110 Sermon Illustrations on Secularism

A Denver woman told her pastor of a recent experience that she felt was a sign of the times. She'd walked into a jewelry store looking for a necklace.

"I'd like a gold cross," she said.

The man behind the counter looked over the stock in the display case and said, "Do you want a plain one, or one with a little man on it?"

Evangelical author Tom Sine called for a radical "third-wave Christian citizenship" to correct flaws of both the right and left at a Baptist ethics conference. Sine, author of "Cease Fire: Searching for Sanity in America's Culture Wars," spoke at a "Leadership Through the Culture Wars" conference sponsored by the Baptist Center for Ethics.

Sine said churches in America are being torn apart by polarization between liberals and conservatives. "Many people, mainline Protestants, Catholics and Evangelicals, are looking for a new place to stand," Sine said. "They are not happy with the polarities of the right and left." Sine offered "not a middle position between right and left" but "a radical biblical alternative" to both positions.

"My contention is neither side takes Scripture seriously," Sine said. The Religious Right takes the Bible "literally," Sine said, but doesn't bring it to bear on public policy issues such as poverty and injustice. Churches on the left, meanwhile, have their identity tied up in being "social progressives," even if it means ignoring moral teachings of Scripture, he said. "Many of our understandings of discipleship, missions and social responsibility simply don't square with the Bible," he said.

Sine contended that the greatest threat to Christianity is not "secular humanism," as Francis Schaeffer argued, but an "enlightened secularism" that defines "a better future largely in economic terms." The "real secularism" threatening American Christians consists of "materialism, individualism and consumerism," Sine said.

"We really have not done the work we need to do to set our folks free," Sine said. He cited "the outrageous busy-ness" that results in people being preoccupied with activities at the expense of time for Bible study and devotion. "The enemy is not the liberal on one end or the Religious Right on the other," Sine said. "Pogo said it best, 'We have seen the enemy and he is us.'"

Sine called for a "third-wave Christian citizenship" to transcend debate between the left and right. "We're using a two-legged milk stool," Sine said, by emphasizing a faith that focuses on "getting our hearts right with God" and "getting our moral lives cleaned up. God wants to define our cultural values, too," he said.

Sine suggested that individuals and families write "mission statements" that "challenge people to whole-life discipleship and whole-life stewardship." He also challenged tithing as a standard for stewardship, citing a growing consensus among biblical scholars that "there's no basis in the New Testament

for 10 percent stewardship." He suggested "calling our people not out of guilt but out of opportunity." Sine called for a "reorganization of how we use our time and money" that includes spending less on one's self and more on others. "I'm convinced we could help a new generation create a way of life that is more festive and celebrative, where they put first things first, where Jesus' vocation is our vocation," he said.

Sine said Americans often compartmentalize religion by thinking about their faith only a few hours a week and not allowing it to make a difference in their daily lives. "I don't think the first call of the gospel is to proclamation," Sine said. "I believe in evangelism, ... (but) I think the first call of the gospel is incarnation." American Christians need "to flesh out something that has the character" of the Kingdom of God, Sine said. "We desperately need to rediscover the meaning of community. We are going to need some new metaphors," he said. "The church we need for the new millennium is not a building we go to once a week."

Sine suggested beginning "cooperative communities" as an alternative to

suburban living. A starter home in Seattle, he said, costs an average of

$150,000. Financed over 30 years, the accumulated cost is $500,000, he

observed. By contrast, homes can be built in a "six-plex" with common

activity areas for about $60,000, financed over five years. Eventually, a husband and wife living there could afford to cut back to 20 hours of work per week, freeing up more time to spend with children and for ministry. "We're going to have to think that radically," he said.

"The single-family detached lifestyle is the most expensive way to live," Sine said. "If we don't create a community where people start to care for one another, we don't have a future." "We need to be the part of the community that stands against the status quo," Sine said. "We need to be a subversive community."

Sine said Christians "need to be leaven in society," but should not equate patriotism with doing the will of God. "We need to realize we are called to work beyond making America great. The Bible makes clear that God's agenda is a transnational agenda. My first allegiance is not only to God, but to the international community of God. It's not the United States of America," he said. "The kind of 'America-first' thing doesn't work for me."

Christians need to avoid the polarities of right and left in public life and "work in a spirit of reconciliation," Sine said. He also said Christians "should not be afraid" of losing in the political sphere because "our trust isn't in a free market or left-wing politics; our trust is in God."

Sine urged Baptists to re-educate people in their churches who have been co-opted by the Religious Right. "Everybody assumes the Religious Right and Christian Coalition speak for all of us," he said, but polls say most born-again Christians disagree with those groups on many issues. "We have lost our voice," Sine said. "The Religious Right has educated our people."

Evangelicals need to "take back education" of their own constituencies, Sine said. "Our people have been educated to the politically correct views of the Religious Right. We have done a lousy job of educating our constituency. We have let others do it for us."

By adopting "a new biblical vision that simply transcends those of the right and the left and the American dream," Sine said, "I think the people of God could be the people who help birth a new dream not only for America's future but for the future of a world as we enter the new millennium."

In response to the 2022 Dobbs decision on abortion and the Supreme Court’s clear, consistent support for religious liberty throughout this term, many progressives are warning of an imminent “Christian theocracy.” Among the loudest voices predicting our collective doom are mainstream media outlets. For example, a recent story in Reuters claimed, “U.S. Supreme Court Takes Aim at Separation of Church and State.”

What’s missing in virtually all of these pieces is a proper understanding of the “establishment clause.” The establishment clause is derived from the opening lines of the First Amendment which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” There are two ways this statement is commonly misunderstood.

First, it is often described as establishing a “wall of separation between church and state.” In fact, those words are found nowhere in the Constitution. The phrase actually was coined later in a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Second, and more importantly, it is assumed that if organized religion cannot be supported by the state, then secularism is somehow “neutral.” Thus, by default, anything goes as long as it’s “secular.”

Understanding the historical context is essential. In the 18th century, an “established” religion referred to an official state church. In the U.S., individual states had already established churches, such as the Anglican Church in Virginia. The First Amendment specifically applied to Congress and prohibited a national church. To prefer the Anglican Church over the Congregationalists or Presbyterians would, at the time, mean alienating certain citizens and entire states. States continued to have established churches well into the 19th century.

