The History of Pietism and Cultural Irrelevance

The History of Pietism and Cultural Irrelevance

Pietism is the most important development in the history of Christianity most Christians have never heard of. It wasn’t high on my radar either until a few years back when I began to learn about its contribution to the rise of secularism in Western culture. Because of the Gnostic and dualistic nature of Pietism, the successful takeover of secularism in Western culture was inevitable. With the church, and Christians in general, focused on otherworldly concerns, culture and governing could be left to the godless. This was never the Pietists’ intention, but it was inevitable given their theological assumptions.

Both Pietism and secularism lead to the same thing: a secular society devoid of Christian influence. This might seem counter intuitive given the former is passionately religious while the latter is completely anti-religion. As we’ll see, Pietism has been a disaster for Christian cultural influence in the West, turning Christianity into a culturally irrelevant force. That was not at all the intention of its founders, or for most who subsequently embraced it, but it was the practical result of their understanding of Christianity, nonetheless.

Before we go back in time, let’s clarify terms since few people are familiar with Pietism. We are not talking about piety, the good and necessary personal reverence or devotion to God, but a German Lutheran movement that developed in the early seventeenth century. Because of the influence of Pietism, secularism triumphed as Christianity became primarily inward and personal, eschewing cultural engagement for personal devotion. It took time, but eventually Christianity completely lost the world transforming power that overthrew the Roman Empire, defeated paganism, and gave the world the blessings of modern society.

Pietism and the Reaction to Scholasticism
Scholasticism was a rigorously logical method of teaching in the schools of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, dominating universities from approximately 1100 to 1600, and into the seventeenth century. All of the early Reformers grew up and were influenced by an educational system steeped in scholasticism, and thus their approach tended to the intellectual. Both Luther and Calvin were educated in the Medieval Scholastic system, and their theological works reflect that. Lutheranism and Calvinism, soon labeled Reformed, would not stray far from their intellectual and scholarly roots, until, that is, the reaction of the first Pietists to Lutheran Scholasticism. The influence of Pietism would go well beyond Lutheranism in the centuries to come because of its focus on experience and not theology or doctrine, allowing it to easily cross denominational boundaries to eventually become the default expression of Christianity in the modern world.

 In his book, Pietism and the Foundations of the Modern World, Justin Davis defines Pietism as such:

Pietism is the generic Protestant expression of experiential Christianity. Notions of mysticism, revivalism, and antipathy towards the world and established religious culture become the standard modes in which this experiential religion is expressed. Individualism is often identified as a central tenet of both Protestantism and modernity, and as such it is also key to understanding Pietism. Pietism is therefore shorthand for the prioritization of experience over rationalism and scholasticism for Protestants. . . . the term is an expression of experiential Protestantism in general.

 I can vouch for this definition in my experience of the Christianity I was born-again into when I was in college. The focus on the “spiritual” meant things of the mind were not so much disparaged, as ignored, although they could be seen as semi-dangerous to our relationship with Jesus. It wasn’t until after I discovered Francis Schaeffer and eventually Reformed theology that I realized this version of Christianity was anti-intellectual, anti-theological, and ahistorical.

Experience and feeling, a feature of Pietism, can turn into a kind of idol like anything else; it was something that haunted John Wesley throughout his life, morbid introspection. Martin Luther taking his que from Augustine, helpfully defined sin as Incurvatus in se, Latin for being turned or curved inward on oneself, so much navel gazing. Thankfully, Christianity offers us the best of both worlds, the heart and the mind, but the mind would prove no match for the rise of Pietism as Western Christianity developed over the next several hundred years. Davis adds that by the nineteenth century, “nearly every influential Protestant theologian . . . was impacted or confronted Pietism or its systems.”

The Founding Fathers of Pietism
Pietism had antecedents in the mysticism of the Middle Ages as Christians were looking for more experiential religious expression. Those Christians seeking an experiential religion by removing themselves from society became monks and nuns. Various models of mystical piety resonated with early Protestants even though the tradition was Catholic. Borrowing their thoughts and practices while putting them in the Protestant context, Pietists would make a kind of mystical experience an essential aspect of Protestant Christianity. Unlike other forms of Reformational Christianity, it wasn’t creeds, confessions, or synods, but experiences that scratched their spiritual itch. This will become abundantly clear in the centuries to come.

The founding of Pietism was a long historical process, but it is generally agreed while not the founder,  Johann Arndt (1555-1621) was foundational to the movement. A pastor, Arndt published a series of books starting in 1605 called True Christianity, in which he developed an experiential Christianity differing from previous mysticism in that it seeks a kind of union or merging with God, but something available to all Christians. Justin Davis writes,

In none of these works does he simply abandon himself to the idea that his experiences are those of a mystic, rather they reflect a newness of life that is far more open and common to every Christian.

Arndt finds little value in theology or doctrine not specifically in service to the renewed life of faith. Thus, “the true Christian must find the kingdom of God within themselves” rather than in any focus on the outside world or the wider church. This effectively transferred a person’s “salvation to the realm of moral endeavor” rather than the communal life of the church. His followers “focused on personal revivals rather than a revival of the church or the culture at large,” and his work came to dominate discussions not just in Germany but throughout Europe.

Philip Jakob Spener (1635-1705) built on the work of Arndt and is technically the founding father of Pietism. Serving as a pastor in Frankfort, Germany, he introduced something called Collegia Pietatis, or “piety groups,” thus Pietism. From these twice-weekly devotional meetings in his house, Spener published Pia Desideria, “Devout Desires,” in 1675, with six major proposals for reform and revitalization of the church. Spener’s reforms were pastoral and practical, easily adopted by the laity, but not popular with the German Lutheran Church who accused him of doctrinal laxity. Indeed, Spener considered doctrinal conflicts irrelevant and often harmful, which would be a hallmark of modern Evangelicalism in the centuries to come. To Spener, and Evangelicals in the future, religious and moral duties were far more important than doctrinal disputes.

We also see in Spener a kind of asceticism in his opposition to card playing, dancing, the opera, and theater, and his stress upon moderation in dress, food, and drink. This becomes a feature of the fundamentalism of the nineteenth and especially twentieth century, along with an undervaluation of the church’s liturgy’, sacraments, and clergy. We see the legacy of this in modern, stripped down services in many churches which consist of praise music and a sermon. It also wasn’t just his desire to reform the church separating him from Arndt, but his desire to confront the growing secularism of what was quickly becoming the modern world because of the effects of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Secularism was also given a push by French Philosopher Renes Descartes (1596-1650) and the development of rationalism, a radical, indeed revolutionary departure from the Middle Ages in which man began his pursuit of knowledge with God. Now, man would begin his pursuit of knowledge with man, as Descartes put it, Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am. From Descartes sprung the period in Western intellectual history known as the Enlightenment, so called because man was supposedly coming out of what some thought “The Dark Ages,” and into the glorious light of human reason. On this freight train to modernism, secularism hitched a ride, and the Western world would undergo a slow moving irreligious revolution. Spener was determined to fight against that. As governments became more secular, it was the church through the preaching and the laity that would affect legislation for reform to create a more religious society. His embrace of Luther’s notion of a priesthood of all believers can be seen in a work he published in 1677 titled The Spiritual Priesthood, which would take Arndt’s more inner looking spirituality in a more outward, practical direction. Also, because of its lack of focus on a rigid orthodoxy, Pietism as it grew easily adapted to different theological contexts.

