Charlie Kirk and The Current Great Awakening

Charlie Kirk and The Current Great Awakening

When I started thinking about writing my last book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, the words awakening and Great Awakening were out there in the zeitgeist, which in German means the spirit of the age. It’s the cultural climate of the period in which we live, and in early 2022 because Biden had “won” the election, we were in the full flower of the Covid scam and Wokistan. It was a dark time, and it would have been easy to lose hope, but because of the excesses of the left in government and culture, people were waking up to the truth. The realization many people were coming to happened specifically because they were being exposed to lies on such a massive scale that it became glaringly obvious something was deeply wrong with America’s ruling class. Although only some of these people were waking up to Jesus, and it was more than a few, others were in a way waking up to Jesus without knowing it. There are metaphysical and spiritual implications to truth because of he who is The Truth. If a person is an atheist or agnostic, and their minds start opening to truth, they are getting dangerously close to the source of all truth. This dynamic is possible because we are at the end of the several hundred year experiment of the Enlightenment. All Enlightenment figures believed in truth, except in a version untethered from the source of truth. Now because secularism born of the Enlightenment failed, truth now point to Jesus rather than away from him.

I wrote a piece here in June ’22 arguing that the dividing line in Western culture is truth. The left, which took over the Democrat Party with Obama’s election, only believes in “the narrative,” or whatever it is that advances and sustains their ideological agenda. They will use the “will to power” to advance it by any means possible. The ends always justifies the means for them. On the other side are old fashioned liberals who believe there is such a thing as truth, and have rejected the leftist takeover of the party. Of course, this doesn’t mean all those who believe in truth will end up putting their trust in Christ, but it does mean they can be confronted with the claims of the ultimate source of truth, the one who claimed to be the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). Those arguments today are more plausible, and have more persuasive power, at this end of the failed Enlightenment. The reason is that philosophically, you can’t get truth from dirt, from mere molecules. Without God truth can’t ultimately prevail because it is grounded in nothing, and so doesn’t even exist. But it does, and so it can.

Which brings us to the difference of this Great Awakening from the previous two: it comes in a secular culture where Christianity’s influence was minimal at best. The previous two Awakenings took place in thoroughly Christian cultures, so there really is no comparison to our current cultural moment. Rediscovering truth as a cultural touchstone is important because it is a rejection of the relativism and postmodernism that dominated the second half of the 20th century, and found its ultimate realization in the leftism of the 21st. Up until the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 it seemed the triumph of secularism, and the third class status of Christians, would go on for the foreseeable future. But things took a radical change that day, one for many of us that is still hard to believe. Unless it is really happening, and it is.

I’ve said this many times here, and argue it extensively in my book, that secularism is basically dead. It had a good, very long run, but has run its course and proved to be a colossal failure. I often use the Berlin Wall as a metaphor for secularism. It seemed as indestructible as the physical wall separating East from West Germany, and fell as ignominiously. The basic premise of secularism was that a society could function and flourish without God, and it is glaringly obvious that doesn’t work. I was born in 1960, and the remnant of Christendom was hanging by a thread, it’s foundations having been completely gutted by the nascent secularism driven by America’s cultural elites. When Kennedy was shot and the Beatles showed up on the Ed Sullivan show a little over two months later, everything changed. What we came to call “the 60s” ushered in a cultural revolution that is only now coming to its somber end in 2025.

Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: The Real
By this third decade of the 21st century the youngest among us were hungering for something real, something that works, that makes sense of reality, that brings real meaning, real fulfillment, real hope, real joy, real healing, real anything. Secularism brought only disappointment and dysfunction because it only deals with half of reality, the material half, and that half will never make a person whole. If the material is all there is, then goodness, beauty, and truth cannot exist. They are only concepts “in the eyes of the beholder.” What ends up happening as we’ve seen throughout history, is that without God rooted in Scripture, goodness turns bad, beauty turns ugly, and truth into lies. It is inevitable. But the fact of the matter is that goodness, beauty, and truth do exist, and these metaphysical realities are touching millions around the world today, especially young people in the West who’ve grown up on a consistent diet of lies.

What is so shocking to many, I dare say most of us, is the seeming rapidity of the change. We felt the same way with peak woke that grew during Trump’s first term, and then came to dominate culture and politics in Biden’s term. Then all of a sudden, Trump’s elected again, and Christians and Christianity went from being mocked and denigrated, to Christ being proclaimed from the rooftops, including by the highest government officials, and that boldly. In a way we have Charlie Kirk to thank for that, but his horrible death only popped the cork, and the spiritual bubbly sprayed over the entire culture, and indeed throughout the world. It was yet another massive red pill in this Great Awakening journey God is granting his creatures. We also have the Internet to thank as well. First, information can no longer be controlled by the secular, leftist gatekeepers who once determined what was important and was allowed to be disseminated. And now people, especially young people, are getting their news and information from social media and the Internet, unfiltered, and uncontrolled by the secular leftists.

What is also amazing about this Great Awakening, is that while we’re breaking out of secularism like those awaking from a nightmare, we also seem to be breaking out of the Pietism that has dominated Evangelical Christianity for almost two hundred years. The lived Christian experience became a primarily personal version of spirituality. Another piece I’ve written here tells the story of Pietism and secularism being two sides of the same coin, each enabling the other. Charlie Kirk has been instrumental in bringing Christianity back to its world changing, culture transforming roots. While not being driven theologically, he realized through his talent and organizational skills at making things happen that it was Christianity that allowed society to function and flourish as God intended. As I recently heard a new British Christian, Louise Perry on Twitter say of Christianity, “If it were supernaturally true you would expect it to be sociologically true.” That is brilliant! Christianity lived out in obedience to God and his law, blesses wherever it goes, the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abram 4,000 years ago. Kirk understood better than most, it was Christianity that allowed true human flourishing in every area of life, including in politics.

More Christians than ever in my lifetime, especially politically and culturally influential Christians, are proclaiming Christ as King, and that our nation must be a Christian nation, rightly understood. And keep in mind, God used the most unlikely vessel to spark this spiritual wildfire, Donald Trump, with the Holy Spirit lighting that spark. It isn’t that Trump is our Moses leading us to the promised land, or a paragon of Christian virtue, but God enabled him to start something in hindsight no other public figure could: he drove the left certifiably insane. This was also enabled by the NeverTrumper right who revealed their true colors as the controlled opposition, and the result of this has been a revelation of God beyond anything that’s happened since the triumph of secularism in the 20th century. Initially, the title of my book was, Trump the Great Revealer, but my publisher suggested changing it because the book isn’t about Trump, but the Great Awakening coming in his wake, a great revealing.

The left revealing its true evil nature is God’s judgment in giving these people exactly what they wanted, and it just wasn’t good enough. They wanted more because at heart they are totalitarians. It reminds me of the passage in Romans 1 where Paul is speaking of God’s wrath against sinful humanity:

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Sexual debauchery is only one of the consequences of man’s rebellion against God, of his giving them over to their desires, because its ugly manifestations infect everything. Human nature being what it is, things often have to get very bad for people to eventually repent and find their way back to the Author of life that is truly life. Which is a good introduction to a change in my prayer habits that happened several years ago coinciding with my own eschatological awakening.

The Four R’s: Revival, Renewal, Restoration, and Reformation
For several hundred years in the Evangelical Church prayer for revival has been common. We’ve seen wide revivals like the Great Awakenings, and pockets of revival throughout Western history. I realized several years ago that revival in a secular society is no longer enough. In previous revivals, all Christians believed their faith should have societal consequences. Then as Pietism and secularism, two sides of the same coin, came to dominate Western culture in the 20th century, revivals became solely “spiritual.” For some my two sides claim seems odd. After all, isn’t Pietism deeply religious, and secularism not religious at all? The point is that one enables the other. Pietism is primarily about a privatized, personal religious faith, and secularism demands a privatized, personalized faith. In a secular Republic, like America is now, but slowly breaking out of, faith is allowed, but not in the public square. As long as religion stays within the four walls of the house or church, the secularist thinks it’s great, but when it starts sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, like government or law or education, it must be silenced and forced back into the private and personal.

Because of this Pietistic-secular dynamic, several years ago I stopped praying for revival only, and began praying the four R’s, for revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation. The first R is for the spiritual rebirth of individuals by the power of the Holy Spirit. The next two Rs means those people bring that spiritual awakening into God’s creation to renew and restore it, and the fourth R into the church to transform it into the engine of renewal and restoration for God’s people so they go out into the world to extend Christ’s reign on earth.

What this means in practice is that I am now praying for the earthly reclamation project that is the gospel. For too long Christians have seen the gospel in narrow, truncated terms, as if it was only about our personal salvation from sin. The gospel means, in effect, saying the sinner’s prayer, the Four Spiritual Laws, the Romans Road. In fact, what makes the Great Commission great, is that going from spiritual death to life, from darkness to light, is only the beginning. We are then to take that life and light into all of life. What did Jesus say when he gave the disciples their commission? Teach “them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And then Jesus gave us the New Testament to let us know what everything meant, and then to take that everything into every area of life. All things are transformed by the gospel, which means God’s kingdom coming and his will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

The beauty of this Great Awakening is that in large measure because of Charlie Kirk and all the work he did for the last 13 years, and then his assassination, more Christians are starting to understand that we can’t stop at the first R. His memorial is a great example of how renewal and restoration happen. Almost the entire executive branch of the United States Government was present, as were many from Congress. The boldness of government officials proclaiming Christ unashamedly was something I didn’t think I’d ever see in my lifetime. Sure, Christians have served in government, and boldly proclaimed their faith, but not in this way, not on such a grand scale. In addition to the people attending in two venues in Arizona, it is estimated that over a hundred million people saw it worldwide, and how many more will see clips and snippets into the foreseeable future is unknowable, but surely massive. Charlie Kirk in death is reaching far more than in life.