In addition, the First Amendment was not intended to prohibit religious activities in governmental institutions. From the very beginning, Congress started each session with prayer. That continues today and is led by an official chaplain.

Our founding fathers, particularly James Madison, believed that religious liberty was an innate right, and inseparable from the freedom of conscience. He also believed that religion would better flourish in a free marketplace of ideas. That thinking was the basis for the free exercise clause.

This understanding of the freedom of conscience is the foundation for the other freedoms protected in the First Amendment. Without conscience rights, we cannot truly speak, write, assemble, or advocate freely from our deepest beliefs. That’s why the freedom of religion is often called “the first freedom.” Its position in the Bill of Rights highlights its importance.

Although the rights of conscience should not be controversial, somehow, that’s what they have become. How this happened is worth considering. By claiming secularism to be neutral, proponents of secularism, as far back as the 19th century, attempted to broadly apply laws originally intended by Protestants to prevent Catholic schools from accessing state funds. In the 20th-century, secularists embraced the concept of “a living Constitution” in order to transform the meaning of the First Amendment, attempting to keep religious institutions from accessing state funds and allowing only “secular” views in the public arena.

Though many court cases illustrate this, among the more important was Torcaso V. Watkins (1961), which declared unconstitutional Maryland’s requirement that officeholders state belief in God. Rather than ruling on the basis of Article VI, which prohibits religious tests for public office, the Supreme Court ruled on the basis of the establishment clause of the First Amendment and of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from violating the rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens. The same line of reasoning has since been used to challenge prayers at public meetings, Bible studies in schools, and nativity scenes on public property. In the process, the First Amendment was turned on its head, taking a clause intended to keep the state from backing any one denomination and construing it to position the state in opposition to all organized religions.

In footnote 11 of the Torcaso V. Watkins decision, Justice Hugo Black listed secular humanism as one of a number of religions “which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God.” Calling humanism a religion was not outlandish. For a century, humanists such as John Dewey and Julian Huxley had defined their beliefs as a religion. After all, secularism involves certain claims about the cosmos, existence, and human nature.

And yet in 1994, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled in Peloza V. Capistrano Unified School District that while “religion” should be broadly interpreted for free exercise clause purposes, “anything ‘arguably non-religious’ should not be considered religious in applying the establishment clause.” In other words, secular organizations were able to play both sides, qualifying as a religion for the free exercise clause but free from constraints from the establishment clause.

To further determine whether religious activities could utilize public spaces, the Supreme Court derived the so-called “Lemon Test” in the case Lemon V. Kurzman (1991). According to this rule, a religious activity is only licit on public grounds if it performs a secular purpose, neither advances nor inhibits religion, and does not foster excessive government entanglement in religion. This test maintained an obviously secular bias: Secular organizations were not required to pass any tests to obtain access.

In the 2022 decision in the Coach Kennedy case [he prayed on the field after football games], the Supreme Court continued its long-overdue corrections to the anti-religious way the First Amendment had been interpreted. Particularly by unequivocally tossing the “Lemon Test,” the Court has stopped the active suppression of religious beliefs and practice. We ought not fear an impending theocracy, but instead welcome a redress to the unjust and ahistorical understandings of religion.

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Copyright (c) 2022 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews happened because Christians failed "to make a difference" in Germany in the years preceding World War II, Baptist ethicist David Gushee said at a national seminar March 5.

The Christian response to Hitler "is a story so tragic, with Christian failure so glaring and with consequences so horrendous that it needs to be burned into the consciousness of every Christian person who walks on the face of the earth," said Gushee, author of the recent book "The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust."

Gushee, assistant professor of Christian ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., spoke at the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission's 29th annual national seminar, titled "Christians in the Public Square: Faith in Practice?", held March 4-6 in Washington.

"German Christians failed because they carried into the crisis years a badly truncated political vision," Gushee said.

Learning from Germany's example, "we must not understand the political life of our own or any nation merely as a struggle between a purer-than-the-driven-snow Christianity on the one hand" and godless secularism on the other, Gushee said.

"Sometimes it is a struggle between competing versions of Christianity," he said. "It is perversions of Christian faith that pose the greatest danger," he said.

Many Christians in Nazi Germany not only failed to oppose Hitler, but even welcomed his appeals to rebuilding national pride and his promoting of "positive Christianity." Many German Protestants either ignored or were not bothered by the Nazi Party platform's caveat that Christianity should be consistent "with the moral feelings of the German race" and Hitler's scapegoating of Jews for all of Germany's ills, Gushee said.

German Protestants were susceptible to Hitler's propaganda for four reasons, Gushee said, noting parallels for Christians involved in American politics today:

A "LONGSTANDING IDENTIFICATION OF TRADITIONAL GERMAN CULTURAL VALUES WITH CHRISTIANITY."

The Nazis called for patriotism, hard work, thriftiness, loyalty, obedience, moral decency and honor, Gushee said. "They were 'family-values' candidates of the first order," he said, borrowing a term from current debate.

Christians in Nazi Germany made the mistake of "collapsing their understanding of the Christian faith in morality into total identification with these values" while ignoring other biblical norms such as the call for peacemaking and justice for all people, Gushee said.

"Far too frequently we Christians do the same thing today," Gushee commented. "We pick a cluster of values and baptize these as Christian. We vote for politicians who articulate those cultural values and are especially enthusiastic about those who skillfully baptize these values in a Christian vocabulary."

"When we do this, we fall prey to a cultural captivity that robs the church of its independence and of any ability to separate the wheat from the chaff," he said.

A "SELF-INTEREST DESIRE" TO MAINTAIN FAVORED POLITICAL AND LEGAL STATUS IN THE NATION.

Though Hitler was secretly anti-Christian, he came to power by assuring churches they were "the most important factor safeguarding our national heritage" and promising churches the influence due them as the institutions providing "the unshakable foundations of our people's ethical and moral life," Gushee said.

Gushee urged Christians today to avoid being manipulated by politicians who promise them political gain. "A church that is consumed by self-interest is no different than any other player in the political arena," he said.

A "LONG HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM" THAT "LEFT THE CHURCH OPEN TO NAZI RACISM AND POLITICAL ANTI-SEMITISM."