Finally, in its development, Pietism would not be limited to Lutheran Germany. Prior to its appearance in Lutheran circles, a Pietism without the name is found in the work of highly influential English Reformed theologian William Perkins (1558–1602), considered the “father of Puritanism.” Coinciding almost exactly with the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), Perkins’ life influenced a whole generation of English churchmen and English piety. The focus of Perkins’ life and ministry was developing piety in others, his students, parishioners, fellow pastors, and readers. From his influential position at Cambridge in his preaching, teaching, and especially writing, he proved a gifted popularizer of Reformed theology.

His books outsold those of Calvin and Beza in England, and he became the first English theologian to enjoy a wide readership throughout Europe with books translated into several languages. He was also the first English Protestant theologian to be published North America. The English Puritans escaping persecution made their way to the New World in the great Puritan migration to New England from 1620 to 1640. “Anyone who reads the writings of early New England learns that Perkins was indeed a towering figure in their eyes,” wrote Perry Miller. Perkins and his followers were “the most quoted, most respected, and most influential of contemporary authors in the writings and sermons of early Massachusetts.” In fact, Jonathan Edwards was fond of reading Perkins more than a century later.

Perkins shows us that piety and intellectual rigor are not mutually exclusive. The problem, however, was that Pietism the movement tended to see them as exactly that, or if not, then at least in tension. Too much intellectual effort and you were in danger of your heart growing cold, but that’s not the way knowledge works, as is the case with any of the good gifts of God. As Tim Keller said, idolatry is turning good things into ultimate things, and that can happen with anything. Even though Perkins wrote extensively on theological topics, his teaching and exhortation on pious Christian living made the biggest impact in America where various forms of Pietism across denominational lines would come to dominate Evangelical faith. Add that to our next “founder,” and in due course Pietism would become the default Evangelical experience for Christians, as it was for me many years after these men lived.

John Wesley and the Institutionalization of Pietism
The man most responsible for bringing Pietism to dominance in Christianity is the impressive if problematic John Wesley. Prior to learning about Wesley, I would never have connected Pietism with the development of the modern world, leaving the blame, or credit as the case may be, for that on the Enlightenment. But both historical phenomena had a fascinating symbiotic relationship through time to give us the modern world. I’ve argued here previously that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin.

Wesley was born in 1703 into a strict Christian family, attended Oxford University, and eventually became an ordained priest in the Church of England. In 1729 he returned to Oxford for a fellowship, joining his brother Charles in a religious study group derisively called the “Methodists” because of their emphasis on methodical study and devotion. The “Holy Group,” as they were also known by those who mocked them, were active in doing good works in the community and intense in their religious devotion. In November 1735 these concerns would compel Wesley to take a trip to Georgia to oversee the spiritual lives of the colonists and be a missionary to the Native Americans, in addition to seeking his own salvation of which he was still not assured. The trip would be filled with terror and doubt in the middle of which he would encounter a Pietism lived out that challenged his weak faith.

Specifically, Wesley encountered a group of Moravians, also called United Brethren, from what is the modern day Czech Republic. They were initially followers of Jan Hus, who foreshadowed the Reformation to come and was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1417. Wesley’s trip to George was a failure, his dream of what he would accomplish turning into a nightmare. A couple years later he fled back to Britain. Even in his interaction with the Moravians, he still did not have assurance of his salvation, until he met another Moravian, a missionary himself heading to Georgia, Peter Bohler. Wesley was told he had no saving faith, and still hoped to become righteous by virtue of his own deeds, lacking true faith that comes in an instant, bringing rebirth and certainty of salvation. Talking to Bohler he was convinced he didn’t possess saving faith. This realization was Wesley’s real Evangelical conversion.

From this point on, age 35, Wesley would proclaim the good news of salvation by grace through faith, which he did in any pulpit he could find. The Church of England, however, did not like such displays of what was called at the time, “enthusiasm,” and he became persona non grata. This reaction was the opportunity to jump start the Great Awakening in England, something that had already been happening in America with Jonathan Edwards starting back in New England in 1734 with a series of sermons on “Justification by Faith Alone.” Initially Wesley worked with groups of Moravian church societies, but in 1739 when he got pushback there as well, George Whitefield persuaded him to go to the unchurched masses. It is difficult to convey to modern readers how radical Wesley was in the eyes of the religious establishment of his day. Any religious work done outside of the established parish churches was suspect because there could be no control mechanisms against “enthusiasm.”   

Even as Wesley became an itinerate preacher whose endurance was legendary, his mission wasn’t only saving souls, but keeping Christians accountable to live and grow in a life of holiness. To that end he developed rules for the Methodist Societies, and association within these societies had little to do with doctrine outside of the broad contours of a kind of “mere Christianity.” In due course Wesley would send lay preachers to the American colonies, where Methodism grew quickly and over time would become one of America’s largest denominations, though in time dividing over various issues.

How Pietism Came to Dominate the Evangelical Church
This was a complicated several hundred year cultural and sociological process, but in due course American Protestant Christianity would become a thoroughly Pietistic Christianity. The first Great Awakening had a profound impact on the spread of the distinctives of Pietism. George Whitfield (1714-1770), arguably the greatest evangelist ever, would preach the new birth and holiness throughout the American colonies as well as in Great Britain, arriving in America in 1738 after Wesley left. Through the spreading Great Awakening Pietism eventually was institutionalized in various Protestant denominations, The conversion experience would always be the driver, and a commitment to personal holiness would follow. My conversion and early Christian life would fit the Pietist mold to a T.

And speaking of holiness, Wesley’s striving for and obsession with holiness led him to preach something few Christians today have ever heard of, perfectionism. Eventually, holiness movements in various forms would have broad influence in Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Also called the higher life, or victorious Christian living, it often included a “second blessing” which would eventually be integral to the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. Wesley’s teaching on perfectionism would not only inspire holiness teaching, but become an underlying assumption of modern fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. That was the case when I was a young Christian. Nobody I knew or heard overtly taught perfectionism, but it expressed itself in what I came to call moralism. Christianity was defined in practice as morality. I’m all for morality, doing good and right, living in obedience to God’s law, which is fundamental to Christianity, but Christianity is far more than morality.

This conception of Christianity is about jumping through hoops, and if you jump through all the right hoops, you can feel good about your faith and your relationship to God. It basically turns Christianity into a form of legalism, and given I’m a sinner guilt was a constant companion in my young Christian life no matter how hard I willed myself to overcome my sin. Even though perfectionism wasn’t overtly taught, I had imbibed Wesley’s theological assumptions. It wasn’t until my mentor led me to a book by the great Princton theologian B.B. Warfield called, Studies in Perfectionism, that I learned about the history of the holiness movements of the last two hundred plus years.

There is also a dualism inherent in Pietism that causes Christians influenced by it to tend to reject political or cultural influence as biblical imperatives. It wasn’t that way with the early Lutheran, English, or American Pietists. They very much saw their faith as logically having an impact for the good on the societies in which they lived. Unfortunately, because of their thin theology and focus on experience, any Christian societal impact could not be sustained, and thus secularism eventually came to dethrone Christianity in the West.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Burying Our Dead: Is Cremation Christian?

Burying Our Dead: Is Cremation Christian?