I recently heard Vice President J.D. Vance say in an interview that prior to Kirk’s murder, he hadn’t read the Bible much, and was uncomfortable being outspoken about his faith, but since he’s reading the Bible every day, and boldly proclaiming Jesus. He’s not the only one either. This is now widespread in the halls of power in the United States of America. And whatever anyone thinks about President Trump, he has really led the way in Making Christianity Great Again in America. Christianity has been welcome in his White House unlike any president in modern times, and given free reign to speak and be itself. That is an answer to my prayer for renewal and restoration. We add reformation when Christians realize the all-encompassing nature of the mission of the church, of God’s people taking the authority of King Jesus and Christian worldview into every nook and cranny of life because we understand again the theological richness of the first Reformation. The scope and extent of the gospel’s influence will then be unleased on the secularism that has decimated Christian Western civilization. But that means we will have to address the big lie of secularism.

The Secular Myth of Neutrality
Unfortunately, most Christians have never heard this phrase, and would likely not know what I was talking about. As I mentioned above, in a secular society religion is primarily a private affair. There is a long history of why this came to exist in Western societies, but religion is never just a private thing. Every nation and people has a view of reality that includes ultimate things, answers to the great questions of life that give our lives meaning, hope, and purpose, or at least attempt to. There has to be some ultimate source of authority in every society, and if it’s not God it will be the state. We saw this come to full fruition in the tyranny of Biben administration, and now on terrible display in the UK. The religion of secularism was on full display, man like God determining what is good and evil (Gen. 3). There has never been and will never be a neutral public space where ultimate questions don’t have to be answered, it’s a myth, one we’ve been mired in since at least the end of World War II.

Ever since we’ve lived in a secular republic informed by the liberal (read left-wing) post-World War II “consensus.” That word in quotes means, sadly, that conservatives (including Christians) have gone along with the “consensus.” Most conservatives still buy into this, thinking something like a “Christian nation” is an oxymoron, in the words of Larry Arnn which I wrote about last year. I hope he’s changed his mind on that contention. The reason he said it, and why conservatives believe it, is because they believe if a nation is Christian, the government will force all the people to believe Christian things. That’s ridiculous because Christianity doesn’t teach such a thing, in fact exactly the opposite. Just read the gospels and Acts. Jesus seemed to do everything he could to get people not to follow him. And the Apostles simply proclaimed a resurrected Jesus as the Messianic fulfillment of the Jewish religion. People were free to believe it, or not.

Somewhere along the way in Christian history, Christians forgot this, and started forcing Christian belief with the threat of persecution, and sometimes death. That was when church and state were truly mixed up in an unbiblical and unhealthy way. Even then, however, the church couldn’t execute those they deemed heretics. That was a job for the state, the institution wielding of the sword (Rom. 13) for justice. This brings up something like blasphemy laws. Certainly, such a thing has no place in a Christian nation, right? Wrong. As we’ve seen in our secular republic, blasphemy laws are alive and well. The only difference is the content considered blasphemous. We all know and lived through this in the Biden years. The lie of the myth of neutrality was on full display, which I now see is why God allowed him to “win” the 2020 election. We got leftism on steroids. Some liberals and conservatives (who are basically liberals as well), still contend that a neutral secular state is the ideal we should strive for, but such a thing can’t exist, and never will.

That means in this age of the four R’s, this Great Awakening, Christians need to think seriously what a Christian nation in the modern world looks like. That will take a lot of work and debate and discussion, but many are now undertaking that. Part of the subtitle of my book was the refounding of America. The founders got a lot of things right, but not everything. Much of the Christian foundation of the republic happened because America was formed in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture, which was assumed, not explicitly stated. That was because secularism was already a force even then. That needs to change, and it is, but none of this will be easy. God gave us, then took away from us much too soon, a Charlie Kirk to give us a good start. Let’s build on his legacy so we can bless the generations to come with what he gave his life for.

 

The End of Christendom: Its Demise and Rebirth

The End of Christendom: Its Demise and Rebirth

I was inspired to write this piece by a little book I’m re-reading by Malcolm Muggeridge. He gave a talk about the end of Christendom in 1978, the year of my new birth, for the inaugural address of the Pascal Lectures at the University of Waterloo. I just did a quick search and found the lectures continue to this day, and some are even available on YouTube. Christendom is a topic of some consternation and much ambivalence for many modern Christians. There is even a contingent who believe it was all downhill for civilization and the church when Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in the early 4th century. That’s overstating the case, but they are not fans of “Christendom.” The reason in their minds, as far as I can tell, is that Christendom confused the kingdom of God with the state and earthly power. That’s not good. Their answer is some kind of Pietistic two kingdoms Christianity, a complete “separation of church and state,” in the mystical words of 20th century secular American jurisprudence. The phrase, as most know, originated with Jefferson, but was made unquestionable doctrine in Everson v. Board of Education (1947).

Their assumption is that Christianity and the state are mutually exclusive, in Augustine’s phrasing, confusing the City of God with the earthly city of man. The spiritual life of the Christian, they believe, has nothing to do with the messy machinations of distributing power through governing. We’ll parse that out below, but there is a growing contingent of Christians of all theological stripes, I among them, who believe not only was Christendom a good thing, but that it is our God-ordained job to return the West to its Christian roots.

I became familiar with Muggeridge (1903-1990) in my early Christian journey, probably because of the influence of Francis Schaeffer who widened the scope of my vision of the Christian life to all of reality. I was born-again into a kind of fundamentalist Pietism in which I experienced Christianity as a dualism, the spiritual stuff in one sphere, and non-spiritual everywhere else. I was never overtly taught this, but it was the Christian water I swam in. When Schaeffer came along, all of a sudden thinking about how my Christina faith applied to society and civilization became extremely important to me. I’m sure when I saw the title of this little book I needed to know exactly how and why Christendom came to its end. I always wanted to see Christianity once again esteemed and influential in society, but my eschatological assumptions were not consistent with that aspiration. That was The Late Great Planet Earth 70s and 80s, and things were getting so bad Jesus was certainly coming back soon. That, however, was never God’s plan, that this fallen world would grow increasingly worse and he would rescue us from the destruction. Quite the opposite in fact.

Because of Schaeffer and my expanding Christian worldview, I was committed to seeing Christianity make a comeback in Western society, but the odds were daunting. The reason this little book fascinates me now is because in the milieu of the late 1970s and 80s, Christianity was pretty much done. We were now clearly the underdogs, even if vestiges of Christian influence hadn’t completely disappeared. Muggeridge was a keen observer of the dissolution of Christianity’s influence in Western culture. He was a one-time atheist and a successful journalist who expressed his thoughts in “stinging wit and elegant prose.” For a time in the 50s he was the editor of a British satirical magazine called Punch. As a professional observer of the human condition, like C.S. Lewis, his atheism wasn’t able to explain what he saw and experienced of life. He embraced Christianity later in life, and at the age of 79 he and his wife were received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1982.

The Boomers as the Fulcrum Generation
Muggeridge’s perspective on Christianity and civilization is fascinating to me because looking back over the decades it now fits so well. At the time it was depressing. I’m more grateful than ever for the exact timing of my birth and the period of history God chose me to live in, even if I have to endure the insults of the boomer haters. In Acts Paul tells us this is no accident, for any of us:

26 From one man he made all the nations of mankind, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.

I was born in 1960 into an American culture that would soon become the maelstrom known as “the 60s.” The further I go up the mountain of age, I can look down upon the plains of my life in hindsight and see the flow of history more clearly than when I was living through it. History is like that. Nobody save God knows where it’s going or what it means when they are living through it. I’ve thought and written a lot about the flow of history and ideas and how they develop over time. It’s an endlessly fascinating topic to me. I recently wrote a piece about my supposedly benighted generation, and as I was writing I realized something I hadn’t considered before. The boomers are the fulcrum generation in Western history, a kind of pivot-point around which modern history has turned. Our boomer role in the modern world has been to experience the fulfillment and death of one world, secularism, and the transition to another. We’re not sure what that transition will bring, but in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, I argue in detail that secularism is either dead, or on its last legs, showing its age, and like the Berlin Wall circa 1989 ready to fall. The boomers were the first and last fully secular generation. How did we get there?

In 1637 a pious Catholic Christian, René Descartes, wrote a philosophical work in which striving for certainty in an increasingly skeptical age, he decided to doubt everything. He discovered the only thing he couldn’t doubt was his existence in the form of his thinking, reflected in the phase Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am. I’ve mentioned this a million times, it seems, in my own writing, because it was the beginning of the so-called Enlightenment. Descartes’ perspective came to be known as rationalism, and eventually Western intellectuals thought they could figure life out and conquer reality with reason alone and without God. Revelation was no longer required. In due course secularism arose, which is the idea that a society could be run without reference to God at all. Secularism eventually dethroned Christianity in the mid-20th century in the decade into which I was born. The baby boom generation became the first in Western history to grow up with the effects of Christianity as a declining force in the culture.

When the boomers were born (1946 to 1964) most Americans thought of America as a Christian nation and the American people as a Christian people. Kennedy’s assassination on December 22, 1963, seemed to usher “the 60s.” Up to that point, America had been living in post-World War II prosperity and naivete, confident in America’s inherent greatness. No obstacle seemed too great for America to overcome. Then in a moment everything seemed to go to hell. Along with other technological and cultural changes, the invention of the pill in the early 60s allowed the boomers to become the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll generation, with a large side of protest thrown in. God only got in the way. Some hippies got religion in the 70s, but the generation as a whole became increasingly God-less. In the early 2000s, the “New Atheists” came on the scene with some very old arguments, and became a cultural phenomenon. It was the first time in history that Christianity was portrayed as not only morally suspect, but positively harmful. What we came to call woke, cultural Marxism, began to permeate the culture with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. From that point on when boomers were at the commanding heights of American government and culture, secularism was now the boss and Christianity a nuisance, or at best an irrelevance. Muggeridge was amazed at where this dissolution of Christendom was coming from:

Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes. Christendom has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elites. Our barbarians are home products, indoctrinated at the public expense, urged on by the media systematically stage by stage, dismantling Christendom, depreciating and deprecating all its values. The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.

