I’ve been on a bit of a secularism kick of late, and as you may know I’m not a fan. I thought of secularism, and its discontents, as I heard of the latest American mass shooting in our new home state of Florida. Seventeen people killed in the prime of life, not by a gun, but by a wicked person bent on destruction. People go off to school or work one morning, like every other morning before, and don’t come home, ever. A tragedy that we hope never touches us, our loved ones or friends, but which we can’t help but wonder if it may some day. Such is life in secular 21st century America.
Do I blame secularism for the carnage that has become a staple of the latter part of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries? You bet I do! And of course I blame sin and the fall, so we always have and always will deal with evil in all of its distorted manifestations of God’s good creation. But there is something unique about the senseless nature of killing and mayhem in our time. I would argue that what we are experiencing in American culture is a cumulative case of thoughts and ideas and actions that have been brewing for centuries. There are no simple causal links one can definitively point to, but rather a rushing river of existence away from God that has brought us to this point.
America’s Founding Fathers understood a nation of laws is worthless without a nation of law-abiding people, and for them the most important ingredient in creating such people was religion, and specifically Christianity. To this end they wrote in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Although George Washington was no conservative Evangelical Christian, he wrote this in 1796 for his farewell address:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
These are powerful words that have been completely deleted from the national conscience by America’s secular cultural elites; over 200 years later our children can’t even go to school with security for their life! It’s enough to make one very angry.
The rushing river metaphor I use didn’t break out of its banks until what we know of now as “the 60s,” but the cultural ethos that has led to today’s mass shooting was well under way by then. I just finished reading a book published in 1961 by R.J. Rushdoony that struck me, to mix metaphors, just how far down the road we were to chaos even by that time. By all appearances, America was safe and prosperous, but as Rushdoony argues, America was falling apart. Secular liberals would likely have laughed if they read what we now know were his prophetic words. I could quote numerous passages to make my point, but this one specifically blew me away, especially as I listen and read the debates we have after every one of these shootings:
Relativism has thus robbed life of the dimension and perspective of God’s absolute law and of the possibility of withstanding the demonic forces of history. Man’s radical impotence is the outcome, in that no power above and beyond human power can arm or defend the oppressed man. Thus, the most demonic of all tyrannies is that which relativism produces, in that the assurance of hope and victory are undercut, and the dimension of fulfillment, never more clearly offered to man, becomes thus a sardonic mockery of impotence.
In other words, we are the richest, most technologically sophisticated civilization in the history of the world, and yet we can’t figure out how to keep our children from getting killed at school! And our impotence is indeed cynically mocked every time one of these shootings happen. But our cultural elites continue to mock God and traditional morality and the family and history, as if everything is up for redefinition. As if there are no consequences for ignoring everything history teaches us. Sadly, too many people are paying for these secular attitudes with their lives.
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