The inspiration for this post is the cremation question I saw on Twitter by a guy who goes by the handle, Smash Baals. It became quite the lively discussion and a lot of people expressed strong opinions one way or the other. The back and forth had an interesting effect on me because the more I interacted and read, the more convinced I became that cremation is in fact not Christian at all. I’ll explain what I mean by that, but I am sure in our day my new conviction would be considered “controversial.” I’ll explain that as well, but after years of waffling and mulling and ambivalence, I’ve come to the conclusion for a variety of reasons that as Christians we should bury our dead and not practice cremation. The primary concern of those who have no strong opinion one way or the other is reflected in this comment:

There’s nothing in the Bible that instructs us, New Testament believers, on how to handle our bodies in death. To claim that cremation is “unchristian,” is unbiblical. There is no ground to stand on.

I am sure in the 21st century post-Christian West this is the default position of most Christians. I frame it this way specifically because we live in a thoroughly secular society that for all intents and purposes is pagan. It’s ironic because Christianity grew to overcome the paganism of the ancient world, and all these centuries later paganism is back on the throne of society. We call it secularism, but it’s pagan in ostensibly non-religious garb, but there is no such thing as a non-religious society or a non-religious person because all people live by faith.

This Christian concern about it being biblical or unbiblical is a typically modern Christian way to frame this. We call this concept biblicism, which is a distinctly Protestant malady. It first shows up in Pietism and some Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then comes to dominate modern Evangelicalism in the 19th and 20th centuries through the Second Great Awakening and fundamentalism. It’s a misunderstanding of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. In stating Scripture alone is our basis for faith and life, we are not saying therefore that if something isn’t expressly stated in Scripture it is illegitimate. In the Reformed world this is called the regulative principle, primarily in regard to worship. It says, if something isn’t expressly allowed or commanded in Scripture regarding worship, it’s wrong and unbiblical to do it. That position itself, however, is wrong and unbiblical.

This becomes obvious when you realize how little Scripture actually addresses in the overall scheme of things. In worship, for example, it’s one thing to say unless something is expressly commanded in Scripture it must not be done, and another that  we should do what Scripture commands. For instance, the Bible says nothing about pianos and organs, maybe because they didn’t exist at the time. But it does say something about other musical instruments used in praising the Lord. The Biblicist who is hard core regulative would say, too bad, it doesn’t command or allow for pianos or organs, so no pianos and organs! That’s just dumb, I say speaking the truth in love. So, regarding burial, yes we don’t find it directly addressed in our Bibles, but we do see how dead bodies are handled in contrast to the pagans, and that tells us a lot. We also see how burial developed in Western Christian history in contrast to paganism, and that also tells us a lot.

The History of Christian Death and Burial
Many early church leaders spoke against cremation, and burial replaced cremation as Christianity spread. It took quite a while for paganism to be vanquished in the West, and thus their burial custom of burning the bodies of the dead as well. With the conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century, paganism began its slow demise. When Rome fell a hundred years later, however, it looked like it would be Christianity that would experience demise, but alas, God’s providential control over all things for His people, His church (Eph. 1:18-23) prevailed. This came through the British Isles starting with St. Patrick becoming a missionary to the Irish in the fifth century, then Charlemagne’s rule in the eighth into the ninth century on the continent, and finally Alfred the Great in the later ninth century. Alfred defeated the pagan Scandinavian hordes by the miraculous intervention of God and helped begin to establish a Christian England that would change the world. 

There are many theological and Scriptural reasons why burial is the preferred and Christian approach to handling our dead, which can be seen in the development of the early church. The church was born into a Hellenistic world where Greek ideas permeated the culture and society, especially those of Plato which developed into the heresy of Gnosticism. Greek thought reflects a radical dualism where matter is tainted and bad, and the soul and the spiritual, non-matter, is good. The goal of life is to eventually escape this tainted mortal body into a non-material realm, so burning dead bodies to ashes was a reflection of this anti-materialist perspective on reality. All pagans shared it to one degree or another because they had no other theological reason for suffering and evil than matter itself being at fault. The concept of a personal, Creator God who made all things good, indeed very good, was unknown among pagans and heathens of every other religion except for Jews and then the Christians.

Christianity took direct aim at Greek and pagan thought with the incarnation of the personal Creator God, something inconceivable to an ancient Roman or Greek. Jews couldn’t conceive of it either, but for very different reasons. The Apostle John speaking of the word or logos in the beginning, the one who was with God and was in fact God, affirms in the incarnation the fundamental goodness of the material world and the human body:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Clearly, it wasn’t matter that makes the world fallen and miserable, but man’s rebellion against his Creator; big difference! And because God united himself with a human body, so Christians saw the body as sacred, part of the full human person. Our bodies are us, and we are our bodies. There is a kind of dualism in Christianity as well, but not playing the material off of the spiritual as the Greeks did. Who we are is more than just our bodies. Some would call that essence, our unique personalities, what makes us, us, our soul (psuché- ψυχή in Greek). Our souls, who we are in our essence, may be separated for a time from our bodies in death, but that is temporary. Our hope, and this is critical, is not an immaterial, i.e. bodyless, existence in an ethereal place called heaven where we go when we die, but a material resurrected body united with our souls in the resurrection on a renewed and redeemed earth, the same earth we exist on now.

Which brings us to one of the pictures of death in the Bible being a kind of sleep from which we will all awaken, and burial is clearly more consistent with this image than cremation. In the great resurrection chapter, I Corinthians 15, Paul speaks of the eternal and spiritual nature of our physical bodies:

42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

Given what is a uniquely biblical anthropology, how Christians understand the nature of man, it is a person who is buried, not just their remains. I came up with a powerful phrase for our kids as they were growing up to communicate God’s hand in the creation of our bodies and who we are: lucky dirt. It was a sarcastic mocking of the idea that we’re simply material beings and a product of mere chance. No, what David says about us in Psalm 139 is that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” This is because we are not merely matter in motion, as I said above, we are persons made, as revealed in Genesis 1, in God’s image, male and female. That we bury persons not merely remains is seen in Mark 1 when the women go to the tomb where Jesus is buried:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so they could go and anoint him. 

The NIV says “body,” but the Greek says him, and not his remains. As I said, Christianity teaches us that we are our bodies and our bodies are us, even though we are more than just bodies. As Paul also says in I Corinthians 15, our bodies have one kind of splendor while our heavenly bodies will have another kind, but both bodies are us! As Paul says, our earthly body must die because what is sown does not come to life unless it dies. Buriel reminds us of this, cremation does not.

So we must ask ourselves a question. Does cremation communicate the same meaning attached to the body as burial? Of course not. People will often ask that their remains be spread in various places that means something to them and their family, which says nothing about the Christian hope of our final destination in a resurrected body on a renewed and redeemed earth. Even if Christians choose cremation, I would hope they would bury the remains of the person as an affirmation of the dignity of the human body and the hope of the resurrection.

Burial and Cremation in a Secular Society
The concern of many of the Christians who commented on Twitter was that this issue would have some bearing on one’s salvation, but that misses the point entirely. Something can be Christian without having any impact on one’s salvation, or not. There are wider societal issues at stake as Christians throughout history understood because a culture is a people’s religion externalized. The ultimate faith commitments of a people would then have implications for how people in that society lived. This was intuitively accepted by all peoples in all societies for all of time until secularism slowly grew out of the 17th century Enlightenment. The great lie of secularism is the myth of neutrality, that a society can be irreligious. This was supposedly the answer to the Wars of Religion, but as we’ve seen over the last several hundred years, wars keep on happening.