I wonder what Muggeridge would think looking back at this first three decades of the 21st century. I’m sure words would not be able to handle his level of incredulity. Even the dissolution of the 70s could not prepare someone for the age of woke.

Many of us were surprised at how quickly this seemed to happen, but this had been developing since 1637. Secularism at its strongest, however, was revealing its weakness. The Berlin Wall metaphor is a favorite of mine because while seeming impenetrable and eternal, we discovered it was made out of papier-mâché. It like secularism and wokeness was built on lies, and nothing built on lies can endure. At the moment of its greatest triumph during the Biden years woke, boomer excess, and government overreach, think Covid, were waking up tens of millions of Americans to The Truth.

Christendom’s Fall is the Requirement for Its Rebirth
Looking at the wreckage, Chicken Littles fail to consider a fall is often an opportunity for rebirth, enabling the realizations required for renewal and change. It’s not unlike an addict who has to hit rock bottom before he walks through the door of an AA meeting. Muggeridge saw it the same way:

For it is in the breakdown of power rather than in its triumph that men may discern its true nature and in an awareness of their own inadequacy when confronted with such a breakdown that they can best understand who and what they are. . . . So, amidst the shambles of a fallen Christendom, I feel a renewed confidence in the light of the Christian revelation with which it first began.

Reading his talks you might think him a pessimist—he can come off like a curmudgeon—but he assures us he is not; he sees hope coming out of the wreckage. Later in assuring us “Christ’s kingdom remains,” he affirms the necessity of the disaster for its renewal:

Indeed, it can be seen more clearly and appreciated more sharply by contrast with the darkness and depravity of the contemporary scene.

In 1978 that contrast had yet to fully play itself out, and that became our opportunity for rebirth in the 21st century. It looked bad in the 1970s, but we hadn’t seen anything yet. Most Americans were too “fat and happy,” as we say, to question the dominant narratives of secular culture until the gift of Covid. I know, it certainly didn’t appear to be a gift at the time, but many now see it as a turning point of historical proportions. I’ve come to call it the neutron bomb of truth. Looking back in hindsight, I now see Covid coming after, in Jefferson’s words from the Declaration, “a long train of abuses and usurpations.”

My red pill journey started with Trump, but Covid revealed the true nature of The Matrix, and many more people woke up because of that. All of a sudden, it seemed, people started questioning everything that until then appeared “just the way things are.” For those of us who lived through decades of Christendom’s demise, there was finally hope that secularism might not be so dominant after all. As Covid wore on, and especially with “the election” of Biden, I kept hearing and reading of an awakening, and this was happening over a wide array of issues, medical, political, geopolitical, cultural, historical, and yes, spiritual, everything. I believe all of the previous issues point to the latter because underlying all of them is a search for truth, and truth has metaphysical and spiritual implications because of He who is the Truth.

I argue in my book that we are in the midst of a third Great Awakening, but one unlike the previous two. The first and second awakening happened in Christian cultures where the assumptions of the Bible and Christendom were taken for granted. Those assumptions create what in sociology is called a plausibility structure. Those are the ideas and beliefs a people take for granted as true, in the phrase I used above, as “just the way things are.” They are not questioned unless the foundations of civilization are falling apart, and it only becomes clear what those questions are, and their implications, in hindsight. We are only seeing now what in the fog of war was confusing and perplexing, but appear as necessary to get us  to the revealing point. This point, it should be unnecessary to mention, is only the very beginning of a very long journey. It requires going back, as I explain in my book, so we can find our way forward. I like what Doug Wilson calls our goal, Christendom 2.0.

What Exactly is Christendom?
That question is best answered by explaining what it is not. For that I go back to Muggeridge:

Christendom, however, is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. It bears the same relation to the everlasting truth of the Christian revelation as, say laws do to justice, or morality to goodness, or carnality to love—if you like, as Augustine’s City of God to the earthly city where we temporarily live. 

The two cities, and the relationship between them, is the confusion that causes so many Christians to embrace secularism and the myth of neutrality. When secularism developed in the 17th century as a reasonable response to the wars of religion in Europe, there arose the idea that government can be a neutral arbiter of all religious belief, and that no one religion can be priviledged in a society. It took centuries to fully develop, but by the mid-20th century pluralism became the default understanding of religion among Western cultural elites, even though such a thing doesn’t exist, in spite of all the protestations to the contrary.

The City of God, as Augustine argued, exists in the human heart, as does the earthly city. One of those two human hearts is going to determine, as Muggeridge calls it, “the administrative power structure,” and the basic assumptions by which it is run. That means these are deep and broad cultural issues, specifically which moral foundation is going to drive what the society believes. Vishal Mangalwadi states an unalterable fact of existence in his insightful work, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization:

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

This is undeniable, but secularism is built on its denial. Every society is built on its laws, and all laws rest on assumptions of “a final source of authority.” The reason Christendom flourished for so long is because it’s assumptions rested on a Christian and biblical worldview, the only source for true societal flourishing. When the West rejected that it didn’t move to some neutral place where law and government became the umpire who just calls balls and strikes. There has to be a strike zone before the ump can call balls and strikes!

If you’re dubious about my assertion about neutrality being a myth, and you’re convinced a secular society where true religious pluralism is possible, boil the question down to the individual. Can a person live without ultimate moral values that determine right and wrong? Does not each person have to decide on what basis they make decisions about what is right and wrong? And who sets those standards? If you say the person, that means each person can set their own moral standards, and you have a recipe for societal chaos and anarchy, which sets up the inevitability of tyranny. There will be order in a society one way or the other. Secularism is basically man-made moral standards, determining right and wrong without reference to God and Scripture. As we saw clearly in the last several years, secularism leads to tyranny because there is no check on government, no higher standard to which government is accountable. For the person and the society, the question always comes down to “the final source of authority.” Christendom 1.0 got it right, if not in all the particulars. We have a chance to improve on that, going back to find the way forward.

 

 

Christian Western Civilization Should Have Never Happened

Christian Western Civilization Should Have Never Happened

From a merely human perspective Christian Western civilization shouldn’t have happened. The odds of a ragtag crew of manual laborers in a small corner of the Roman Empire eventually turning the world upside down, or should we say right side up, were as close to zero as it possibly gets. From God’s perspective, it was inevitable, baked into the salvific cake. The entire life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God was the inflection point in human history. Literally everything changed, only it didn’t look like it, at all. We can see the beginning point of Christian civilization in a confrontation Jesus had with his enemies (Mark 12, Matt. 22).

They ask Jesus a question that would land him in hot water with the Jews and Romans; there should have been no third option. Jesus’ reply was completely unexpected, as was much of what he said and did. They asked if the Jews should pay tax to Caesar knowing if he said yes, he would be condemned by Jews, and if no, by Roman authorities. It was one or the other, they thought. But Jesus surprised them by asking whose likeness and inscription was on the coin, which he obviously knew. When they told him Caesar’s, he replied: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Thus, political reality changed forever in the Western world. Yes, it took the slow outworking of this principle for almost 1,800 years to finally see what the full fruition of this principle would look like in America’s founding, but it started that day.

God and Caesar
At the time there was no and, only Caesar—all things belonged to Caesar. This was true in the Roman Empire, as well as in every other empire on earth whatever the ruler was called. Power ruled, might made right; everyone else would either submit or die. Now Jesus comes along and has the temerity to suggest the ruler must share his rule with God. This was radical, world changing radical, if Jesus was in fact who he claimed to be—he was and is, and thus Christian Western Civilization.

First, Jesus is saying we have certain obligations to temporal authorities, be they Caesars, kings, presidents, or those in any position of civil authority. However, he is also saying something nobody prior had ever said: there are limits to rulers’ power, and the things of God do not belong to them. In effect, Jesus was putting strict limits on political power by limiting the sphere of political sovereignty. Such an idea was inconceivable in the ancient pagan world. After all, Alexander the Great’s teacher, Aristotle, didn’t exactly turn him into a Democrat. Yes, Aristotle thought despotism was bad, whether it was the rule of one (monarchy turns into tyranny), a small number of rulers (aristocracy turns into oligarchy), or rule by the many, democracy (a polity turns into the tyranny of 51%). What he didn’t have was a transcendent authority in which to ground his arguments for the just state of limited powers. Human reason alone, and Aristotle was one of the most brilliant men ever to live, can only get us so far. Revelation was required to tell Caesar, hands off! The seed of this principle was planted by Jesus, and we’ll see how the tree of liberty coming from it grew very slowly, but surely, as the story progresses.

Without the God of Judaism and Christianity, Israel’s covenant God Yahweh revealed in Christ, tyranny is inevitable. Without God, if all we are is lucky dirt, then might makes right; morality is preference like preferring chocolate over vanilla ice cream. The logic of the “will to power” in a merely material world is irrefutable and inevitable. Why shouldn’t the one with the biggest gun, or the biggest army, determine what is right and wrong? The pagan gods offered no defense against this logic because they were basically human beings with more power, which is an especially toxic brew. Ultimately, politics is religious, and history has been a war between two mutually exclusive worldview systems, paganism (its current iteration is secularism) versus Christianity.

Christianity Verses Paganism
The war against paganism in redemptive history also goes back a very long way. This is the same worldview war we fight today, it only looks more sophisticated.

In the first verse of Genesis 12, the Lord says to Abram: “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you,” and “all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” In the ensuing 2000 years, God’s plans didn’t appear to be progressing much. The entire history of Israel is the story of one battle after another in this religious i.e., worldview, war. From the beginning of Israel’s identity as a people, they vacillate between embracing the idolatry and paganism of the surrounding nations, or Yahweh and the true worship of God. The story seems to end without an ending in the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, but it points forward to the messenger of the one who would bring ultimate victory over the enemies of God’s people. Four hundred years later John the Baptist turned out to be the messenger.