"Because all human beings are made in the image of God and are equally and immeasurably valuable in his sight, anti-Semitism or any form of racial hatred is sufficient to disqualify a political party or political leader from Christian consideration," Gushee said.

"Do Christians know this today?" Gushee queried, noting that anti-Semitism was "such a part and parcel of average Protestant life in 1920s Germany" that few Christians were troubled by Hitler's announced plans to deport Jews.

AN "EROSION OF THOUGHTFUL THEOLOGICAL ORTHODOXY" WHICH "LEFT THE CHURCHES OPEN TO THEOLOGICAL AND MORAL CONFUSION ABOUT WHAT ADOLF HITLER WAS."

Gushee blamed classical theological liberalism, which had its headquarters in Germany, with undermining confidence in the Bible's authority and truthfulness, opening Germans to all kinds of theological experimentation and weakening the resistance of German churches to Nazism.

Because of that, German churches "were bamboozled" by a Hitler who presented himself as a kind of political messiah.

"This accusation is not original to me but emerged from within Germany itself from such people as Karl Barth and others," Gushee said.

Gushee warned that "flabby" theology prevalent in many American churches could also allow modern Christians to be led astray. "In normal times such a problem is bad enough," he said. "In times of social stress, it can be devastating. Behold Adolf Hitler -- defender of the church, upholder of morality, savior of a nation. Behold the consequences of Christian theological negligence."

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Paul Vitz, Professor of Psychology at New York University, examined sixty social-studies textbooks used by 87 percent of the nation's elementary-school children in a study done under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education. He looked for "primary" references to religious activity such as prayer, church attendance, or participation in religious ceremonies, as well as "secondary" references, such as citing the date when a church was built. What Vitz discovered was a "total absence of any primary religious text about typical contemporary American religious life" and only a few secondary pictures and passages touching upon the religious. The few direct references to historic religion centered on Amish, Catholic, Jewish, and Morman faiths, leaving a "very curious" deletion of characteristic Protestant religious life.

Religion appeared to be relevant only in remote points in history. Pictures of pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving were bountiful -- without any mention of to whom thanks was being given. One mother told Vitz that her son's social-studies book made no mention of religion as part of the pilgrims' life. Her son told her that "Thanksgiving was when the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians." When the mother called the principal of her son's suburban New York City school to point out that Thanksgiving originated when the pilgrims thanked God, the pricipal responded, "That's your opinion." He continued by saying that the schools could only teach what was in the books.

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Charles Colson, KINGDOMS IN CONFLICT (199), 333-334.

All across the country this week, "Pomp and Circumstance" is being played on college campuses as graduates stream forward to take their degrees and head off into the world. Addressing them are statesman-like figures with graying temples, dispensing wisdom to the new graduates as they tuck their sheepskins under their arms.

Commencement is one time of year when students get to hear speakers say something profound. Newsweek, TIME, and The New York Times all carried excerpts of some of them last week. I've read many of these speeches, and delivered some myself. But not many these days will make it into the history books.

So in this commencement season, maybe it's appropriate to revisit a true classic, delivered twenty-two years ago today, June 8, 1978 -- a speech that I believe ranks as one of the most prophetic and eloquent ever given. And it was from an ex-prisoner, a man who is one of the twentieth century's most enduring heroes.

The commencement was at Harvard. And how did that distinguished audience react? Shamefully, some booed him.

The speaker, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had endured years of imprisonment in the Soviet Gulags and lived to write about it. In 1970, his writings earned the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 he came here, to find refuge in America. Many in the audience that day no doubt assumed he would speak about the freedoms he now enjoyed, or the honor of speaking at Harvard. Surely he would express his gratitude to them.

But the Russian prophet had more solemn business in mind: His concern was the spiritual decline of the West. In his speech, he wondered why "The Western world has lost its civil courage" -- a decline most noticeable among the intellectual elites. He said that Western leaders based their policies on "weakness" and "cowardice," and the evidence was their belief that "We cannot apply moral criteria to politics."

Instead of congratulating the Ivy Leaguers, he warned about "destructive and irresponsible freedom" and "the abyss of human decadence." He deplored the "misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror."

The audience grew even angrier when Solzhenitsyn identified America's real problem as spiritual sickness. And its root cause was our most prized possession -- our self-centeredness. We suffer from the delusion, he said, that we are "the center of everything that exists." We think we are not accountable to "any higher force...."

"Is it true," he asked, "that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him?" Founded by Puritans in 1636, Harvard once knew the answers to those questions. We are not the result of some biochemical accident. We didn't create ourselves. But we mouth the words, "one nation, under God" and leave God out of it altogether.

Most of what is being said this year will soon be forgotten. But the words of that Russian prophet remain vivid, burning in our ears. They are a cry that should awaken the passion of every believing Christian. So if you know someone graduating this year, as an offset to the politically correct banality that they're being force-fed, why not give them a copy of Solzhenitsyn's classic address.

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Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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At a Christmas party at the home of Prison Fellowship president Mark Earley, I began chatting with two of Mark's children who were home from college and two of their friends. Our small talk quickly became an intense discussion. We talked about natural law and the Christian faith, ontological arguments for the existence of God, naturalism, and the like.

For half an hour, these students strained my intellectual resources to the limit, but I walked away exhilarated. That discussion was but one of many signs that the upcoming generation is finally asking the right questions.

Up until now, the conventional stereotype of today's youth has been of a detached, almost blasé group of channel-surfers happily drifting through life. But this appears to be changing, and the change offers Christians an opportunity we haven't had since the 1960s.

Journalist Colleen Carroll describes why this is happening in her book, THE NEW FAITHFUL. Carroll spent a year tracking a grassroots movement toward serious Christian commitment among America's young. Secure in the wealth and opportunity provided by materialistic parents, they're already asking: “Is that all there is?”

These “new faithful” have rejected our culture's secular values and hedonistic impulses, Carroll writes. Many have had life-changing conversions and embrace the traditional morality their elders rejected.

This is thrilling news. But will kids raised in Christian homes emulate them? Ironically, since these kids take their faith for granted, they may be less likely to ask the hard questions.

