Feb 4, 2018 | Culture
I ended my last post claiming that secularism is no less a paper tiger than the Berlin Wall. That’s quite an assertion in the face of a secular cultural hegemony that seems to approach absolute. Everywhere we look, people who claim the name of Christ are on the defensive. Many (most?) Christian parents feel insecure against the onslaught. It seems for many (most?) Christian parents that keeping their kids Christians in the face of such hostility is a challenge they might not be up to. The goal of my book and this blog is to convince them that this is not the case, at all. That we can have confidence is what inspired me to write the book. I finished the book where I began:
The conclusion I come to at the end is the conviction I started with at the beginning: Christianity is so powerfully credible that my children should never ever want to leave it, or even be slightly tempted to do so. God has revealed himself in so many compelling ways that it is inconceivable that a secular Western culture would be more appealing to our children than Christianity. God has provided us an over-abundance of resources to make the Christian Faith winsome, appealing, attractive, and compelling to our children. Thus, we should have every confidence that we can keep our kids Christian.
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Jan 26, 2018 | Culture
As I stated in my last post, The Berlin Wall is a great metaphor for the current reigning worldview in the West, secularism. My thesis: Secularism is a deeply flawed and weak explanation for the nature of reality. Correctly understood, we don’t need to fear secularism as a threat to the faith of our children. Thus we can have confidence that we can keep our kids Christian.
Secularism as pushed by Western cultural elites is a faith (i.e., a religious) commitment to a world without God. The secularist won’t tell you that you can’t or shouldn’t believe in God (as a good post-modern relativists you can believe anything you want as long as it floats your boat—”true for you but not for me”), but that belief must stay withing the walls of your church or home. The reason secularism is so pernicious is not because of it’s “doctrines” or what it asserts, but because of what it assumes: a reality where God is optional. The secular worldview in ways large and small, overt and covert, is presented as the default position (worldview) of enlightened, educated, rational, and reasonable people. It is assumed as superior because it is ostensibly “scientific,” and thus not in need of “faith,” which of course religious people need because they lack “evidence” for what they believe.
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Jan 22, 2018 | Culture
On the evening the title of this post came to mind, I’d been interacting with a possible publisher for the book. They have a concern with what appears my excessive confidence that we, Christians, can keep our kids Christian. Having read just the first few chapters and my proposal, it didn’t surprise me that they found my confidence problematic. To see if my confidence really is excessive, I suggested it’s necessary to read the argument I make throughout the book. I think it’s not excessive, but fair-minded people could certainly disagree. We’ll find out. Which brings me to secularism, and what will obviously have to be multiple blog posts as I address it.
Christians face a certain, unique reality in the 21st Century West (post-Constantine and the development of “Christendom”), one that has been brewing for hundreds of years. This reality, one that has everything to do with the confidence I speak of, is secularism of a certain kind. It is important to understand the distinction between the healthy secularism of government not being run by a state church, and the very unhealthy secularism of a worldview in which God is at best persona non Grata. You can find a great historical overview of how we got to this point in Hunter Baker’s The End of Secularism. Originally, as Baker argues, secularism was a reaction to the protracted wars of religion in Europe, and the idea of a Christian state that led to those wars. All religion and politics did when combined was create strife and misery. Secularism’s proponents had the benign intention of creating civil peace by getting religion, or The Church, out of the governing business. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there, and thus the secularism I address in these posts.
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Jan 17, 2015 | Uncategorized
There has been a lot written about secularism in the light of the terror attacks against the French Magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish deli in Paris. French secularism with its roots in the French Revolution is quite different than American secularism. William McGurn puts it this way:
The question is whether French secularism is up to the challenge of defending itself.
At the heart of laïcité are two principles: first, that religion and the questions it raises have no role in French public life, and, second, that no one faith will be favored over others.
In theory, this latter ought to make France more attractive for a minority religion. In practice, this has not happened, in good part because many in France’s Muslim community don’t wish to be assimilated.
The received wisdom is that France — and Europe — must respond to the threat of radical Islam by rededicating themselves to their highly secularized selves. What no one asks is whether it might in fact be the way the French and the Europeans define a secular state that accounts for some of their weakness.
He says concisely and accurately:
Can you beat something with nothing?
Maybe, but it’s very difficult. In France, public life is completely devoid of any reference to a higher power; the public square is wiped clean of religion. Some radical secularists in America have tried to say America’s Founders intended such a secular state, but they would be mistaken. In fact our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, has five references to God itself! Our very liberty is grounded beyond the state, in the “laws of nature and nature’s God.”
We tend to forget that the liberties and prosperity bequeathed to us in Western civilization did not come from nowhere. In America, Christianity and the Enlightenment fused to make the most stable experiment in republican government in the history of man. It was not one to the exclusion of the other; any other reading of history is either dishonest or blind. That’s why when Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s he marveled that religion, i.e. Christianity, far from being a destabilizing force as the French believe it was, in fact was a glue that held society together. McGurn has a fantastic quote about the importance of the Judeo-Christian foundation of the West:
[A]s Britain’s Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has put it, an understanding that “you cannot expect the foundations of Western civilization to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact.”
As Europe increasingly moves away from its Christian roots, this will certainly be put to the test.
As I’ve read about this discussion, I’ve thought of a tremendous book that is required reading if one is to have a healthy, and accurate understanding of secularism properly understood: The End of Secularism by Hunter Baker.
Apr 1, 2026 | Explanatory Power
I think about time all the time. You might think this happens more as you enter your elderly years, but I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. Well, not in biblical time, but in regular old human time. One of my favorite sayings is that God is never in a...
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