At the time Jesus appeared on the scene, victory over God’s enemies certainly didn’t appear immanent. Israel was a small backwater province in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, the Romans being only their latest oppressors. They certainly didn’t resemble the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore promised Abraham two thousand years previously. That would come through Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension. After Jesus rose from the dead he explained to his disciples how the entire Old Testament is about him (Luke 24), which would include the promise to multiply Abraham’s seed beyond human ability to count. The geopolitical and cultural implications would take time to become apparent as God’s kingdom advanced, and the church grew like leaven in a very large batch of dough (Matt. 13:31-35).

The Apostles and the New Testament Church also didn’t have geopolitics and culture on their minds because they expected Jesus to come back within their lifetimes, this became imperative when, against all expectations, Constantine converted to Christianity in the early fourth century. Emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 AD. The implications for Christianity on society became even more imperative when in the early fifth century the Goths sacked Rome and overran the Roman Empire. The pagans blamed the Christians and their strange religion for angering the gods and bringing the downfall of the Empire. A robust defense of Christianity was required, and Augustine, the great Bishop of Hippo (northern Africa), mounted one in his erudite tome, The City of God. This influential work would reverberate down through the ages as Christians realized there were no easy answers to the questions posed by those who inhabited a heavenly city and how they would engage with the earthly city. It seemed the pagans, though, would again be the dominant force in Europe, and God’s promise to Abraham delayed yet again.

How the Irish Saved Christian Western Civilization
Each year on March 17th the Western world celebrates St. Patrick’s Day, and maybe one in a million people know why. I didn’t fully know the story of Patrick and his true significance until I read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. His life was the domino God used to begin the process of growing Christian influence in the West, and eventually the world. Patrick lived during the 5th century and was born in modern England at the end of Roman Rule in Britain. At sixteen he was captured by Irish pirates and brought to Ireland where he spent six years in captivity as a shepherd and converted to Christianity. He escaped, made it back to Britain, and eventually reunited with his family. There he grew in the knowledge of his faith, and had a vision in a dream where he believed God was calling him to return to Ireland as what today we would call a missionary, probably the first since the Apostles. Before he left, he was ordained as a priest and bishop so his ministry would be sanctioned by the church. According to Cahill, Patrick

In his last years could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland . . . With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.

In other words, God’s promises to Abraham are starting not only to be fulfilled in the souls of people, but in how they lived in society.

Learning and the spread of knowledge reflected a significant contrast between pagan and Christian civilization after Rome. When the heathen hoards poured in from the north, they not only brought with them violence, but ignorance, and the destruction of learning, libraries burned, and books turned to dust. These were not your learned classical pagans of Rome and Greece, a world destroyed with Rome. The elite leisured learned class which made learning possible would soon cease to exist, and the books they once paid to have copied by scribes began to disappear. Over time, Patrick’s influence would also bring the light of learning into a Europe enveloped in pagan darkness. For the next two hundred years people from all over Ireland, soon England, and then from Europe came to learn from the monks inspired by Patrick. As monasteries developed into little university towns, scribes took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. According to Cahill, “Without the service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable.

Except it wasn’t “unthinkable” to Almighty God! This knowledge will in due course bring us to our next glimpse of the inexorable spread of Christendom, and a story of God’s providence every bit as seemingly against the odds as Patrick’s.

How King Alfred the Great Saved what Patrick Started
Though Patrick’s influence was felt far and wide, the heathen barbarians were relentless, which moves us forward to the 9th century and the reign of King Alfred the Great of England (Wessex) from 871-899. Alfred aspired to establish a Christian united England under one king. He’s the only king in English history with the appellation Great attached to his name because he started the process to a united England under the law of God. As I learned about Alfred, I was amazed to learn that Christian Western civilization as we know it hung by a thread during Alfred’s reign, and from a human perspective, a thread might be overestimating the odds.

In Winston Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples, The Birth of Britain, he calls the period from the late 800s to 1050, the Viking Age, referring to it as a “murderous struggle.” There was no such thing as Viking people. The reference is something like calling them pirates. The Danes were representative and were Alfred’s primary adversaries, but Vikings were Scandinavian seafaring warriors who left their homelands during these years in search of a better life on an Island seeming to promise it. Since the time of Patrick, the Christian church had become the sole haven of learning and knowledge, something that seemed to amuse and perplex the Vikings.

We see in the English-Viking encounters two mutually exclusive forces, two worldviews that had been at war for almost 3,000 years, and only one could be victorious. Christianity would bring learning and peace, the rule of law, and the advance of God’s kingdom in the world, or the pagans would bring a bloody world of arbitrary power none of us would want to live in. Tom Holland in his book Dominion reminds us, “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view.” Because of secular progressive education, the influence of Christianity to most people is invisible. Without the eyes of faith, which Alfred had in abundance, England could very easily have become Daneland, and heathen, paganism the dominant religion. It was as close, as I said, as a thread.

Wessex was the last Anglo-Saxon kingdom not to fall to the Vikings. By 875, they decided Alfred and Wessex would be next, the last kingdom in Britain yielding to the inevitable onslaught to come. Unlike the Scandinavians, Alfred didn’t have a large professional standing army to call on, but mostly depended on militias called fyrds, farmers who fought, then went back to their farms. Danish leader Guthrum looked to have the advantage, Wessex would fall, and Christian England lost to history. Prepared to deliver the final blow to Alfred, Ubba, another Scandinavian warlord king, sailed south with many Viking ships and many thousands of warriors to join Guthrum west of Wessex.

In one of the great “coincidences” of Christian Western history, a freak storm destroyed the fleet and Guthrum retreated back north. According to Churchill, “A hundred and twenty ships were sunk, and upwards of five thousand of these perjured marauders perished as they deserved. Thus the whole careful plan fell to pieces . . .” Alfred believed the storm was divine judgment on the heathens, but they were not done. In early 878, Wessex, during a surprise attack, suffered a defeat at the hand of Guthrum and the Danes. Alfred fled hiding for several months as a fugitive in marshlands with just a few hundred followers, hardly anyone in Wessex even knowing if he was still alive. The marshlands ended up not only saving Alfred, but Christian England from paganism.

When news went out in Wessex Alfred was indeed still alive, all his fighting men came back for what turned out to be a culminating battle for Alfred and Christian England at Ethandun (now Edington). We might say this was Alfred’s last stand. If the heathens had won, Christian England would likely never have existed and arguably neither would Christian Western civilization. There would have been no Magna Carta, no Glorious Revolution, no Pilgrims or Puritans, or America. It was Alfred who conceived and accomplished the beginnings of a united Christian England. His grandson, Athelstan, finished the work and would be known as “King of the English.”

Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution and the Rule of Law
The next period in English history on the way to America in the never-ending war against the centralizing spirit of Babel is Magna Carta (1215) to the Glorious Revolution (1688).  Alfred was given the appellation Great for many reasons. Not only was he a warrior king who saved Christian England from the heathen hordes, but he was also a scholar king in ways almost unimaginable after the fall of Rome. In addition to promoting scholarship and general learning among the people, he was committed to the reign of Christ and the rule of God’s law over England. His vision was to establish a Christian England. His most important accomplishment to this end was building on previous kings to establish his Law Code built on the foundation of the Ten Commandments, and thus beginning the slow growth of English common law, and how law is practiced in America today. Understanding this development is crucial in the war against Babel because the only thing keeping power from absolutizing is the rule of law, something nonexistent anywhere in the world until its development in England. Magna Carta, also called the Great Charter, is a milestone in Christian Western civilization and English constitutional history.

Prior to this time there were no legal limits on the authority of the sovereign. What the king decreed was law. By declaring the sovereign to be subject to the rule of law and documenting the liberties held by “free men,” Magna Carta provided the foundation for individual rights in English law. This is remarkable when you realize in the thousands of years of recorded history previous to this fulcrum moment, the will to power of one man, or a small group of men, was law. Might made right. Outside of England, the Holy Roman Empire (basically greater Germany) and France were governed by Roman law, and therefore by the maxim that “what pleases the prince has the force of law,” thus allowing absolute government. Nonetheless, English kings would not give up their power easily.

When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, the era of the Tudor monarchy ended, and the tumultuous reign of the Stuarts began. This eventually leads to the English Civil Wars in mid-century, to the reign of parliament under Puritan Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) called the government of the Commonwealth which lasted until 1660. Another Catholic king instigated the events leading to the Glorious Revolution and the end of the reign of the Stuarts. In February 1689, Parliament offered the crown jointly to William and Mary, provided they accept the Bill of Rights, which “placed the royal prerogative and the monarchs themselves unambiguously under the law.” The change of dynasty creating a constitutional monarchy is what is known as the Glorious Revolution partly because it was bloodless.

This period of English history had a significant influence on America’s Founders, leading to the most enduring constitutional republic in history. That day in ancient Israel when Jesus answered his enemies’ question.  then through God’s providential sovereign ordaining of history, the blessings of limited government made their way into the founding of America. The tyranny of Caesar was effectively ended, and a self-governing people, a representative Republic was made possible. From a human perspective the odds against this happening were enormous, but in God’s eternal plans it was inevitable.

 

 

Yes, Christian Western Civilization is Superior to Every Other Civilization

Yes, Christian Western Civilization is Superior to Every Other Civilization

This assertion was unquestioned in the West for 1,500 years, not until one Karl Marx declared Christianity the enemy of his inevitable coming communist revolution. In their little Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, Marx and his benefactor, Friedrich Engels, outlined the four enemies of the revolution that must be abolished:

  1. Private property
  2. The family
  3. The nation-state
  4. Religion, i.e., Christianity

We’ll briefly explore philosophically why these four were on the top of Marx’s enemies list, but the entire secular leftist, progressive, liberal mission requires enmity toward these four pillars of Christian Western civilization. Once overt Marxism in the form of class-based communism failed in the 20th century, cultural Marxism was repackaged in the 1960s by the “New Left,” which transmogrified into woke in the 21st century. Whatever the package, these four pillars are their implacable enemies, and why if we’re to re-Christianize America and the West, it will include an equally implacable commitment to reestablish these four pillars. True societal and personal flourishing requires all four.