It took until the middle of the 20th century for secularism to become the default worldview in the Western world. We can see clearly now that it wasn’t that the West merely grew increasingly irreligious, but that God himself became persona non grata, an unwelcome presence in cultural life. God with all his unpleasant side effects must not be seen in public, but must remain part of people’s private lives. As long as God was kept in private, people could be as religious as they wanted. The lie in all this is that people can somehow be irreligious, but in fact all people live by faith, and thus all people are ultimately religious. Further, a people’s religion, or ultimate faith commitments, have profound implications for culture.

An example of this related to cremation comes from India. Not too long ago, a Hindu tradition probably going back two thousand years known as Sati was practiced by certain Hindu castes. When the man died his body would be cremated and the ashes thrown into the river, and so deliver his spirit to heaven. The other part of this tradition was that if he had a living wife she would be taken and burned her as well, by force if necessary, and burn her on the same funeral pyre as her husband. When the Christian British colonized India, they finally put a stop to this barbaric practice. Hindus obviously didn’t see it that way, so it was culturally accepted even for the many who did not practice it. Culture always cultivates and will have inevitable moral implications.

What we do with our dead communicates something profound about our Christian worldview, and what Christians value and hold to be true not only about the human person but about the ultimate nature of reality. Because of the Enlightenment and rationalism, eventually giving us Darwin and materialism, the secular worldview defaults to matter is all that exists. Cremation regardless of the context in which it is practiced, will always tend to confirm materialism and thus secularism. As I said above if all we are is lucky dirt, matter in motion, and we live in a culture that confirms this, then cremation will communicate exactly that. It is important to understand, which should be clear by now, that I am not making a theological argument but a cultural one because culture not only cultivates but communicates as well, it tells us something about who we are and what this world is.

Many of us are familiar with the phrase heard at funerals, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” a phrase found in the Book of Common prayer, not in the Bible. However, seeing our perishable bodies as dust is clearly biblical, as a few examples make clear. After the fall we read, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen, 3:19). Or this statement from Abraham: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes” (Gen. 18:27). Or when Joab laments, “He throws me into the mud, and I am reduced to dust and ashes” (Job 30:19). And when the cynical Solomon declares, “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return” (Eccl. 3:20).

Yet knowing this, Christians for over 1800 years specifically refused to practice the pagan custom of cremating their dead (people weren’t cremated in America before 1876). In the beginning this was specifically because of their Jewish understanding how to treat their dead who were promised resurrection at some point in God’s redeemed world. This article in the Jewish Virtual Library, “Death & Bereavement in Judaism: Ancient Burial Practices,” is a good one to read to see how important it was for the Jewish people to treat their dead with respect. Although they did not think of cremation as an abomination, nonetheless, their burial customers communicated a profound truth about the biblical nature of the created world, including the people in it.

Lastly, I will point out the value of cemeteries, which can be used for cremation but not created for that. They were created as a place of rest for the dead until the resurrection. They are also a visual reminder that we are mortal and death is our destiny, so we ought to, as the Psalmist says, ask God to “number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).  All of my adult life since I became a Christin at the age of 18, when I drove by cemeteries I was reminded that death is a stark reality I will have to face some day, and that I should live appropriately. Because death is so remote from most people in our secular modern age, our mortality is news to most people. They live with the illusion that maybe the Grim Reaper won’t come for them after all, that death happens to other people, but surely not them. Of course they know that’s not true, but they live like it. As Freud said, none of us can imagine our own deaths, so we’d rather not think about it at all. Cemeteries remind us it is coming, and sooner than we think.

Given I’m somewhat morbid and think about death all the time, any time we would pass a cemetery with the kids in the car, I would remind them they are not immortal and death will come for them one day too. That would often lead to lectures about the veracity of Christianity and how in life only one thing ultimately matters, our relationship to God through Christ. With the much overused phraseology in the Trump era, for this and all the reasons above, I implore my fellow Christians that we must Make Burial Great Again.

 

Culture and Making America Christian Again

Culture and Making America Christian Again

When I started writing my latest book in early 2022, I knew it would be about the Great Awakening happening all around us, and along the way it also became about the re-founding of America. I didn’t realize until a little later into the journey, specifically after I embrace postmillennialism in August of 2022, that Making America Christian Again was the only way America could truly be RE-founded. The book is an historical analysis of how we got our post-Christian 21st century secular America from our founding as a deeply Christian enterprise with a ubiquitous Protestant Christian culture. Without Christianity again becoming the dominant ethos and plausibility structure of the nation, a re-founding will not happen. Which means without America rejecting secularism and embracing its Christian roots, it cannot be the constitutional republic conceived in liberty it once was.

I first heard Joshua Haymes of the Reformation Red Pill Podcast use the phrase, Make America Christian Again, and it perfectly encapsulated in a Trumpian way what I’d been hearing among my new post-mill compatriots. This gets into discussions of the divisive phrase, Christian nationalism, and the even more divisive concept of theonomy, or God’s law over the nation. But those are meaningless concepts and useless discussions without a Christian culture undergirding them. We must work on parallel tracks as we seek to rebuild a Christian America, studying and debating and thinking through exactly what this will look like, but developing a Christian culture is a prerequisite if a Christian America is to even be a possibility.

It’s All About Culture
Culture is a people’s religion externalized. However a people answer ultimate questions of life and death, purpose and meaning, will affect not only how they live, but how they perceive everything in the lives they live. American culture, and the West in general, is secular, God is persona non grata, unwelcome at the societal table. He may or may not exist, but either way He is an invisible, unimportant God, irrelevant to everyday life. This is the driving assumption underlying the secular worldview, and it’s doleful consequences are everywhere. In The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi puts this succinctly:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

The final source of authority in a secular culture is man and his reason, the poisonous fruit of Enlightenment rationalism. Unfortunately, Christianity played along with the rise of secularism in Western culture through the influence of Pietism, a German Lutheran movement in the 17th century, which was a not unreasonable response to a dry, scholastic theology coming out of the Reformation. It was also a perfect example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What made Pietism the ultimate disaster in the demise of Christendom was an over spiritualized Gnostic dualism it created in practice. All this means is that most Christians today effectively live in a two story reality (dualism). Upstairs is the important, spiritual stuff, like prayer, church, evangelism, Bible reading etc., while downstairs is every day mundane life, which is not as important, and above all, not “spiritual.”

The is a profoundly unbiblical and destructive take on Christianity, one that has allowed secularism to grow and dominate the culture, which is why I’ve argued that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin. Most Christians see the purpose of Christianity as being saved so when we die we go to heaven, and while on earth practice and grow in personal holiness. This is a terribly truncated, narrow, and distorted view of Christianity. Before we see why, let’s take a look at culture, what it is, and why it’s so important. As Christians, we must think about culture biblically, as opposed to sociologically or anthropologically. In other words, how do we as Christians define culture differently than non‑Christians. 

