiths of the modern age, G.K. Chesterton:

 Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

God has given us His law-word specifically through His people, His church, to place the boundaries of constraint in which we are empowered to flourish for our good and God’s glory.

Thus the constrained vision developed in Western history as God revealed Himself to the world through this people, but also confirmed it through what C.S. Lewis called in his little masterpiece, The Abolition of Man, the Tao. This also came to be known as the natural law, which is revealed in every religion to some degree, but only seen in fullest degree in the face of the Lord Jesus Christ. The constrained vision began working itself out in Western history by God bringing three cultures together in what Paul said was “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4), the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews. God in His providentially sovereign ordaining power broke into fallen history to establish His kingdom on earth, to change cursed history to a blessed future. The radical nature of this breaking in is often missed by Christians because they assume it only has to do with them personally, or at most the church, the body of fellow believers. But I believe God has something much more profound in mind having to do with the entire created order. Here is how Paul puts it speaking of the ministry of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5:

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

The NIV translation has this right. Some translations taking their que from the context insert a “he,” so it reads, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” But the Greek simply has the adjective, new, describing the noun, creation. So the way I read it, each person who makes the journey to “in Christ,” at that moment they don’t become a new creation so much as inhabit one. Their history and the history of the world is fundamentally altered because the kingdom of God is now ascendent in their life and in the world. The fall and the curse of sin is being pushed back in everything they do as they “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” knowing if they do that, all the blessings of life will be added as well (Matt. 6:33).

The gospel constrains to bless. God says through Jeremiah (31) that in this New Covenant in Christ,  He will put His law in our minds, and write it on our hearts; and He will be our God, and we will be His people. No longer will we have to be like God, determining what is good and evil. No longer will we presume to mold reality to our wishes, but we will seek to understand reality in His law and created order, and share this “constrained” vision with the entire world. When Jesus commanded the disciples in Mathew 28 to make disciples of all nations because he’d been given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” he meant it. This wasn’t a command in futility, but a command to victory in his power and authority and will. Our vision is exciting and inspiring and it has the extra added benefit that it is true and works because it is true!