The Problem of Evil and Marx
To better understand the lay of the land, we must start at the ground floor of human perception about reality, or how we think about God and man. A person’s theology determines his anthropology. In other words, what we think about God determines our understanding of man, and this applies to atheists like Marx as much as Christians and other theists. Because life is exceedingly difficult and suffering universal, every religion and philosophy has a theodicy, from Greek theos, “god” and dikē, “justice”, meaning it addresses the problem of evil and why it exists. Even without God evil must be accounted for in some way, so in that sense must be justified. Thus the perennial question echoing in every human heart throughout history: why? Nobody is satisfied with, just because.

So having to explain the horrors of life somehow, Marx took his cue from the anthropology of Rousseau who asserted his belief in the innate goodness of man in the first words of his book, The Social Contract: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” Out of Rousseau’s writings the idea of the noble savage, an ancient concept, gained traction in the Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, and as a materialist with no concept of original sin, Marx believed man was basically good. It was society in the form of capitalism that corrupted man and made him the perpetual victim of his oppressors.

This perspective on human nature completely eviscerates personal responsibility and human agency, making victimization the driver of human existence. The key fact of Marxist existence is oppression, and all relationships are built on the dynamic of oppressors and oppressed. No wonder those programmed into this worldview (primarily via education and culture) are so miserable. That is the point; only miserable people are ripe for revolution. Thus the anger and vitriol in the left’s never ending protests against everything. In Marxian terms it’s called revolutionary consciousness, and the revolution never ends, which is why eternal vigilance is required if liberty, prosperity, and justice are to prevail and spread. We need to be as patient, persistent, diligent, and determined as the Marxists have been for the last 175 years.

The Four Pillars of Superior Christian Western Civilization
Given the pillars are the enemies of the Marxists, what Americans used to call God-less communism, first we’ll need to explore why the first three are biblical Christian concepts. Then, we’ll need to see why they are required for us to be able to do what God commanded Adam and Even in the garden, and by extension us, to build civilization. We find this command, our mission, in Genesis 1:28:

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Throughout Christian history this has been called the cultural or dominion mandate, and it didn’t stop when Adam and Eve rebelled and the earth fell into sin. In fact, this is what life is all about. In New Testament terms, Jesus gave us the same mission when he taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Given the nature of modern Evangelical Christianity, we tend to see that prayer as moralism, meaning the more God’s kingdom comes the more moral we are, or the more we love and serve others, and it is of course those things, but it is more. This means everything on earth is to be influenced and defined by heavenly values, heavenly truth, wisdom, and righteousness, everything, our schools, our businesses, our homes, our money, our possessions, our buildings, our governments, our music, our art, our stories, every single thing.

This command is given to man made in God’s own image, as verse 27 says, male and female he created them. This is hugely significant for Christians in a secular age in which feminism and egalitarianism have disastrously infected not only Western society, but the church as well. That God differentiates his image into our two, and yes, only two natures, communicates how essential the two distinct natures of man are to true human flourishing. It starts with the most obvious interpretations of “be fruitful and multiply,” having babies. We’re told throughout Scripture that children are a blessing of God, but far too many Christians want to limit the blessings in their lives. We need to be reminded this is a command and not an option. In addition, it also means a life of bearing fruit, a life of multiplication, including in our occupations and relationships. If it is the Lord our God who gives us the ability to produce wealth as a confirmation of His covenant with us (Deut. 8:18), then wealth is an unqualified good, more is better than less. In other words, contrary to much teaching of Christian history, poverty is not a virtue, and in fact to be avoided if at all possible.

Then we add the words subdue and dominion or our mission to fruitfulness and multiplication. God has given man, male and female, the position, the authority as his vice regents to take the chaos in the world and turn it into blessing. Built into the creational order, male and female, man and woman, have different roles and abilities to bring blessing and true human flourishing. The Marxists in the form of feminism and egalitarianism want to destroy that by leveling everything. Down that path, as we’ve seen all too clearly and all too sadly, leads to destruction. Unfortunately, because of the fall creating blessing and flourishing was made harder, now full of painful toil, thorns and thistles, but the commands are no less pressing, applicable, and true.

Thankfully, we’re part of a cosmic story in the entire outworking of redemptive history, which gives us confidence and optimism as we are building the four pillars in the face of the death cult of Marxism, whatever package it comes in. The reason for our confidence and optimism is not based on us, but on Christ, the second Adam. What did Paul say about him specifically in this regard? It’s significant that Paul gives us the theology of the second Adam, Christ fulfilling what the first Adam could not, in I Corinthians 15, the epic chapter on the reality of the resurrection, first Christ’s, then ours. Right in the middle of the chapter he gives us a clue to what being the second Adam means:

25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For he “has put everything under his feet.”

The enemies are anything that is contrary to righteousness and justice and love and order, goodness, beauty, and truth, as I said above, every single thing. The cultural and dominion mandate isn’t only what we might consider “spiritual,” but material as well, this earth and everything in it, and Christ will now successfully accomplish it. How? Through us! His church, his people, his body. How else would he do it, by magic? That’s the point of the metaphor of the church being his body, his arms and legs and feet and hands. He can’t put “all this enemies under his feet” without us! But it is by his power and authority as the ascended Lord and King of all creation that this will be done. This is why the Marxists have no chance because all they bring to the table, made abundantly clear in the age of Trump, is lies upon lies built on even more lies, like turtles, all the way down.

Let’s take a look at these four pillars from a biblical perspective and why it is imperative we defend them as Christians.

Private Property – The idea of human beings owning property is foundational to a well-ordered society with maximal liberty. Those who are not allowed to own property, as in communism, are no better off than slaves who can’t own property but are in fact the property of others. There is no direct affirmation of “private property” in the Bible, but it is everywhere assumed. The word property is common, used 50 to 60 times in the Old Testament (depending on the translation). The Hebrew word means possession. What a person possesses they own; it is their property. This is codified in the Ten Commandments in what is called “the second table of the law,” or six through ten. Most directly it is in the command that we shall not steal, which assume others’ property or possessions belong to them. The Lord makes the point even more powerfully in the tenth commandment against coveting, meaning we are not even to desire anything anyone else calls their own.

Contrary to the entire biblical witness, Marx is unequivocal in his antipathy to private property:

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

He does qualify this abolition with “in this sense” referring to the Edenic paradise prior to “the fall,” and before man the noble savage was corrupted:

Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation.15

In other words, to Marx real private property which is truly (spiritually, ontologically) owned by the person in “modern society” and “capitalist commodity production” can’t exist. So anything called private property in such a society, the only one that exists, must be “abolished” because it leads to “fresh exploitation.” In fact, contrary to Marx, private property is a critical means of fighting exploitation and tyranny.

The Family – As Christians, we don’t need to establish the biblical basis for the family, but we do need to argue that the family, once commonly referred to as the nuclear family, father, mother, children, is the natural order of things. Every society in world history developed with the family as the fundamental building block of its civilization. Even those cultures that practiced polygamy required the man’s commitment to his spouses and children. Through families a culture’s moral values and framework are passed on from generation to generation, and as such must be destroyed by communists. A society comprised primarily of families will never be ripe for revolution or develop the necessary revolutionary consciousness in the population. Thus, Marx is also unequivocal about this: 

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.

Like with most of Marx’s assertions, he begs the question, assuming any family in “modern society” and “capitalist commodity production” is not in fact a “family.” Therefore, such “families” must be abolished. As with everything else in the Marxist philosophy, this is supposed to happen naturally as dialectical materialism works itself out in history: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its compliment vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.” As we witnessed in the 20th century, nothing vanishes “as a matter of course,” which is why communist regimes are always tyrannical, totalitarian, and bloody.

Marx also addresses education because that can’t be allowed to perpetuate the bourgeois family. Therefore, education must be rescued “from the influence of the ruling class,” and “home education” replaced by “social education.” This didn’t work at all in Marx’s economic model of communism, but has worked brilliantly in the cultural version. Christians must affirm and fight for the family at every point, preferably with many children.

The Nation State – It was the gospel, the good news, given to us in Christ, and expanded to the Gentiles by the Apostle Paul that made Christianity the only universal religion on earth. However, since Christianity isn’t Utopian, the idea of a borderless world never took hold among Christians. It is, however, a requirement for communists. There must be no hierarchy or authority because all such things, including the nation state, will vanish in the inexorable development of history.

As with his critics’ take on private property and the family, Marx addresses those who bring up this criticism, “The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.” His reply? “The workingmen have no country.” So, just like property and family, which by Marxist definition can’t exist in a bourgeois society, neither can “countries and nationality.” This is yet another reason why Christianity was and is the implacable foe of Marxism because it stands in their way. This includes the modern nation-state which developed in Christian Western civilization in many ways because of its Jewish and Christian roots. The idea of nations or peoples is ubiquitous in the Bible, so it stands as a fundamental bulwark to the universalist pretensions of the Marxists as well as the modern globalists who are their offspring.

Religion, i.e., Christianity – Here we come to the crux of the matter. Marx knew it was either Christianity or communism; both can’t exist in the same world. He never saw the need to argue for or in any way try to prove his atheism. Like many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, it was too obvious to bother. Everything in Marx’s philosophy flowed from his anti-Christian animus. Even though the cultural Marxists believed Marx was in error about economics being the driver of revolution, they embraced this central aspect of Marx’s worldview, that hostility to Christianity would make perpetual revolution possible.