A Biblical Take on Culture
Christians start with the Bible, God’s story about his relationship with the human race, and not with something called culture somehow existing independently of His story. The Bible has no word for culture, thus, no definition of it, but we can say culture is the imprint human beings put on God’s creation. In the Genesis 1 and 2 creation account, we find something we now called the “cultural mandate.” Human beings are commanded to govern God’s creation:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

But it is the prior two verses that gives the cultural mandate its true power:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

The significance of the Imago Dei (the image of God in man) for the Christian worldview cannot be overstated. We are God’s visible representatives on earth! We reflect his likeness and attributes in every aspect of our human faculties, be it moral, intellectual, relational, practical, etc. All of these attributes contribute to creating culture. God commands Adam and Eve to act (be fruitful, fill, subdue, rule), and these commands define the essential purposes of human existence. Reformed theologian and philosopher John Frame had this to say in a lecture on Christianity and Culture:

Why did God give this command to Adam and Eve? Well, for the same reason, ultimately, he does everything else: for his own glory. God’s glory is that beautiful, intense light that shines out from him when he makes himself visible to human beings. [He] wanted Adam’s family to spread that glory through the whole world. Adam was not to rule merely for himself, but for God, glorifying God in all he did. So culture is based on a divine command. Adam must develop culture because that is God’s desire. Culture is for God’s sake. So it is subject to God’s commands, God’s desires, God’s norms, God’s values. 

I will add that this God orientation is the only way culture and the people in it can truly flourish.

I may create a beautiful piece of art or music, or build a magnificent building, or tell a moving story in words or film, or plant a garden, or do any number of mundane things, but all of these reflect the glory, greatness, power, and knowledge of the living God! All human creations ultimately point back to him. Obviously the efficient cause, i.e., me, deserves recognition, but the point is that every created thing, whether in the natural world or culture, reflects God himself. Nothing is trivial. It doesn’t matter if the person or people doing a thing are Christians or not, for they too are made in God’s image. Just because they are blind to his glory, try to suppress His knowledge and take the glory for themselves, doesn’t mean God is silenced.

There are significant apologetics implications (i.e., evidence for the veracity of Christianity being true) for a proper biblical understanding of culture which play a critical role in re-Christianizing the culture. The importance of cultural apologetics (culture is the evidence) cannot be overstated in its implications for re-Christianizing and refounding America on its foundational principles. There isn’t space to get into this in detail, but contrary to the doomers who bemoan the debauchery of the hostile secular culture, the culture is our best friend. In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I have a section with exactly that title, and show how I used our non-Christian secular culture to ground our children’s faith. The reason has to do with culture being a reflection of man made in God’s image, and the topic we turn to next. 

Culture and The Fall
Six times in Genesis 1 God says his work was good, and caps it off with a “very good.” When we engage culture, we aren’t simply making meaning, but responding to meaning woven into creation. We are taking that meaning‑filled creation and reshaping it in our hands, or responding to others who have, thus culture is fundamentally a religious pursuit. This means there is no neutral position relative to ultimate meaning as we interact with the culture. As I said above, culture is a people’s religion externalized. Because of the fall, man mars culture even as his distorted products of culture glorify God. This reflection of the disease of the human heart, i.e., sin, suffering, and death must be explained. As I’ve often said, if all we are is matter, merely lucky dirt, then life is basically a Woody Allen movie. His is always in a futile pursuit of meaning, hope, purpose, and fulfillment outside of Christ, and he expects the vacuum in his soul to be filled by created things rather than the Creator. All his movies end in resignation, and you can see this futile pursuit etched in his sad face.

So, an example like Woody Allen shows how all human works can be distorted by man’s disobedience to God. This is the tension that exists in all culture, but God doesn’t leave man in his sin. Immediately after the Fall, God promises redemption (Gen. 3:15). Adam and Eve realize they are naked, and they are ashamed. So taking things into their own hands, they try to sew fig leaves together to cover themselves. And when God comes calling “in the cool of the day,” what do they do? They hide. Their covering didn’t do the job. After they get through with all the excuse making, and God shares with them the promise that the woman’s offspring “will crush” the serpent’s head, we have what is possibly the first sacrifice in history. “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” From that moment on, all history is one long story of human beings furiously sewing fig leaves to try to cover themselves from God’s wrath and judgment, and earn his favor; it doesn’t work. Instead the Lord sacrifices himself because no other sacrifice will do the job! Human beings reflect this salvific drama in everything they do, including in the stories they tell, and in whatever they make.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal work Christ and Culture is a good overview of the ambivalence Christians have had with culture since Pentecost. He looks at certain Christians through the ages, and how they thought Christians should interact with culture. He divides them into five broad types or approaches:

  • Christ against Culture
  • Christ of Culture
  • Christ above Culture
  • Christ and Culture in Paradox
  • Christ Transforming Culture

Christians have negotiated their interaction with a fallen world in a variety of ways, and maybe all these approaches in some way at the same time. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, conservative Protestant Christianity in America, however, slowly came to embrace a version of the Christ against culture approach. With the rise of a truly biblical postmillennialism in the 21st century, in contrast to a secular progressive postmillennialism of the 19th and early 20th century, Christ transforming culture is again becoming the dominant view among Protestant, especially Reformed, Christians. If we are to make America Christian again, we must recapture the Reformation and Puritan vision of Christ the transformer of culture.   

Professions of Cultural Influence, Plausibility Structures, and MACA
If America is to become Christian again, that will be fundamentally a cultural change. As conservatives were finally starting to understand the primacy of culture, as the late great Andrew Breitbart famously said, politics is downstream from culture. Politics and the laws of a country in its own way creates culture, but the politics and laws of a country will never fundamentally contradict the dominant cultural ethos of the people. In 21st century America, that cultural ethos is thoroughly secular. Too many Christians either ignore this or don’t understand the power of it. Whatever that cultural ethos is, is that culture’s plausibility structure, and understanding this concept is critically important.

What is plausible is what seems true and real to us, and the societal structures we inhabit determine for us what is plausible or not. For those who uncritically navigate the culture, their perspective is assumed to be just the way things are. It is the fundamental plausibility structures of culture that must eventually be changed if we’re to ever redirect the massive ship of American culture to true north, i.e., Jesus, God’s word and Law. I will address two issues related to this, abortion and homosexuality. Both of these issues are accepted as normal in a secular culture, and rejected as sinful in a Christian one.

If we are ever to get there, we must understand professions of cultural influence. When I first became aware of the power and dominance of culture in 2007, conservatives were still obsessed with politics thinking somehow if we got the right people elected, the culture would become more conservative as well. It doesn’t work that way. It is a two way street, but fundamentally, culture drives a nation’s laws and how it is governed. So the question is, how do we change the culture? It will not come primarily from changing the laws, even as we attempt to change laws. This is why John Adams, no raging Evangelical, famously said,

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The Founders believed it was the Christian religion and Christian morality of a providentially ordaining God that made the American experiment possible. To them, a secular America would have been a contradiction in terms.

This brings us to professions of cultural influence, something conservatives have basically been clueless about. James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, argues that,

[T]he deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occur from the “top down.” In other words, the work of the world‑making and world‑changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well‑developed networks and powerful institutions.

These networks and institutions include, but are not limited to, education, Hollywood and entertainment, and the media. These three broad areas are the most powerful worldview and plausibility structure generators. As Hunter states further, cultural change, or influence for our purposes, “is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality.” Shaping reality happens primarily from the top down, not the bottom up, and as long as a secular worldview dominates the profession of cultural influence, Christians are spitting into the wind if the think the moral framework of our laws will change.

