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.
Recent Comments