Religion, by which Marx always means Christianity, gets the same treatment as every other “traditional idea.” It is dismissed as historically conditioned oppression. His most famous take on religion, or infamous depending on one’s perspective, is not in the Manifesto, but in his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sight of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. . . .

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

His criticism of religion is tinged with a contrived concern for people who supposedly suffer from oppression and look to an illusion to dull the pain. These people may think they are happy, but that too is an illusion keeping them from real happiness. You have to hand it to the guy. Here is a miserable man selling happiness to people who by definition will always be miserable (it’s a requirement) until the revolution brings everything to the dialectical end of history. And people bought it! And still do. The Satanic core at the heart of Marxism is blatant: man must be his own God, he must “revolve around himself.” As Satan said to Eve, you will be like God, knowing good and evil, and like Eve, Marxism has brought only misery, death, and destruction.

Some might argue that the civilizational sweepstakes isn’t just between Christianity and Marxism, and they would be right. However, in the history of the world the evidence from every civilization is that the influence of Christianity is necessary for a society to truly flourish. Tom Holland makes this case persuasively in his book Dominion, a must read for anyone who thinks the blessings of the modern world are in any way a secular Enlightenment inspired phenomenon. In fact, both the Enlightenment and secularism are a product of the Christian West. Hindu, Asian, and African cultures only prospered to the degree they were influenced by Christianity, including free enterprise, private property, and any kind of liberal, democratic governance. American Indians were a noble people, but the American continent was a brutal place before Christians began to colonize it. This is not even to mention the rule of law and political liberty and freedom of conscience brought to America from the British Isles, and eventually to the entire world. Or does anybody who has a choice want to live in the Islamic world unless they are committed Muslims?

The superiority of Christian Western civilization is made all the more apparent by one of the great challenges of the 21st century, illegal immigration. It is primarily to America and the once Christian nations of Europe where the world’s poor flee for the hope of a better life. I’m not sure there is a better testimony to the superiority of Christian Western civilization than that, even in its current secular iteration. The task before us, now, is to make America, and the West, Christian again, even as we seek to disciple the nations.

 

The Growth of Pietism and Secularism’s Inevitable Dominance

The Growth of Pietism and Secularism’s Inevitable Dominance

Pietism and secularism lead to the same thing: a secular society devoid of Christian influence. As I’ve argued here previously, Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin; one requires the other, and each contributes to the other. This is an odd notion for many because Pietists are extremely religious and secularists are not. In fact, there is a species of human in the modern world called Christian secularist. This Pietistic-secular dynamic is critically important for us to understand because if we’re to bring heaven to earth in obedience to Jesus, we need to understand the lay of the land, and the challenges a secular society presents to us. Because secularism is the air we breathe, like the water fish swim in, few give any thought about why it exists or where it came from. To most people, including Christians, it’s just the way things are, and the way things are supposed to be, but it’s a relatively new phenomenon in the history of the world.

Secularism is primarily a perspective on society, and how it is arranged. It developed out of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century as a reaction to the protracted wars of religion in Europe, and the idea that a Christian state led to those wars. Religion and politics when combined created misery and strife, so secularism’s proponents had the benign intention of creating civil peace by getting religion, meaning the church, out of the governing business. And we agree, representatives of the institutional church, be they elders, deacons, priests, bishops, pastors, etc., should not as official representatives of the church dictate government policy. But in due course secularism became like a societal Pac Man gobbling up anything smacking of religious belief, insisting it belongs only in someone’s personal life, not in the public square. This slowly developed in the 20th century, and eventually Pac Man gobbled up the last vestiges of a Christian America in the 1960s.

By this point you may already see where Pietists and secularists hold hands. For the Pietist, Christianity is primarily a personal faith without direct societal implications. Whatever cultural impact the Christian faith has on a society is not planned or sought, but a spillover from Christians faithfully living out obedience to God in their lives. There is a continuum of such beliefs on the pietistic Christian side, but as American Christianity became increasingly pietistic, it became increasingly personalized and culturally irrelevant.

We’ll talk about the myth of neutrality below, the bridge that brings the Pietist and the secularist together, but as became apparent over time, Christianity as a societal and cultural force never had a chance. As the 20TH century progressed, and culturally Christianity waned, secularism became more aggressive and we discovered it was a jealous God; it would have no other Gods before it. This was likely inevitable given the historical forces we see play out in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the changing nature of Americanized Christianity made secularism’s triumphant march all the easier. 

How Pietism Took Over American Christianity
The first Great Awakening, while looked on positively by most Christians in our day, had within it the seeds of the two story Christianity I wrote about previously. The terms Old Lights and New Lights were initially used during that time, and we can guess which were for this awakening and which weren’t. New Lights generally referred to Congregationalists and Baptists in New England who embraced the revivals spreading throughout the colonies, while the traditional branches of their denominations, or the Old Lights, did not, seeing them as a threat to their authority, and their emotional appeals as a recipe for social chaos. Jonathan Edwards described his congregants’ vivid experiences with grace as causing a “new light” in their perspective on sin and atonement, and thus the terms were born. Old Light ministers such as Bostonian Charles Chauncy (1592-1672), a Congregational clergyman and second president of Harvard College, decried the awakening as delusionary enthusiasm. Even without delusional before it, enthusiasm was not a compliment in the 17th century. It connoted not merely overly emotional, but implied a claim to have received divine communications or private revelations. That was positively dangerous.

In God’s providence, we largely have George Whitfield to thank for the Great Awakening. Whitfield’s first of his seven tours of the colonies was in 1738. America was a thoroughly Christian culture steeped in Protestant Christianity and biblical knowledge, and because of Pietism’s growing influence in America the emotional appeal of an itinerate preacher like Whitfield found fertile soil for the gospel message. As the saying goes, timing is everything, and Whitfield became America’s first celebrity. He preached upwards of a thousand sermons a year, at times to as many as 25 or 30 thousand people. He also set the foundation of a particularly American church reflected in a dogmatic yet broad ecumenical mentality, with iconoclastic and populist impulses, thanks in large part to Pietism. These would also set the tenor of what would become the American Revolution. The twentieth century focus on Christians being “born again” started in this time. New Lights even began challenging established church pastors as nominal Christians because they hadn’t experienced the “new birth.” They exhorted the true believers to leave the lukewarm established congregations and join new, “pure” churches. The establishment of the day didn’t like that one bit.

We can see in the New Light ministers a rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment with their appeal to the emotions of the crowds or congregants, often resulting in immediate conversions. Old Light sermons tended toward the intellectual and sober religious practice, and preached the dangers of “enthusiasm.” From this point American Christianity began the embrace of the anti-intellectual, anti-doctrinal approach to Christianity of German Pietism which would come to dominate Evangelicalism in the 20th century. By the 19th century and the Second Great Awakening, the newness of the emotional appeal was no longer an issue, but became common in revivalist preaching. Nineteenth century revivalism largely replaced Scripture with experience and emotion, divine sovereignty with human free will, a high church ecclesiology and sacramental focus with the parachurch, liturgy with revivalistic techniques, psalms and hymns with more of what we call today praise music, and a properly ordered hierarchy with egalitarianism. This Great Awakening was also driven by the influence of Methodist revivalist preachers, thanks to John Wesley’s indefatigable efforts in Britian and sending ministers to the Colonies.

At the same time developing in Dublin, Ireland, in the 1820s and 30s, were the Plymouth Brethren, and something that almost a hundred years later would come to be called dispensationalism. These men came out of the larger Brethren movement, the most famous and massively influential would prove to be John Nelson Darby. It was this small group that developed the eschatology of what was then known as “the new premillennialism.” As it developed and spread through fundamentalism in the 20th century, dispensationalism become the dominant understanding of “end times,” exploding in cultural awareness with the popularity of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s, which by the end of the century had sold an estimated 35 million copies. It inspired another “end times” cultural phenomenon in the 90’s, The Left Behind series written by written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, which was turned into a hit movie film series of five movies in the early 2000s staring Kirk Cameron.

It is helpful to study the development of American Christianity through the nineteenth century into the twentieth and how it prepares the way for dispensationalism to completely dominate the Evangelical mind in the latter part of the century. Secularism was developing at the same time playing off the dominant fundamentalism of the early part of the century to set the table for secularism’s domination. It was a kind of dysfunctional symbiotic relationship. Fundamentalism put up a good fight but because of its Pietistic assumptions and theology, it didn’t have a chance.

Fundamentalism’s Losing Battle with Secularism
The nineteenth century set up everything that came after in the twentieth. While revivalism and a growing dispensationalism was sweeping the country in the 1800s, at the same time in Germany biblical higher criticism was itself sweeping Christendom. German intellectuals completely embraced Enlightenment rationalism, including its anti-supernatural bias. This meant the Bible was merely a book written by men and could not be God’s revelation to man. The Bible’s critics, however, did not want to abandon Christianity just yet, so Christianity was thereby transformed into moralism, little more than the golden rule, and the world was given liberal Christianity. The “Father of modern liberal theology” was a Christian from Prussia, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), himself no doubt influenced by German Lutheran Pietism.

The great Princeton Theologian J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) was kicked out of the Presbyterian Church and founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1929. He spent much of his professional life battling liberal Christianity in the Presbyterian Church and Princeton Seminary. A bastion of Christian theological orthodoxy in the 19th century, Princton produced scholars who were titans of American Protestantism, including Charles Hodge, his son A.A. Hodge, and B.B. Warfield. By 1929 liberalism had won. In his 1923 book Christianity & Liberalism, Machen argues that “The liberal preacher is really rejecting the whole basis of Christianity, which is a religion founded not on aspirations but on facts.” I would add historical facts, which if they did not happen, there is no Christianity. The liberals would not see it that way; the facts didn’t much matter to them. Machen concludes that liberal Christianity is a different religion all together, and the rejection of supernaturalism is at the heart of that difference.