Too many Christians, unfortunately, seem to think spitting into the wind is a strategy. On Twitter I come across Christians often who declare that abortion is murder and women should be prosecuted as any other murderer would be. Or they declare sodomy should be illegal, some going further say homosexuals should be executed. Such sentiments in the real world are meaningless, not to mention unpersuasive to most people, because we live in a representative republic. That means we have to persuade our fellow citizens that Christianity and God’s law is the only source of true human flourishing, and then elect legislators who will pass laws that will be signed by the state’s or country’s chief executive.

If we truly want to make America Christian again, we need to understand it is a complex, multifaceted, difficult, and generational enterprise. It will only happen if we play the long game. As Christians we have something to learn from the history of cultural Marxism and the rise of woke in our day. Their “long march through the institutions” started in the early 1920s, and it took almost a hundred years for their perverted vision to dominate the culture. As we contemplate the future I say to my fellow Christians, we need to be as patient, persistent, diligent, and determined as the Marxists. We are building cathedrals we will never worship in, and planting trees the fruit of which we shall never eat. Thus we work as if it depends on us, and pray because it depends on God.

 

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.

Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Since I became active on Twitter earlier this year, mainly to promote my new book and work, I’ve noticed that Christians can be narrow minded and dogmatic. And lest you think I’m bagging on my fellow Christians, these less than appealing traits come naturally to sinners regardless of what they believe. Such myopia, the inability to see beyond their own certitude, is why I often see people saying that Peterson is not an orthodox Bible-believing Christian, therefore he’s either dangerous or not worth listening to. I could not disagree more. I believe God is using him as an important piece of the puzzle to re-Christianize America and the West. I believe this, strongly, because of a concept most Christians have never heard of; plausibility structures. This post will be a short primer on the importance of this concept for our specific time in history, living in what Aaron Renn calls “negative world,” and the importance of Jordan Peterson.

In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I explore plausibility structures in some detail, which is the idea of the reality generating mechanism of a culture. 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 secular people 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 being plausible to us, or not. These structures are built into our educational systems, media, entertainment, etc. They are the secular air we breathe, and they affect us in ways big and small without our being aware of it. Christians are not immune to it either. In the West, God is persona non‑grata; if he exists at all he is merely a personal preference. I am convinced most people reject Christianity or never entertain it, because it just doesn’t seem real to them. For most, whether it is true or not is beside the point.

The sociology of knowledge is the study of how a life lived among persons in society affects their perception of reality, the “seemingness” of it. Reality isn’t just there; in some sense it is socially constructed, and the plausibility of our faith to us is directly related to the idea of a socially constructed reality. Christians affirm objective reality, that meaning inheres in things apart from our perceptions or experiences of them. Reality, however, is mediated to us in a variety of ways, through our senses, our psychology, our upbringing, interactions with other people, and society itself. This mediation means that although we affirm that objective reality exists, it must be interpreted by us, to us, and for us. Pure human objectivity does not, and cannot exist. Yet most human beings take reality for granted, as if their view of it was perfectly objective, no interpretation needed. All the while they are ignorant that interpretation is not an option; it is going on all the time whether they acknowledge it or not.

Secularism: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Western post-Christian secular culture no longer shares our Christian presuppositions. God, it is asserted and assumed, is not part of reality in any objective sense. He is wholly subjective, likely a projection of our wishful thinking, a purely personal phenomenon, and as such His existence has no bearing on society.  This perspective, however, starts with the secular world’s understanding of faith.

Secular cultural messaging denies that irreligious people need faith because faith is defined as something required only by religious people. Secular, non‑religious people, however, don’t embrace something called unbelief, but rather some other faith. All people live by faith, but we live in a culture that defines objectivity in a way that prejudices it against religious belief. Scientists and those who live by its light, we are told, can be purely objective, while religious folks by definition can’t be. This “objectivity double standard” allows the culture to define objective reality against us because in this view religious people can’t be objective. Secular people technically may not be “religious” in that they don’t go to church, but they still have a worldview based on faith commitments, which is why there is no such thing as an unbeliever. Finite creatures of limited knowledge can only exist by faith, by trusting the knowledge or expertise or insights or authority of others.

Secular irreligious people don’t know this, and many Christians unfortunately don’t know it either. To the secular, the Christian faith is less believable, less credible, than the secular faith they embrace which seems more credible, more plausible. This faith takes many forms, be it agnosticism, atheism, or an indifference to the claims of Christ, but it is faith, a trust in something, nonetheless. It seems more plausible to such people that God is either not worth pursuing, or even if He’s there it doesn’t much matter, or that any meaning to be had is in this life alone. None of this is merely rational or logical, and I would argue it rarely is. What they believe has more to do with what seems real to them than what is actually real. Society and culture in many ways determine this.

The Social Construction of Reality
In order to work under the rubric of “science,” sociologists have to bracket questions of truth or ultimate meaning. So when they say that reality is a social construction, they are not saying that it is only a social construction. What they are saying is that human beings interpret reality, give meaning to it, in social settings, and that social settings in turn affect that meaning. In the words of Berger and Luckmann:

Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. As sociologists we take this reality as the object of our analysis.

The key phrase here is “reality interpreted.” Reality isn’t self‑interpreting. Looking at the world through our eyes is not unlike how we experience a movie or TV show. The director constructs a reality, i.e., meaning, for us through various mechanisms at his or her disposal, and they are all deliberately, painstakingly used. After laying out an extensive list of what goes into making these virtual fictional worlds meaningful for us, Ted Turnau in his book Poplogetics says:

Each of these techniques adds meaning and texture for the imaginative landscape projected by the film, a world that the filmmaker constructs for our imagination.

Our world, however, is inundated with far more meaning than any film; it’s a veritable Niagara Falls of significance. And it doesn’t take a director to manipulate sound, light, or camera angles; we just have to wake up in the morning. The meaning exists out there, and we hunger for it as we hunger for stories told to entertain us.

Reality, however, isn’t merely something socially determined for us. The idea of the realness of reality, if you will, its objective nature, is both biblical and classical. In the Bible this is assumed from beginning to end, and Plato and Aristotle believed and argued that things have meaning in and of themselves apart from our subjective experience of them. The only other view of meaning, the default of most in the West, is that we are sovereign meaning creators because reality is what we make of it. Ernst Becker, a cultural anthropologist writing in the 60s and 70s, in his book the Structure of Evil writes that there was a “problem of creating meaning,” and that man is “the meaning creating animal.” His fundamental assumption about the nature of reality was that “man maximizes his Being by creating rich, deep, and original human meanings.” Even though in some sense we do create meaning, the difference for the Christian is that meaning is primarily there to be discovered. Our attempt to interpret it is to get as close as we can to the thing that is actually there, but as finite limited creatures we will always be one step away.

Whose Interpretation?
Even though as Christians we affirm objective reality, our everyday existence in the world is a constant encounter with a plethora of circumstances and experiences that must be, in one way or another, interpreted and attached with meaning. Berger and Luckman use the term, “Subjectively meaningful.” This reality is meaningful to us, and as such it must form some kind of “coherent world”; it must be comprehensible, it must make sense to us.

