As I stated in my last post, The Berlin Wall is a great metaphor for the current reigning worldview in the West, secularism. My thesis: Secularism is a deeply flawed and weak explanation for the nature of reality. Correctly understood, we don’t need to fear secularism as a threat to the faith of our children. Thus we can have confidence that we can keep our kids Christian.
Secularism as pushed by Western cultural elites is a faith (i.e., a religious) commitment to a world without God. The secularist won’t tell you that you can’t or shouldn’t believe in God (as a good post-modern relativists you can believe anything you want as long as it floats your boat—”true for you but not for me”), but that belief must stay withing the walls of your church or home. The reason secularism is so pernicious is not because of it’s “doctrines” or what it asserts, but because of what it assumes: a reality where God is optional. The secular worldview in ways large and small, overt and covert, is presented as the default position (worldview) of enlightened, educated, rational, and reasonable people. It is assumed as superior because it is ostensibly “scientific,” and thus not in need of “faith,” which of course religious people need because they lack “evidence” for what they believe.
This, to put it technically, is poppycock, sheer nonsense. All human beings, secular or “religious” live by faith. The secularist who touts science as the ultimate means of knowing lives as much by faith as the most devoted Tibetan monk. So much of this discussion of the confidence we can have as Christians in the face of the onslaught of a hostile secularism comes down to epistemology, or how we know what we think we can know. The secularist thinks knowing comes down to a simple acceptance of what we can see, touch, and measure. The only valid knowledge, according to them, is what is empirically verifiable to the senses. Such a statement, however, is not empirically verifiable because it’s a philosophical assertion; it cannot be empirically verified. In other words, it contradicts itself because it doesn’t stand up to it’s own terms. It’s like saying, I can’t speak English. This statement, like the secular worldview, is nonsense.
Which brings me at long last to the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was one of the great aberrations of modern history. As younger people may not know, the Wall was built by the East German government in 1961 as a puppet of the Soviet Union to keep people from fleeing to freedom in West Berlin. And for 28 years the illusion was sustained that a people could forever be contained in walls not of their choosing. It is also one of history’s great metaphors. Secularism, I maintain, is like that Berlin Wall, and its invisibility makes it all that much more powerful, and seemingly invincible.
Growing up during the greatest heat of the Cold War in the 60s and 70s, and becoming an adult in the 80s, I could have never conceived of there not being a Soviet Union or a Berlin Wall. I was sure that for my lifetime, and likely much longer, both would exist. It took a Ronald Reagan to see what a paper tiger was the USSR, and to have the guts to demand against all world opinion that the Wall be torn down. Astoundingly, amazingly, unbelievably, less than two and a half years later that wall did indeed come down. For those who did not live through those years it is impossible to understand how inconceivable this was to we who did.
Like those of us who lived in the era of the Wall, Westerners of every religious and non-religious stripe today are as confident in the eternal and impregnable nature of secularism as we were of the Wall. That secularism would bid such a hasty retreat as the East Germans did behind their wall is just as inconceivable for most of us as its fall was then. But secularism is no less a paper tiger than the Wall. Why, and how could I say that? Especially when all the most powerful drivers of cultural influence are not only thoroughly secular, but positively hostile to traditional Christian orthodoxy. Stay tuned . . .
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