Liberal Christianity in the early 20th century, unfortunately, had all the cultural and intellectual momentum, not least because of German higher criticism. However, it ran into a movement which grew out of revivalism and the Second Great Awakening, fundamentalism, which would not bow the knee to this scholarship taking the intellectual world by storm. It is difficult for most Christians today to grasp just how powerful an attack German high criticism, and its liberal offshoot, was on Christianity. It had developed over a century which produced secular superstars like Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, and going into the 20th had developed a seemingly unstoppable momentum in the form of liberal Christianity. From a cultural perspective, it appeared conservative Christianity’s days might be numbered, but fundamentalism stood in the way.

Out of these two opposing forces came the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. While I’ve critiqued the awakenings and their tendency to an overly emotional Christianity, the fundamentalists, the inheritors of the revivalist tradition, were solidly conservative and refused to give up on the historical, supernatural foundations of Christianity. Fundamentalism today carries pejorative connotations and few Christians embrace the term, but when coined in 1920s it simply meant conservatives who stood up against the liberals. It originated with a book called The Fundamentals, a project conceived by a Southern California oil millionaire and edited by Bible teachers and evangelists, and published in twelve paperback volumes from 1910 to 1915. This served to coalesce those unwilling to lay down on the tracks in front of the intellectual and cultural freight train of modernism—not that fundamentalists had a chance, culturally speaking. Around this time conservative Christianity began its rather quick decline into cultural irrelevance and caricature.

Conservative revivalist Christianity in some ways allowed liberals to pass themselves off as orthodox Christians. In Fundamentalism and American Culture, George Marsden points out the similarity between these two diametrically opposed views of Christianity:

The evangelical tradition had long been strong on the condemnation of the appetites of the flesh—with alcohol and sex seen as the chief temptations. In the pulpit, liberals could not easily be distinguished from conservatives on such practical points, and practical morality was often for American Protestants what mattered most.

Both stood on moralism, and liberal preachers were good at sounding orthodox when in fact they were not. Eventually, however, an anti-supernatural Christianity that appeared unstoppable in the 1920s withered and what proved unstoppable was the supernatural religion of the Bible and conservative Christianity. Unfortunately, on the cultural front the latter was not only stoppable, but proved no match for the freight train of secularism.

The freight train as a metaphor for secularism is apropos. Starting with Renes Descartes and rationalism in the 17th century birthing the Enlightenment, the forces of societal secularism in the West were likely never to be stopped no matter how intellectually robust the Christianity was standing in its way. Unfortunately, a personalized, pietized Christianity made it all the easier, fundamentalism especially so. Nineteenth century conservative Protestant Christianity is exemplified by evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899). All things, including doctrine, took a backseat to winning souls. By the early 20th century, according to Marsden, for Christians “evangelism overshadowed everything else,” including battling for the integrity of the Bible against higher criticism. That would be left to the Reformed intellectual types at Princeton like Warfield and Machen, but they were a tiny part of the conservative Protestant world. Machen, however, would prove prophetic, not only in his assessment of Christianity and liberalism, but Christianity and Pietism in the current form of fundamentalism.

According to Marsden, Machen lived his entire professional career in an atmosphere “in which the leading intellectuals, and even many theologians, ridiculed traditionalist Christianity.” Machen believed the hostility to the gospel was “due to the intellectual atmosphere in which men are living,” and the evangelism of the conservatives and the social work of the liberals must be “founded on a solid intellectual base.” For him, the key to the battle to win men to Christ was in the universities. He believed the cultural crisis was rooted in an intellectual crisis, and “an attempt to bypass culture and the intellect, the arts and the sciences, would simply make the situation worse.” The Pietism dominating Christianity at the time ensured that would be the case. Culturally, the final nail in the coffin would be the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” in 1925. The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity as full of backward unsophisticated rubes started here, thanks to the journalist with the acerbic wit who covered the trial, H.L. Mencken. It wasn’t evolution on trial, but the caricature in the popular imagination of fundamentalism. Some fundamentalists certainly tried to fight back, but intellectually and culturally they were no match, so much of conservative Christianity became culturally invisible; fundamentalists separated themselves to maintain their purity in the midst of a hostile culture.

Pietism and the Secular Myth of Neutrality
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 we can see how they grew symbiotically together as a poisonous weed in Christian Western culture. But as much as I denounce secularism, it wouldn’t be nearly the obstacle it is if most Christians weren’t pietists, effectively Christian secularists.

In addition to this faulty, dichotomized version of Christianity, another reason most Christians believe in secularism is because of a misunderstanding of Christianity and the state. Many Christians see the phrase “Christian nation” as an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. I’ll give examples from two well respected scholars, Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, and Carl Trueman, an author and professor at Grove City College. Arnn had a discussion on his podcast with an Episcopal Bishop on the topic, ironically, of Bold Christianity in a Secular World. When he said, “A Christian nation is an oxymoron,” I started yelling at my little MP3 player I was listening to. “No, Larry, it’s not!” Why would he say such a thing? I’ll get to that with my second example. I saw the following on Twitter from a forward Trueman wrote to James Bannerman’s book, Church of Christ:

If the church’s power is spiritual, then the notion that the civil magistrate should be used to coerce belief is shown to involve a terrible confusion of categories. To put it bluntly, the sword cannot be used to impose Christianity. . . . Churches are Christian; it is hard to see how a nation my qualify as such.

Carl, who said anything about those in government compelling others to believe anything? Larry Arnn basically said the exact same thing. In logic this is called a straw man fallacy. By exaggerating, misrepresenting, or just completely fabricating someone’s argument, it’s much easier to present one’s own position as being reasonable. Of all those who are convinced the Bible and the Great Commission calls for nations to become Christian, not one believes this includes forcing people to believe anything. So, because they believe this is what being a Christian nation is, and it most certainly is not, they believe a nation should be secular. This, however, assumes a secular nation can be morally or religiously neutral, which is a metaphysical impossibility.

The idea that God’s rule (theocracy) based on Christ in a society is inherently tyrannical exists for a reason. It came primarily from a certain slice of Christendom in the Middle Ages where tyrannical force was indeed used to coerce belief in certain things. We know this as the Inquisition, a judicial procedure and later an institution that was established in the 12th century by the Catholic Church to identify heresy. Before we Protestants get on our high horses, our forebearers thought they too could compel belief. This is a complicated situation of the Middle Ages that historical ignorance and bias only makes worse. Religion and state were not separated, and to think people at the time should have thought otherwise is, as C.S. Lewis put it, chronological snobbery. Protestant Christian princes, and everyone else, thought heresy would create societal instability, and it must be stopped.

Because Christian and non-Christian secularists alike believe the rule of Christianity and God’s law in the state is inherently tyrannical, their answer is the rule of secularism, a neutral public square where justice and not religion rule. Such a thing, however, has never existed because it cannot exist. A nation’s culture and laws are a reflection of its worldview, its faith commitments. Its culture and laws are the externalization of its religion. Doug Wilson calls this “inescapable theonomy” because “all societies are theocratic.” Vishal Mangalwadi states an unalterable fact of existence:

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

Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption, the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutrality assumes religion is fundamentally a private, personal thing that only messes up the tranquility of society if it is brought into how a society is governed. It’s easy to see how Pietism feeds into this.

While the early Pietists were certainly not secularists, they had something in common with modern Pietists. Both believed personal piety would spill over and affect the morals of society, therefore, the more Christians in a society the more Christian it is. There is obviously truth to this, but societies must be governed according to some “final source of authority,” and if Christians aren’t governing and insisting that it is the Bible and God’s law ultimately in King Jesus, that authority will be the state. In the year of our Lord 2025 that has become obvious, and unless Christians reject Pietism for a more engaged Christianity, secular statist tyranny will never be far away.

 

Make Patriarchy Great Again

Make Patriarchy Great Again

I recently read Masculine Christianity by Zachary M. Garris, and in many ways it’s an eye opener, but in many other ways it’s stuff I’ve accepted all my life. Growing up in a traditional Italian family, masculinity was not a problem, but men abusing their masculinity sometimes was. My family, and extended family on both sides, was for the most part nominally Catholic, so the Christianity part never seemed to make much of a difference. I also met my wife to be at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, and we could not have been more on the same page in terms of masculine and feminine, and how that plays out in a marriage and family setting. So patriarchy was never something I felt the need to think about; it was invisible because I am a pretty patriarchal guy. Prior to getting married and having to live out patriarchy, I’d been a politically and culturally engaged conservatives for six or seven years, so my radar was up on the evils of feminism, but that obviously wasn’t an issue for my wife and I. Looking back over 37 years, however, I can see how feminism, like the secularism that birthed it, has influenced how we see things. I just didn’t realize how much.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the term complementarianism started showing up in Christian circles, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Clearly, God created men and women to complement one another, but was this how we were to counter feminism? I’m not sure why their arguments didn’t impress me, but it was more confusing than anything. Ok, men and women complement one another. So what. What difference exactly does that make in a relationship? Who calls the shots? It seemed like complementarians didn’t want to deal with such an uncomfortable question in the modern world. When Paul commanded wives to submit to their husbands, what exactly does that mean? I’ve never really had to pull rank on my wife, so does this command have any real practical application unless I have to do that? And does this submission apply anywhere outside of the home? Like in the church? In society? And what does this all say about the nature of men and women, and how feminism has had an impact about how Christians think about and live lives as men and women? Garris answers these questions, and many more, in exhaustive detail.

So after we were married I went on my merry way not thinking about Patriarchy, and I can’t remember in over four decades as a Christian every hearing a sermon in church about it. Then when I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, I discovered patriarchy was a big deal with this crowd. As in, if we’re going to re-Christianize America and Western culture in general, then patriarchy will be a critical component for that to happen. So in the now overused phraseology thanks to President Trump, we will need to Make Patriarchy Great Again. The question, though, is what exactly that means. There is of course a lot of disagreement among Christians about that, and if we can’t even agree on what it means, how are we to change cultural perceptions on the matter? This is really a question about living in a world that is a result of several hundred years of the Enlightenment and secularism, and what exactly that will all look like. Making it Christian again will not somehow turn the 21st century into the 16th century, any more than we can go back to the world before the industrial revolution. Yet I get the feeling from some of the patriarchy bros that it is exactly what they expect and are convinced needs to happen.