Everything, however, turns on the interpretation, which is “the action of explaining the meaning of something.” Interpretation, then, is where the true battle for the soul of Western civilization lies. Who gets to interpret reality? It is either God in Christ in Scripture, or secularism by default. The biggest challenge for the rise of a new Christendom is secular culture. As Berger points out in The Sacred Canopy:

One of the most obvious ways in which secularization has affected the man in the street is as a “crisis of credibility” in religion. Put differently, secularization has resulted in a widespread collapse of the plausibility of traditional religious definitions of reality.

And he wrote that in 1967! It wasn’t too many years prior that a universe without God would have been inconceivable for average Americans. Among Western society’s cultural elites after the Enlightenment it was totally conceivable, and it only broke out into the wider culture with a bang in the 1960s. Sociology helps us to understand how wider social currents, like secularization, get internalized into individuals.

The interpretation process and how human beings derive meaning from the world is interactive. Berger and Luckman:

It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity.

They call it a paradox that human beings construct a world that they “then experience as something other than a human product.” At first blush, concepts like “humanly produced, constructed objectivity” may appear arcane, but it is important for this discussion and Christianity’s influence in our secular world. This “seeming” process happens because all of us interact socially. In producing a world in our perceptions we externalize it, then interacting with it we objectify it, and finally we internalize it as “reality.” In effect our perceptions become reality for us, whether they reflect objective reality or not. You might want to read that sentence again, and think about it a bit. As Christians it is a good idea in our knowing and what we think we know to exercise some epistemological humility (I Cor. 8:2). I have written about that in detail previously.

Christians Should Not Take “Reality” for Granted: Says Who?
What does all of this have to do with Jordan Peterson? Everything! Reality and how people perceive it is in some way always socially defined. The dialectic process of a world becoming “real” to us is never ending. Christians can never take “reality” for granted because the question is always, “Says who?” That is, who serves as the definers of reality, secular culture or God. In The Sacred Canopy, Berger puts it this way: “The fundamental coerciveness of society lies not in its machineries of social control, but in its power to constitute and impose itself as reality.” The power of this imposition occurs when reality becomes taken for granted. We should never let reality be “taken for granted,” never assume reality is there to be seen for just the way people instinctively think it is. This is where Peterson comes in as a powerful question mark on this secular-taken-for-granted reality people inhabit in the 21st century.

Our Job as Christians battling secularism is to be consistently defining reality biblically. If we don’t, the hostile secular culture will always do the defining, and Christianity will lack a compelling plausibility to most people. The cultural air breathed throughout the West is plausibly secular. It is much easier for most people to believe in an irrelevant God (few are philosophical atheists) than the providential God of Scripture who ordains and defines all things. The challenge for Christians and Christianity at this moment in history, in “negative world,” is that we don’t have any cultural credibility. In fact, as Renn’s phrase implies, the dominant secular culture sees Christianity as positively harmful and dangerous. In this environment it is, practically speaking, extremely difficult to gain cultural traction. Most of us have little culture defining power, except in the very narrow pocket of our personal lives. Then, in God’s providence steps Jordan Peterson, himself a secular, Canadian liberal academic psychologist, and a most unlikely driver of a new Christian cultural consensus.

Too many myopic Christians focus on Peterson’s lack of historical Christian orthodoxy, as if that really matters for the cultural job God has called him to. It doesn’t. It’s almost a sport now, parsing Peterson’s words to see when he’ll finally take the plunge and declare with his mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in his “heart that God raised him from the dead,” so that he will finally be saved (Rom. 10:9). And being a man of many words, it’s a robust sport! It seems The Hound of Heaven is after him, though, given his wife is a convert to Catholicism, and his daughter an outspoken born-again Christian. Not to mention how many people challenge him on his conception of Christianity. But at this point, whatever the form and nature of this conception, his job is much bigger than his own salvation. I know that’s not a very Evangelical thing to say, but it’s true.

 

 

The reason Peterson is so important is because the “conceptual machinery” that elites in a society impose on the masses must be unmasked so that the underlying assumptions are always questioned. The secular culture like a machine grinds its notions, or concepts, into our plausibility field, so to speak, to make reality seem a certain way. This seeming must be questioned. As the popular bumper sticker in the olden days demanded, we must “Question Authority.” We as Christians in a culture hostile to our Faith must always question the authority of the definers: “Says who?” That is Jordan Peterson, and God has given him a huge platform to do that. This short video is a good example of how effectively he does that.

He also has credibility among cultural elites who are not leftists. Not being a run of the mill conservative Evangelical has helped him gain an impressive traction among people who would otherwise not find Christianity plausible at all. I’ve heard quite a few stories of people who have come to Christ because of him, so his lack of orthodoxy hasn’t kept people from being influenced by him to embraced Christ as Lord and Savior. The battlefield in our secular age is immense, and much of it happens, as Burger and Luckman say, on a “pretheoretical level,” that is prior to people even thinking. What Peterson is doing so well is again making the Christian worldview a player on the secular world’s stage, making it plausible for an increasing number of people. That means they will take it more seriously as a possible answer for the crying needs of our time. Secularism is not working, an experiment birthed in the Enlightenment that has proved wanting at every level. Let’s pray for Jordan that he makes it all the way to the only one who can save him from sin and death.

Secularism and Pietism: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Secularism and Pietism: Two Sides of the Same Coin

As I’ve been thinking and reading about Christ’s reign being extended throughout the world and God’s kingdom advancing, I’ve realized that secularism and Pietism are two sides of the same coin. That might seem strange given the former is completely anti-religion and the latter is passionately religious, but both lead to the same thing: a secular society devoid of Christian influence. The realization I’ve had, and learned from others who’ve thought through these things for a lot longer than I have, is that because of the influence of Pietism, secularism triumphed as Christianity became primarily inward and personal.

Secularists love Christianity as long as it stays inside the four walls of the church or home, in the proverbial closet. Religion cannot be allowed to mar the sacred secular public space. I use the word sacred purposefully and ironically because secularism is a religion, another form of paganism whose gods just look different. The problem is that Christians who effectively embrace Pietism, as do most Evangelical Christians in our day, believe their faith belongs within those four walls and not in public. Therefore, secularism has free reign to dominate society and culture just as it has since World Word II in the once Christian West.

I’ve been thinking along these lines since my “conversion” to postmillennialism. The critical component of this optimistic eschatology is that it teaches us from Scripture, not speculation, that Christ did not come only to save our souls so when we die we go to heaven, nor to add personal holiness to that. His mission was far more expansive and far reaching. Specifically, he came to address the curse of sin for his fallen people, and the effects of sin on, in, and through us. For me, that latter preposition was what I didn’t get or discounted my entire Christian life until my “conversion” a year and a half ago. I heard a young Christian Twitter friend of mine, Joshua Haymes, say becoming postmillennial was like a drop of ink in a clear glass of water. It looks pretty cool and psychedelic for a bit, then in due course it colors every drop of water. Postmillennialism is like that; it colors everything I see because Christ came to win, here, now, in this life in this fallen world.

Christ’s Victory Over the Devil
Just as he frustrated the devil in the wilderness (Matt. 4), Jesus has been frustrating him for 2,000 years through His people whom he came to save (Matt. 1:21). I never knew that Isaac Watts’ Christmas hymn, Joy to the World was postmillennial:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
far as the curse is found,
far as the curse is found,
far as, far as the curse is found.