Josh McDowell, in his new book, BEYOND BELIEF TO CONVICTIONS, addresses the concerns of Christian parents. As McDowell documents, teens -- even those who sport Christian T-shirts and WWJD bracelets -- often have deeply distorted beliefs about God. Influenced by postmodernism, they're all too inclined to absorb spiritual pragmatism, an “if it works for me, it's okay” approach. The good news is that a majority of Christian kids say they don't have any set philosophy about life that consistently influences their decisions. That is, it's good news so long as we can challenge them with the right questions and help them understand what they need to believe and why.

How do we do this? My friend, Nancy Fitzgerald, from Indianapolis is living the answer. For several years, Nancy has taught worldview lessons to teenagers each Sunday night, using materials from many sources, including HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE? She's prepared a great curriculum. Discussion groups camp out all over her house, following an hour-long lecture in the basement. Some eighty-five kids show up each week, and they're so hungry for worldview teaching that they often don't leave until midnight.

When they do go off to college, Nancy maintains a lively e-mail exchange, answering their questions and emboldening them to stand up to hostile professors.

What a great example for how we need to be equipping our kids to defend their faith. Imagine what would happen if a hundred Nancy Fitzgeralds -- or two hundred -- opened their homes across America. The kids they teach would leave for college confident in their beliefs and knowing where to turn with their questions.

Their faith would become rock solid -- and the secular academy would not know what hit them.

FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION

Colleen Carroll, THE NEW FAITHFUL: WHY YOUNG ADULTS ARE EMBRACING CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY (Loyola Press, 2002).

Josh McDowell, BEYOND BELIEF TO CONVICTIONS (Tyndale, 2002). http://www.parable.com/breakpoint/item_0842374094.htm

Steven Garber, THE FABRIC OF FAITHFULNESS: WEAVING TOGETHER BELIEF AND BEHAVIOR DURING THE UNIVERSITY YEARS (InterVarsity, 1997). http://www.parable.com/breakpoint/item_0830819940.htm

Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE? (Tyndale, 1999).

Phillip E. Johnson, THE RIGHT QUESTIONS: TRUTH, MEANING, AND PUBLIC DEBATE (InterVarsity, 2002).

Candi Cushman, “Hey, Is That a Bible Study in Your Room?”, BOUNDLESS, 2 January 2003. http://www.boundless.org/2002_2003/features/a0000694.html

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Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #13081]

Psychologist Stanley Milgram, in his book OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY, describes a mock experiment he conducted at Yale University in the 1960s. It is a revealing illustration of natural man’s inability to safeguard individual rights.

A group of volunteer subjects participated in a study to “test the effects of punishment on learning.” They stood in front of an imposing device labeled a “shock generator.” Another man — called the “student” — was strapped into what looked like an electric chair.

The volunteers were told to read a list of questions to the student and to administer an increasing level of electric shock for each wrong answer. What they DIDN’T know was that the “shock generator” was a dummy, and the hapless “student” was an actor hired to give a convincing performance of a man being electrocuted by degrees.

As to be expected, the actor proved to be a most unpromising student and was subjected to — what the volunteers thought were — increasing levels of electric shock. What Professor Milgram found so extraordinary was how easily the volunteers set aside whatever moral qualms they might have had. One after the other, they pressed the shock buttons despite the desperate pleadings and feigned screams of the actor in the phony electric chair.

Professor Milgram’s obedient tormentors were not hardened criminal types. When interviewed, they stated their opposition — in principle — to hurting innocent people. Yet what they abhorred in PRINCIPLE they did in PRACTICE. Why? Because an authority figure in a lab coat assured them THEY HAD NO CHOICE.

What the Milgram experiments show is that — without allegiance to a higher law — decent people can be goaded into assaulting innocent strangers. In so doing they disregard a fundamental moral obligation.

The Heidelberg Catechism teaches that the commandment “You shall not kill” includes the God-given obligation to protect our neighbors “from harm as much as we can.” But when the Christian foundation for society is lost, freedom collapses. We will torture our neighbors.

The Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, in his novel entitled THE POSSESSED, clearly saw the implications of attempting to build a society without God. In the book, Shigalov the revolutionary laments the failure of his utopian ideals: “I started out with the idea of unrestricted freedom and I have arrived at unrestricted despotism.” Without God, it is inevitable — as our society may soon discover.

In the final analysis secular society cannot provide an inviolable basis for protecting individual rights. Unless man owes his allegiance to a power higher than the state, he cannot stand against moral degradation and tyranny.

People resent the fact that the so-called “New Religious Right” obeys an authority higher than the state. But this is the very thing that guards our liberties. Look at the heroes, the martyrs of Eastern Europe who brought down communism. Most of them have a “reverend” before their names.

The Declaration of Independence states that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Liberty is inalienable because it comes from God, and, make no mistake, the Christian world view is the BEST defender against tyranny. If you don’t believe it, ask Professor Milgram’s students.

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Version from February 6, 2009:

SHOCKING: CONSCIENCE AND CRUELTY

In 1961, shortly after Israel put Adolf Eichmann on trial — ”the architect of the Holocaust” — Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began a series of psychological experiments. The goal was to “test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was “ordered to” by an authority figure.

In the experiment, the subject was told to administer an electric shock every time a participant in another room (who was called the “learner”) gave a wrong answer. While there were no real shocks, the subjects thought there were, a ruse made more believable by the sounds of screaming coming from the other room.

With each wrong answer, the subject was instructed to increase the severity of the “shock” — all the way to a potentially lethal level.

When the participants expressed concern or a desire to stop, they were told things like “please continue,” or in the most extreme cases, “you have no other choice, you must go on.”

Sixty-five percent of the subjects administered what they thought was a potentially lethal shock. Only one participant refused.

The results, understandably, shocked both scientists and the public. They implied that, given the right setting, “ordinary citizens” were capable of brutality and even murder. The difference between us and the perpetrators of the Holocaust weren’t as great as we liked to believe.

In the 45 years since the experiments, our attitudes toward authority have changed a lot. That and the lessons of history led many of us to believe that the results would be different if the experiments were performed today by more enlightened citizens.

They were wrong. When researchers at Santa Clara University performed a modified version of Milgram’s experiment — where the “shocks” were limited to the merely painful — the results were “nearly identical” to Milgram’s.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Even though the social movements of the last 30 or 40 years weakened institutions like the family, they didn’t change human nature itself. We are inclined by nature to seek out authority if for no other reason than self-preservation. So when there’s chaos, people choose order over liberty.