Before I move on, what exactly does patriarchy mean? Pater means father, and patriarchy father rule. Over time it came to mean male rule in general because in Christianity the family is the fundamental relationship in society.

Patriarchy and the Bible
One of the reasons I know Patriarchy is crucial for the re-Christianizing of America and the West is because the destruction of the family was one of the top priorities of Karl Marx; it needed to be abolished in the pursuit of a communist Utopia. What better way to do that than making men and women indistinguishable by destroying sex roles as created by God. Thankfully, the Marxist demons got carried away in the last ten years trying to turn men into women, and boys into girls, and vice versa; for normal people that was a bridge to far. Reality can only be distorted to a certain degree until it slaps the distorters back in the face. Feminism has distorted reality as well, albeit to a lesser and slower degree than wokeness, but the consequences are more widespread, long lasting, and horrific. I’ve known feminism was an enemy for decades, but Garris marshals the practical and biblical evidence like the lawyer he is. Something he does especially well is to allow his opposition to make the best case possible in their own words and arguments, so you won’t find any straw men in this book. It’s also a great reference work to have on your shelf. If you want to know his take on a certain issue or passage it’s in there.

The created nature of man, male and female God created them, is the fundamental issue at stake. Everything in this debate goes back to Genesis 1-3. Let’s see how Garris defines feminism:

Feminism minimizes sex distinctions, with an emphasis on pushing women away from the home and children and into careers just like men. Feminism is the belief that men and women are fundamentally the same and thus interchangeable. The feminist movements have been so successful over the years that Westerners live in a post-feminist society meaning most people today are feminists without the label.

That last point is an indisputable fact, and the salient question is, is this necessarily a bad thing? If you are a Christian committed to Scripture as God’s infallible revelation to man, then yes, it most definitely is a bad thing. That’s before we get to the evidence of the last two hundred years, which shows us without a doubt it is a bad, terrible, horrible thing. Unfortunately, the idea of equality is so rooted in the Western mind as an unqualified good, itself rooted in Christianity’s influence, that any hint men and women are not absolutely equal in every way is tantamount to heresy.

The Origins and Nature of Feminism
Most conservatives and Christians think of the first feminists as benign, what is called “first wave feminism.” These women were supposedly seeking to bring some balance to the distortions and abuse of the patriarchy at the time, but that is not the case. Garris titles his first chapter, “The Rise of Feminism and the Erosion of Masculinity.” The intention of the early feminists may not have been this specifically, but masculinity was the casualty. The two most popular of these early feminists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), were egalitarians who were driven by the growing secular progressivism of the 19th century. All of the Reform movements of that era were influenced to some degree by the Christian culture of the time, but they were in fact revolutionary and anti-biblical. Once Descartes and rationalism come to dominate Western intellectual history in the 18th century, secularism and it’s offshoot, feminism were inevitable. Once the Bible was discredited and no longer the center of Western civilization, the jig was up, and the dance really took off in the 19th century with the feminists leading the way.

To understand the pernicious nature of feminism, starting with the “first wave,” it is important to understand why egalitarianism is not only un-biblical, but anti-biblical. The Bible is clearly hierarchical, even if Christians disagree as to the extent. There are conservative Christian egalitarians, but they are a tiny minority. Liberal Christians in the late 19th and early 20th century no longer believed in the supernatural, but instead of just burning the Bible and moving on, decided to turn Christianity into something it is not, and feminism was part of that turning. Fundamental to the vision of feminism is ridding the family of male authority in the home. Take women’s suffrage, which took until 1920 to become law in the passage of the 19th amendment. Garris quotes B. B. Warfield who points out that giving women the right to vote changes the basic unit of society from the family to the individual. In Scripture, the individual is never the basic unit, least of all in the family. The federal headship of Adam representing the entire human race is central to God’s plan of redemption in Christ, and the husband and father representing his family is evident throughout redemptive history. The assumption of early feminists was that women could and should be independent of men, and at the time the Christian assumptions of society limited that; in due course all limits would be gone.

Which brings us to second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution. In this iteration women not only wanted to be independent of men, but to act like men, and technology in the form of a little pill would accommodate that desire. Now instead of being a servant of their God-given biology, women could now like men have consequence free sex, or so they thought. Sex, whether it results in a child or not, is never consequence free, and few people today would deny that, especially for women. Then a decade or so after the pill went mainstream in the early 60s, the Supreme Court decided women murdering their child in the womb was a “constitutional right.” If the pill didn’t work, just dismember the baby, suck it out, and get rid of it. “Problem” solved, but it isn’t. Women who get abortions are emotionally scarred for life, unless they find the mercy and grace of Jesus. But the sexual revolution was a means to the feminists’ real end of getting women out of the home so they would be more like men. Garris writes:

Feminism is the twisted idea that a woman is free when serving an employer but a slave when serving her family.

This was the basic idea of one of the seminal books of this wave of feminism, Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. To Friedan, women stuck in the home in American middle class suburbia was exactly another form slavery, and women would only be emancipated when they were emancipated from the home. There are further waves of feminism, but the damage had already been done. Feminism had done the bidding of Marx, and while not abolished, the family has been decimated with all its deleterious effects I don’t need to delineate here.

The Inadequate Complementarianism Response
At some point Christians were going to need to respond, and from the beginning they did, but not in any organized fashion. Since feminism had come to dominate liberal mainline denominations in the 20th century, and started making inroads into Evangelical churches, Christian leaders in the 1980s, among them John Piper and Wayne Grudem, felt compelled to respond. Complementarianism was the result. One of the most valuable contributions in the book for me, among many, is Garris’s chapter on this topic, which he titles, “Complementarianism’s Compromise.” That says it all.

I never quite got why I was always uncomfortable with the term, but the word compromise nails it. As a response to the growing influence of feminism not just in the culture, but in the church, it was actually weak. Why? The first problem is the word itself. All those syllables are unnecessary when what they are trying to defend describes the issue at stake, patriarchy. That compromise alone meant they lost the game before it started. Of course men and women are complimentary; even feminists believe that to one degree or another. That’s irrelevant to the real issue at stake: male authority. They emphasized two points: Husbands have the leadership role in the home, and only men can be pastors and elders. But that leaves a whole host of questions unanswered about where male authority begins and ends, which is exactly the issue: does it end? To complementarians it most definitely does, and there the battle is enjoined.

Feminists and egalitarians believe there is no such thing as male authority, in or outside the home, while complementarians believe male authority is reserved just for the home and the church, which some have called “narrow complementarianism.” Unfortunately, even at that they are uncomfortable with the idea of speaking specifically of male rule or authority in the home, preferring to use the word leadership. It’s less offensive. The problem with trying not to be offensive to modern sensibilities is that it’s counter productive. Those you’re trying not to offend won’t be satisfied anyway unless you completely agree with them. You may as well go all the way and proclaim you are defending patriarchy and male authority. At least you’ll get the respect of not being wishy washy or looking for a mollifying “third way,” which doesn’t exist anyway. The problem with this, Garris says, is that it “creates a dichotomy between the church and society at large.” Inside the home and church men and women are who God made them to be, outside they are something different. That’s the conclusion one has to come to.

The entire chapter is necessary reading for those struggling with these issues, but the bottom line is what God made man and woman to be. In other words, what is the nature of man and woman, and does that affect the gender roles they engage in, both inside the home and church, and in society? If the nature of man and woman are fundamentally different which affects their roles, how is limiting these differences to just the home and church not arbitrary? That’s the question I asked.

Rooting Gender Roles in Nature
I often utilize my old buddy Aristotle when discussing things like this because of his genius in discussing the concept of telos, which means purpose in Greek. He came up with four reasons for why things exist, which he called four causes. We can better understand why the nature of man and woman is important if we understand Aristotle’s four causes. In layman’s terms as I understand them:

  1. Formal Cause-The concept of the thing in the mind, say a table.
  2. Material Cause-The stuff out of which the table is made.
  3. Efficient Cause-The person making the table.
  4. Final Cause-The purpose, or telos, for which the table was made, e.g., to put things on.

In Genesis 1 we learn that God made each thing “according to their kind.” We use the phrase of comparison apples and oranges because those are two different kind of things, so it makes no sense to compare something if they are fundamentally different as if they were not. That is the issue biblically with men and women, they are of two fundamentally different kind of man, male and female. This means the nature of the differences are built into their being, so they are ontological differences. This is the rub, and something we can’t explain away if we’re Christians and we believe God made human beings with a final cause, a specific purpose consistent with their natures. As Garris puts it:

God’s laws regarding men and women reflect their natures, as He did not give divine commands detached from His design to their entire being. A man is to exercise authority because God wired him to exercise authority, and a woman is to submit because God wired her to submit.

For feminists and egalitarians them’s fightin’ words, while for complementarians them’s embarrassing words. They do generally believe this, albeit narrowly, but they aren’t up for the fight so they message with words like “leadership” in place of authority.

Given this is the case, it doesn’t surprise us that they limit the natures of men and women to family and church. Outside of that I guess their natures don’t apply. This I now realize is why I’ve always been uncomfortable or confused by complementarianism. Reality as God made it is hierarchical, and men were created and designed to exercise authority and rule, and women were not. If we are Christians and take the Bible seriously as God’s revelation, I don’t see how we come to any other conclusion. As I said above, though, we are not going back to the 16th century. The secular feminist cat has been let out of the bag for 200 years, and what this looks like going forward in a modern context is hard to predict. We obviously have to start with our own homes and churches, and these truths must be proclaimed and taught with boldness from pulpits throughout the land. God only blesses the nation when the four causes line up with his will, and right now the American family needs it desperately.