There is a lot of wonderful theology in those words! Just as the curse is ubiquitous, so are the blessings that flow through us to overcome the effects of the curse. Every square inch of reality is Christ’s, and he has commissioned us to take it back from the devil.

We sell Jesus’ victory over Satan and evil short when we think it is solely for the consummated state when he comes again to judge the living and the dead. I used to believe Satan and evil had the upper hand down here in this fallen world. I thought, isn’t it obvious? But it’s not obvious at all for those with eyes to see beyond the obvious. I use that word three times to highlight how easily we interpret reality by what we see and feel, rather than by the word of God. For example, we’re told Jesus came to reign and rule until he has put all his enemies under his feet (I Cor. 15:25), the last enemy being death which will happen at the resurrection. Who and what are his enemies prior to the resurrection? Anything that is contrary to the law-word of God. That’s happening whether you think you can see it or not, and in due course it will become obvious too. We’re playing the long game here, pushing back the curse not just for now, but for generations to come.

Unfortunately, we give far too much credit to sin and the devil. God told us in Genesis 3 that the seed of the woman would strike or bruise the serpent’s head. We may think the devil is a formidable foe, but every scheme he can conjure up in that head of his will fail. Jesus (through his church, us) is in fact frustrating him; he cannot frustrate Jesus. And no matter where the curse is found Jesus is conquering it, pushing it back, transforming what the devil intends for evil into good. If we think this process of conquering evil is only for the church, or only to be done inside the church or our houses, we are missing the mission of God in Christ, why he came: to redeem and restore all creation by the nations being discipled. That indeed is a Great Commission!

I recently relistened to the James White sermon that initially cracked open my closed mind to postmillennialism in August of 2022. In it he said there are far more professing Christians alive today than people living on earth in the first century. Could anyone alive then have imagined such a thing? Now we need to help more of these Christians escape from the clutches of Pietism and bring King Jesus to every area of their lives to disciple their own nations.

Why Pietism Came to Dominate the Modern Church
As with any movement among peoples and cultures there are a variety of complex factors that cannot be neatly packaged as a cause. The same is true with these two isms, and it is important to realize how they grew symbiotically together as a poisonous weed in Christian Western culture.

Initially, Pietism was a response to a type of dry scholasticism that grew out of the Middle Ages tending to make faith a merely intellectual exercise. The early Reformers were products of that scholastic culture, and as such were profoundly intellectual. The Reformation was built on those intellectual efforts, but over time some saw those efforts as tending toward a dry formalism. Pietists were specifically looking for a more dynamic, experiential faith, and built a contrasting, non-intellectual version of Christianity. This developed initially among German Lutherans in the early 17th century. In due course through some strains of Puritanism and the First and Second Great Awakenings, it made its way into American fundamentalism, and became the default faith of modern Evangelicalism.

Needless to say, God made us in his image, therefore our intellect is not in any way opposed to or contrary to our feelings or emotions. God made us so our emotions primarily flow from our thinking, and our thinking not dominated by our emotions. This orientation of the rightly ordered man started to change in Western culture as the two isms made their way into the modern world. An excellent explanation of what this means is in C.S. Lewis’s classic book, The Abolition of Man. He starts with a withering assessment of a book intended for, “boys and girls in the upper forms of schools.” Keep in mind the book was written in 1943, some three hundred years after the two isms had come to dominance in Western culture, but not enough to dominate. That would come in what we affectionally call, “The ‘60s.” The authors of the textbook are addressing a work by English poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The authors address a depiction of two tourists discussing a waterfall. Lewis quotes from the textbook:

“When the man said, That is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. . . . Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word ‘Sublime,’ or shortly, I have sublime feelings.’ Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: “This confusion is continually present in language as we appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our feelings.”

Lewis then shreds this perversion of thinking in his own indomitable way, but it doesn’t take having the towering intellect of C.S Lewis to realize what a disaster this shift entails. Here’s my take: Feelings are what count, what is important, and sublimity or beauty doesn’t exist objectively in God’s created world. The saying, beauty is in the eye of the beholder became absolute. As the 20th century showed us, ugliness could now be proclaimed beautiful.

Lewis called such people, “men without chests.” That is the title Lewis gives to the third section of his little book. In the classical understanding of anthropology, human beings are made up of three parts, the head, the chest, and the bowels. The head is the seat of the rational, the bowels the emotional, and the chest negotiates between the two. If the head through knowledge and faith doesn’t train the chest to manage the bowels, you get, well, the modern world, which is a feminized world where feelings and emotions through empathy dominate rather than rational calculations of the tradeoffs necessary to living in a fallen world more common to men. God created man, male and female he created them, that their two natures would compliment each other toward true human flourishing, or in biblical terms, blessing.

How do We Escape the Two Isms?
This is the question confronting every Christian in our time. It’s not difficult to convince Christians they need to escape secularism, but if you tell them they need to escape Pietism, they’ll wonder what you’ve been drinking. Unfortunately, most Christians are as ignorant of history as most Americans, so they will think Pietism just means being pious. They need to be educated about the 17th century German Lutheran movement of the name, and its influence on how they live out their faith in the modern world.

The fundamental fact Christians must learn is that Pietism has made their faith irrelevant to the culture in which they live. The church effectively has zero impact on Western culture, and that must change because it is that to which we have been called. The Great Commission and the Lord’s Prayer make it abundantly clear the “culture wars” are not an option. Some Christian leaders think they are, and worse, are a distraction. I’ve heard more than one say, being involved in the “culture wars” is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And we wonder why American culture is such a hell hole.

Few people understand the culture is simply a people’s religion externalized. Because secularism is the dominant religion of the West, we have a secularized culture that treats Christianity as a threat to societal order. Aaron Renn says we are now in “negative world.” In an influential January 2022 article in First Things called, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” Renn argues that we’ve come to negative world through positive and neutral world. Prior to the 1990s, Christianity was seen in American culture as a positive thing. In the 1990s that changed, and the culture treated Christianity as neutral, neither good nor bad. Now, our cultural elites see Christianity as a threat to all that is decent and good, like abortion, homosexual “marriage,” and transgenderism.

I believe the issue is theological, specifically eschatological. What we think about how things will end determines what we see as our mission as Christians today. That is, we are his body to bring everything in submission to his kingship, including the nations. From the very beginning, God’s covenant promises of salvation were to the nations, a word used well over 600 times in the Bible. In the Old Testament, it is clear he blesses nations as nations who honor and obey him, and curses, even destroys, those that don’t. America was blessed because as founded its leaders and most of its people believed their success as a nation depended on honoring God as a people, as a nation. And Jesus said plainly, nations are to be discipled. I will end with a verse, 2 Chronicles 7:14, that applies to every nation on earth:

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

The context is the dedication of the temple by Solomon and the people of Israel. God’s people now inhabit every nation on earth, and we are called to pray for God to heal our lands. The temple no longer resides in Israel and belongs to one people, but Jesus is now the living temple of God as we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. This promise of God healing our land if we pray, seek him, and walk in his ways, is to us! It is why I pray most mornings for our land, America, what I call “the four R’s”: for Revival that will lead to Renewal to Restoration and finally Reformation. The goal isn’t just saved souls, but transformed people who will transform everything they put their hands to.