Another reason we shouldn’t be surprised is that what stands between us and obeying an immoral order isn’t our view of authority — it’s conscience. Not “conscience” in the sense that we do something we feel inside of us. I mean conscience in the sense of actually understanding right from wrong — an informed view of life. The word “conscience” comes from the Latin cON SCIENTIA, meaning “with knowledge.”

And that implies that you know something in the first place — that you have been taught principles you are prepared to apply when you are asked to do something immoral. Given the devaluing of human life and dignity in the American culture, we cannot assume that many people have that kind of knowledge today.

But without access to this higher law and belief in a higher authority — or highest Authority — resisting unlawful and immoral authority is almost impossible. So all that stands between a person and cruelty are vague feelings that, not surprisingly, can’t resist authority, or peer pressure for that matter.

This is why the biblical worldview and the authority of God, and understanding it in our lives, matters.

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Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Over the last few years, there's been increasing political and cultural pressure to keep Christian influence out of public affairs. We've seen it in restrictions on prayer at public events, on posting of the Ten Commandments and the recent Supreme Court case. We see it when politicians or the media describe evangelical Christians as “bigots.”

One of my greatest worries is that the Church will oblige the secularists by retreating into our safe sanctuaries. I've had religious leaders tell me that all we need to do is lead people to Christ and keep them in our churches, and that's the end of our biblical responsibility. Nonsense.

This is a profoundly dangerous point of view because it would undermine the balance between church and state that is vital for the protection and the rights of all citizens.

We live in a democracy, remember, where the will of the majority is enacted into law. Most people believe that this is the best way to guarantee freedom and to promote the common welfare. And democracy has been hugely successful in the American experiment.

But our founders recognized that unrestrained democracy can lead to a tyranny of the majority. Let's say that the majority believes that it's fine to kill people who are designated by doctors as within their last six months of life. What's to stop them?

The Constitution? We've seen how judges reinterpret the Constitution, and how the so-called “right to die” is increasingly being recognized in public policy. It's a short step from a “right to die” to an obligation to die.

The point, you see, is that there must be restraints on democracy. That's why our founders described the American founding as an experiment in “ordered liberty.” That is, order must be maintained for freedom to be enjoyed by everyone. That's why our founders relied on a prevailing consensus that there was an absolute moral law. Some people thought it came from the Enlightenment, but most recognized it as our biblical heritage.

You may have heard the Church described as the conscience of society. It is the only institution that can provide a moral restraint against the excesses of a tyrannical regime. Therefore, it is essential to preserving human freedom. Our government, whenever it passes laws, makes moral judgments. But it is in no position to enforce a moral code in today's highly pluralistic environment.

That's why a strong, vibrant Church is required — not necessary just so you and I can exercise our religious freedom, but so that we can be an influence for the common good in society. In a way, this is God's gift for the freedom and welfare of all people.

William Wilberforce, the man for whom our Wilberforce Forum is named, wrote that God had laid before him two great objectives: the abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. He knew that both were needed. And our founders, men and women of the same era, understood this as well. The events of July 4, 1776, that we celebrate today began the experiment to see if this balance could be preserved.

This is why the Church today must take its stand: be the Church, with all that means. We ought to be explaining, as well, to our secular neighbors that they don't have anything to fear from the much-maligned “Religious Right.” Rather they should welcome Christian influence for the common good of all and the preservation of freedom.

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Copyright (c) 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5556]

The French Canadian writer Yann Martel has acknowledged that he rearranged chapters in the Canadian edition of his new novel, “Life of Pi,” because he feared that Canadians would be offended by its religious content.

“America is a very religious, almost puritanical country,” he told Publishers Weekly last year. “In Canada, secularism is triumphant, and to talk noncynically, nonironically about religion is strange.”

Mr. Martel's comments have been much quoted of late as a sign that in at least one vital respect, Canadian and American societies are moving in opposite directions despite their common language and geographical proximity.

In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington, only 30 percent of Canadians said religion was very important to them, compared with 59 percent of Americans. Twenty-one percent of Canadians said they attended religious services regularly in another survey taken in 2000 — about half the rate for Americans (although still a bit higher than the rate for most of Western Europe).

The statistics would be far more skewed if it were not for the growing number of devout Muslim, Sikh and Hindu immigrants to Canada. In Mr. Martel's city of Montreal, which is crowned by a giant illuminated cross atop Mount Royal, to commemorate the piety of its founder, Paul de Chomedy de Maisonneuve, church attendance is plummeting so fast that at least 18 churches in the last three years have been boarded up and abandoned or converted into condominiums and, in one case, even a pizza parlor. Meanwhile, rural churches are closing across the western prairies.

“This is a society where religion no longer wields cultural authority,” Marguerite Van Die, a theology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, wrote recently.

In stark contrast with American presidents, Canadian prime ministers rarely, if ever, speak in religious terms. They even avoid being photographed attending church.

It would be almost unthinkable for a prime minister to say “God Bless Canada.” It was not until after Pierre Trudeau died that Canadians learned that their former prime minister was a devoutly religious Catholic.

Mr. Trudeau was a champion of keeping government out of the bedroom, and most Canadian politicians have followed that example. The few Canadian politicians who have raised abortion as an issue have suffered at the polls for doing so, even in conservative provinces like Alberta.

Though widening in recent years, Canadian scholars note, the divergence over religious content in Canadian and American societies goes back to different colonial pasts.

The Puritans who came to the New World in the 17th century as religious refugees never considered colonizing Canada's eastern coast, because it was French and Roman Catholic. They went instead to Massachusetts, where their ideas of having a predestined and godly obligation to transmit their ideals to the world deeply influenced the founders of the United States.

“Religious rhetoric has played an important role in sanctifying major American political actions beginning with the War of Independence,” said Stephen A. Kent, a University of Alberta sociologist. Canada has never had a revolution or civil war or expansionist foreign policy, he noted, “so there was no need to sanctify major political events.”

Even before Canada was formed, the British saw the need to play down religion in the political sphere. They ceded the French colonists of the newly conquered New France (today's Quebec) broader religious freedoms than even those available to Catholics living in Britain in the late 18th century. Otherwise, they would have risked rebellion or losing the territory to the pesky Americans.

