“My analysis is that most faith based systems depend upon an absolute moral order. The declaration of things as absolutely evil or absolutely good, as sin or virtue, puts liberalism into a horrible position because it’s founded on no judgment on anything. As a result, any faith that is seriously practiced or understood is a challenge to the politics that depend on constituencies that would rather not be told that their choices are bad and their lives are not virtuous” Hugh Hewitt
We are continually told that in the Western world religion is in decline. They may be right because religion is nothing more than a pursuit of interest, the worship of a god or gods or the supernatural. Religious concepts change with the wind. In that respect even atheism becomes a religion. Christianity however is not a religion. It is a life choice, a relationship based on the Biblical teachings of the one true God and His son, Jesus Christ.
Elaine Howard Ecklund, a social scientist at Rice University, surveyed scientists at elite universities only to discover that while about 70% described themselves as spiritual, 65% were agnostics and atheists. Don’t be surprised, even Richard Dawkins, the “evangelical” atheist, is enthralled with spiritualism. He said in an interview that he had experienced “wonder at the beauty of the universe, the complexity of life, the magnitude of pace, the magnitude of geological time…[something] which you could call spirituality.” In this concept spirituality becomes a vague religious concept that anyone can embrace.
Within the center of every scientist’s life lies the fundamental principle of spirituality; the capacity to be connected to all that is. The Hubble telescope, the Hadron Collider at CERN, and the Human Genome Project, all proclaim that humans are a spiritual being. The cosmologist studies the universe as a whole, the archaeologist and paleontologist examine the ancient past; the particle physicist plumbs the smallest things. If man were unable to embrace the totality of being, the pursuit of science would be doomed to failure and in the end would be meaningless. Yet we must not forget that science is only one of the many ways we are connected to things.
Love and hate, hope and despair, freedom and enslavement cannot be measured on a meter; existence is vastly greater than the results of measuring apparatus and measurements themselves. If scientists were to look inward with the same seriousness with which they look outward, they would be forced to reflect upon the interior life, upon the creature who seeks truth, desires to know everything, delights in beauty, experiences joy when truth is encountered, and wonders about why nature can be known at all.
Today, most progressives in academia and politics tend to treat Christians one of two ways. When they need your vote they tend to use heavy handed pandering. Once elected, Christians are treated with sniggering contempt, like the sort of refuse you scrape off your shoes after a long walk through a cow pasture. That’s not to say that there aren’t progressives who call themselves Christians. There are, although I question their dedication to a Christian life because of what progressivism stands for – socialism, and socialism denies God. There is no way to worship God and man at the same time.
Belief and politics are inseparable for Christians because of the inseparability of the two great commandments; i.e. that we love the Lord our God and that we love our neighbors. As such, the goal of secular fundamentalists to separate Christians from the public square is not merely an affront but an effort to ban Christians from political life. But that is nothing new.
Anti-Christian ideology has always been intolerant and has always sought to exclude Christians from the public square. From the persecution of the early Church and the martyrdom of countless Christians to the French Revolution and its Great Terror, right through to the last century with the extermination of Christians in the concentration camps of national and international socialism, the intolerance of secular fundamentalism has continually crucified the body of Christ as it has continually corrupted the body politic. Employing the evil means that matched its ignominious ends, anti-Christian ideology has always favored the power of a lie, Orwellian doublethink and newspeak to further its goal of deception and the dark art of propaganda.
There is no such thing as a “naked” public square. No society is “neutral” in regard to a set of social institutions or values. The progressive myth of laws that treat all values and value systems as equal covers up an attempt to change the cultural and ultimately traditional norms that bind together any stable community. These norms undergird any society’s laws and shape its public life. As the demand for neutrality gives way to the demand for Christian conformity with anti-Christian dictates the bad faith of earlier claims to desire mere “fairness” become increasingly clear.
Whether we believe that God exists or not, His existence is at the center, it is the touchstone, the conceptual rock on which all our other presuppositions are based. For the theist, God’s real presence is the defining principle at the heart of reality, For the atheist, it is God’s real absence. Yet in both cases, God is crucial and is therefore ironically present.
The removal of God creates a vacuum that is filled with all sorts of dangerous and deadly nonsense. The only alternative to One Nation under God is all nations under God-knows-what. May God deliver us from our deliverance into the hands of such Godlessness.
Sources: Wonder & Love: How scientists neglect God and man by George Stanciu, first published at the Imaginative Conservative