“Ever since, the way to deal with religion is to avoid it,” said David Marshall, a University of Calgary historian, “because it is divisive, it is not part of our tradition.”

The one place in Canada where organized religion played as lasting and important a cultural role as it did in the United States was in Quebec, where the Roman Catholic Church ran schools, hospitals and otherwise set the moral tone until the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960's. Quebec was then transformed by a generational shift in favor of sovereignty and freer social mores, and in opposition to a conservative authoritarian provincial government closely linked to the clergy.

It is traditional for American leaders to speak of faith during moments they seek to bind the country. Not Canadian politicians. To have done as the Americans in the past would have risked exacerbating the great divide between Catholic Quebec and the rest of the country where Protestants dominate. Now to do so, with the entire nation becoming increasingly secular, would simply be irrelevant.

The “culture wars” simply do not resonate in Canada, in large part because Canadian Protestants are more mainstream, homogeneous and closer to their country's intelligentsia than their American counterparts. Fundamentalist evangelicalism is not a major current in Canada, while the traditional Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian churches here remain content to keep religion a private matter and largely out of the public domain.

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[Original illustration at this number was added to HolwickID #16729]

In talking about religious liberty, as we are doing in this series, it's important to understand how our concept of religious liberty came to be.

The American Founders set out to do something remarkable: to guarantee maximum individual freedom consistent with maintaining the social order. And they succeeded; the American government has been called an experiment in ordered liberty.

In sharp repudiation of King George and the notion of a "divine right of kings," the founders introduced a concept of limited government grounded in Christian Reformation principles - especially Samuel Rutherford's principle of Lex Rex, that is, the law is king. The balance of freedom and order they established is rooted in a recognition of transcendent truth that provides pre-political foundations for religious liberty.

The constitution they wrote reflected the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence - "that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

And it reflected the separate spheres of Church and state, another Reformation principle; that is, the state exists for the protection of order, the church for the redemption of the people.

That's why the very first freedom guaranteed by the Bill of Rights stipulates that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

When Jefferson spoke of a wall of separation between church and state - a phrase much misunderstood today - he was explaining to a group of Connecticut Baptists that, as President, he could not interfere with Connecticut's already established state church. That "wall of separation" did not ban religion from public life - if anything, Jefferson's wall banned the state from keeping religion out of the public square.

Religious liberty has always been indispensable for preserving a free society. It's the bedrock individual right on which all others rest - which is why the challenges to it today are so dangerous.

As recently as 1952, the courts recognized the importance of religious freedom. In Zorach V. Clauson, the great liberal justice, William O. Douglas, wrote that our Constitution and form of government presuppose a Supreme Being. And he further warned that neutrality toward religion would eventually lead to pervasive hostility toward religion.

In the 1960s we saw existentialism make its way onto American campuses and into popular thought. It undermined any moral appeal to transcendent truth. And without transcendent reference points for truth, moral relativism found a foothold in the law.

By 1963 prayer and Bible reading were removed from the schools. And in 1996, in the case of Romer V. Evans, the Court in effect held that religious opposition to special privileges for homosexuals constituted bigotry.

Today, public expressions of faith are under fire. Christians can't peacefully protest at abortion clinics; prayer before sports events is outlawed; and we can't display nativity scenes or pro-life images in public places.

We need to make the case that preserving religious liberty is not just a matter for Christians - this experiment in ordered liberty relies upon government defending freedom of conscience. And threats to religious liberty imperil not only the Church; they undermine the American way of life itself - a fact important for your neighbors to understand.

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Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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What would it take to prevent another Enron?

Experts in business ethics gathered at Rice University last week to work on an answer. Rice professor Duane Windsor suggested that what's needed is "more fear of a loss of reputation."

Well, the schools will be asking these questions for years: How could the auditors be so negligent? What new regulations are needed? What would be the effect of an environment of fear?

But in my view, the most crucial question is one secular observers and business school seminars may be unwilling to ask: Has value-free post-modernity -- the fruit of modern secularism -- undermined the moral foundation essential for democratic capitalism?

As theologian Michael Novak argues, western liberal democracy is like a three-legged stool. One leg, political freedom; the second, economic freedom; the third, moral responsibility. Weaken any leg -- the stool topples.

Enron's collapse exposes a decayed third leg -- moral responsibility.

Now mind you, Enron's leaders were the best and the brightest, pillars of the community. Enron's chairman, Kenneth Lay, boasted he hired only graduates of the top business schools.

What Enron's collapse exposes is the glaring failure of these business schools. Ethics, you see, historically rests on absolute truth, which our top schools have systematically assaulted for four decades. And business school graduates leave the schools, as I discovered when I lectured at Harvard Business School ten years ago, without a clue about ethics.

But the Enron debacle does offer a good chance for Christians to contend for the Biblical worldview in the economic marketplace. The Scriptures endorse concepts like private property, contract rights, and the discharge of debts -- all essential to free markets. The Bible also demands justice, warning of God's judgment against oppressors who withhold wages or take advantage of the needy.

The Scriptural system, in short, balances the acquisition of wealth with a demand for both justice and compassion. It requires people to subordinate self-interest to moral demands.

Through the centuries, Christians have fought to bring these moral demands to bear in the marketplace. For example, in nineteenth century England following rapid industrialization, conditions in the coal mines and factories were deplorable. Children as young as seven were forced to work twelve hours a day.

The great Christian statesman, Lord Shaftesbury, who famously argued, "What is morally wrong cannot be politically right," led a crusade against these conditions. He exposed what poet William Blake called "the dark Satanic mills." Hammonds, the economic historian, would later write, "[Shaftesbury] did more than any other single man in English history to check the raw power of the new industrial system."

The lesson of history, which our neighbors need to understand, is that capitalism is healthy only when subject to moral restraints derived ultimately from religious truth.

It is these moral restraints that have been dangerously loosened, as Enron reveals. The resulting chaos can only lead to bureaucratic regulations and the loss of freedom -- unless, that is, we rebuild the third leg of Michael Novak's stool.

This will require an heroic effort -- but it's one Christians are uniquely equipped to undertake.

For further reading:

Kristen Hays, "Watkins says warning too late, virtually ignored," Associated Press, 1 April 2002.

Os Guiness, STEERING THROUGH CHAOS: VICE AND VIRTUE IN AN AGE OF MORAL CONFUSION (Navpress, 2000).

Michael Novak, THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM, rev. (Madison Books, 2000).

Michael Novak, ON TWO WINGS: HUMBLE FAITH AND COMMON SENSE AT THE AMERICAN FOUNDING (Encounter Books, 2002).

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Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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THE Church of England has accused Marks & Spencer of "subverting" the true meaning of Christmas for profit in its new advertisements.

The commercials ask celebrities to sum up what Christmas means in three words. None mentions the religious significance of the festival.

Angela Griffin of Coronation Street says: "Last-minute shopping." George Best says: "Pulling a cracker." The gay comedian Julian Clary says: "The Queen's speech." The final meaning is: Marks & Spencer.

A church spokesman said: "It gives the impression that Christmas is solely materialism." A spokesman for Marks & Spencer said: "Christmas is a time when people, whatever their religious beliefs, want to be with their families and friends, to share a special meal and exchange gifts."

Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard terms and conditions. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the Syndication website

Few things reveal the hollowness of American Christianity with any more clarity than the collapse of Thanksgiving. In this age of contention over the role of Christianity in the public square, Thanksgiving has survived at all only because it has been emptied of its true spiritual and religious significance. Many have deemed it a “secular holiday,” the blatant contradiction built into the linguistic root of “holiday” notwithstanding.

Just how far have we moved? One Amazon.com customer has compiled a list of secular Thanksgiving children’s picture books, to which the customer offers this preface: “It can be difficult for parents and teachers to find picture books that approach Thanksgiving in a secular way. This is a list of titles that do not interpret the holiday in a religious manner. Although several of these books mention characters being ‘thankful,’ they do not depict anyone saying grace/giving thanks to a higher power.” In other words, these books go out of their way to obfuscate the truth about Thanksgiving in America.

Of 25 such titles for sale at Amazon.com, one is entitled “Thank-You, Thanksgiving.” The title gives away the absurdity of the proposition. If there is no personal God who has intervened in American history, then there is no one left to thank -- so let’s thank the day itself. Another book is “Thank-You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving.” Since we can no longer thank the God we have forgotten, this book redirects thanks to Sarah Hale, a writer and woman’s magazine editor who prevailed upon Abraham Lincoln to use his influence to turn Thanksgiving from a states-based event into a true national holiday. Never mind the unsettling fact that the real Sarah operated from a Christian worldview and that her true desire was to ensure that all Americans were involved in giving due reverence to God for his many blessings.

Every effort to redefine Thanksgiving into a holiday that suits the secularist agenda is destined to fail. The true Christian origins and intentions of Thanksgiving are unmistakably revealed in a mountain of historical and literary evidence. The Protestant Reformation gained steam in part from its cry to return ad fonts -- that is to the biblical source itself, not the layered interpretations built up over centuries that had effectively hidden the biblical meaning. Thanksgiving is a time when American Christians need to return to the sources themselves.

For example, the Continental Congress issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1777 that could arguably be considered the first such national decree. Printed in The Journals of Congress, it reads:

“It is therefore recommended to the legislative or executive

powers of these United States, to set apart Thursday, the 18th

day of December next, for solemn thanksgiving and praise; that

with one heart and one voice the good people may express the

grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to

the service of their divine benefactor; and that together with

their sincere acknowledgements and offerings, they may join the

penitent confession of their manifold sins, whereby they had

forfeited every favor, and their humble and earnest supplication

that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ,

mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance; that it

may please him graciously to afford his blessings on the

governments of these states respectively, and prosper the public

council of the whole; to inspire our commanders both by land and

sea, and all under them, with that wisdom and fortitude which may

render them fit instruments, under the providence of Almighty

God, to secure for these United States the greatest of all human

blessings, independence and peace; that it may please him to

prosper the trade and manufactures of the people and the labor of

the husbandman, that our land may yield its increase; to take

schools and seminaries of education, so necessary for cultivating

the principles of true liberty, virtue and piety, under his

nurturing hand, and to prosper the means of religion for the

promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth in

righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”

Where, I ask, is “thank-you Thanksgiving” or “thank-you, Sarah” in all of that? To paraphrase what Charles Spurgeon once said about the Bible, the true roots of Thanksgiving do not need so much to be defended as they need to be turned loose.

Thanksgiving is a time to recognize the blessings of God on this nation. It is also a time to repent of sin and seek forgiveness through the work of Christ. It is a time to pray for wisdom for our leaders and protection over our military personnel. In the present economic malaise, Thanksgiving is an opportunity to ask God to ensure the future prosperity of the nation.

The pulpits of America once resounded with sermons built around these themes during the season of Thanksgiving. Like the Founding Fathers before them, men entered the pulpit and drew attention, especially, to the Psalms of thanksgiving found in the Bible. They recognized that the active hand of God in American history called for similar offerings of praise and thanks from our people. May God grant that a remnant of Christians in America cherish and preserve the authentic meaning and practice of Thanksgiving for future generations.

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Paul Brewster is pastor of Barlow-Vista Baptist Church in Hampstead, N.C.

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[Original illustration at this number was moved to HolwickID #10959]

Several years ago, Rev. Stephen Fournier, and his wife, Darlene, decided to start a "Good News" club in Milford, New York. The club would meet at the elementary school right after classes let out.

The Fourniers expected school officials to grant them permission to use school facilities since other groups already held meetings there. And a series of Supreme Court cases guaranteed the rights of groups like the "Good News" clubs to use these facilities.

But Milford officials forced them out, citing a policy that prohibits use of school facilities for "commercial activities, partisan political gatherings, or 'religious purposes.'"

The Fourniers sued. They lost in circuit court, but this week the Supreme Court overturned the circuit court decision.

Writing for the six-three majority, Justice Clarence Thomas gave a judicial back of the hand to nearly every argument made by the School Board. He chided the Board for ignoring the clear precedent set in the Court's decision in the Lamb's Chapel case. He questioned how anyone could think that allowing a private group to hold meetings in a school was an establishment of religion.

Justice Thomas also rejected the School Board's claim that a perceived endorsement of religion by the state poses a "danger" to our children. This assertion is laughable, especially since few ten-year-olds of my acquaintance ponder constitutional law.

But laughable or not, this idea has carried weight in the courts. Cases like the abominable Lee V. Weisman decision, denying a generic prayer at a school commencement, regard uninvited exposure to religion as the equivalent of exposure to pornography or radioactive waste.

Well, Justice Thomas thankfully cut through the nonsense. He wrote out that any such "danger" posed by religion is no greater than the danger posed by a perceived hostility to religion.

Just as gratifying as Thomas's opinion was the fact that he was joined by Justice Stephen Breyer -- one of the liberal judges on the Court. Could this be a signal of a break in the Court's hostility toward religion?

Well, hostility has clearly dominated the Court's decisions about church-state relations since the early sixties. Cases like Engel V. Vitale and Abington V. Schemp, the infamous school prayer case, turned the First Amendment's religious freedom guarantees on their head.

Two dissenting justices in the school prayer case, Abington, warned that the "unilateral devotion to the concept of neutrality" wouldn't stop at "noninterference and noninvolvement" with religion. They would lead to "a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious."

And that's exactly what happened. Since then, secularists have used the establishment clause to squelch religious liberty. And the free exercise clause has become a mere footnote. That's why I called the dissenters "prophets" in my book, Kingdoms in Conflict.

The good news out of the Supreme Court is that this devotion to the secular seems to be waning. In recent years, Court decisions like this one suggest that the Court is reconsidering the issue. The Court has said that the free expression of religious ideas is at least as important as the non-establishment of religion. And that's real progress.

Which is why this case is so important. For the first time in nearly forty years, we've refused to allow the establishment clause to trump religious freedom. The "Good News" case is good news indeed.

For further reference:

Good News Club et. al V. Milford Central School. No. 992036 (2001).

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Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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The holiday police are at it again -- looking for violations of the nation's new policy of separating faith and civic celebrations. The same folks who will soon be trolling courthouse squares looking for manger scenes are now calling on Americans to have a happy Thanksgiving ... but leave God out of it.

School textbooks filled with revisionist history tell children that the first Thanksgiving was a celebration at which the Pilgrims thanked the Indians for teaching them how to survive the harsh New England climate and plant successful crops. God is simply not part of the picture.

Some educators, worried that even the word “thanksgiving” might be too controversial, have renamed the holiday “Turkey Day.” Of course, this implies that the central thrust of the celebration comes down to poultry.

The revisionist historians want to have it both ways. They present the Pilgrims as wild-eyed religious fanatics -- precursors to the Religious Right -- and then suggest that the first Thanksgiving was essentially a secular holiday.

The historical basis for the Thanksgiving observance is clear. In 1621, the Pilgrims celebrated “the goodness of God” as they feasted with friendly local Indians. In reality, the Pilgrims had faced far greater adversity than had been expected. The climate was harsh, the crops were sparse, the native peoples were often hostile, and their ranks were thinning. Hunger, disease, discomfort, and discouragement were ever close at hand.

Aiming for Virginia, these Christians -- dissenting from the Church of England and determined to establish a truly Christian community -- actually landed in New England. That miscalculation meant that disaster was almost certain. Nevertheless, they “fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over this vast and furious ocean,” recorded Governor William Bradford.

In 1789, President George Washington declared the first national day of Thanksgiving by asking Americans to “unite in most humbly offering our prayer and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of nations.”

Later presidents followed Washington's example. Abraham Lincoln issued moving Thanksgiving proclamations during the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt, who regularized the holiday on the national calendar, called the nation to thankfulness in the middle of World War II: “The Almighty God has blessed our nation in many ways. He has given our people stout hearts and strong arms with which to strike mighty blows for freedom and truth.... So we pray to Him now for a vision to see our way clearly -- to see the way that leads to a better life for ourselves and for our fellow men -- to the achievement of His will, to peace on earth.”

Is all this just a demonstration of civil religion? Do most Americans really follow the example of the Pilgrims in expressing thankfulness to God, or is it just another holiday with emotional overtones -- and an orgy of overeating?

Millions of Americans will, no doubt, celebrate an essentially secular festival. For them, it might as well be “Turkey Day” or something equally vacuous. This reveals the most important contrast between the Pilgrims and the current generation. The Pilgrims were driven by a worldview that was centered in the worship of the one true and living God, the Creator of the universe, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. They understood His providential rule over the universe to explain everything that happened to them -- and everything that blessed them. They did not attribute their survival in New England to their own fortitude -- nor to the help of the Indians -- but to God.

Secularized Americans are driven by no impulse to give thanks, and wouldn't know to whom thanks should be addressed. They think of themselves as self-sufficient, self-directed, and self-reliant. Their horizon of thankfulness is, to say the least, rather low.

The civic holiday may not mean a great deal to many moderns -- but that doesn't mean that it is meaningless. At the very least, it implies that we cannot really take care of ourselves. That is just as true today as it was in Pilgrim New England.

Christians understand that the call to thanksgiving is far more urgent than a holiday, and far more important than the calendar. True thanksgiving cannot be limited to a day or a season. We recognize that God has given us everything that we have -- and everything that we need. We acknowledge our unconditional dependence upon Him for every second of our lives, every morsel we will eat, and every joy we will ever experience.

Deserving nothing but God's wrath, we were granted forgiveness through the Son. Needing all things, we have been given everything needful for our salvation and eternal life. To these God has added joys, comforts, and provision beyond our imagination -- “far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.” [Ephesians 3:20]

So, gather together to give thanks to God. While others celebrate “Turkey Day” and ponder poultry, direct your thoughts to the God of Heaven, by whose hand we have been brought near and given more than we can even remember.

The Pilgrims knew to whom they were praying -- and why. Let's follow their example and remember that their dependence upon God was no greater than our own.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #9136]

You would think it would be difficult to eliminate God from the history of Europe. That’s not just because of its great cathedrals or its museums full of religious art. As Kenneth L. Woodward writes in the NEW YORK TIMES, the ideas that made Europe a great civilization were born out of the Christian faith.

Unfortunately, many Europeans today — most of whom now live in intensely secular societies — have short memories. At the European Union’s recent constitutional convention in Brussels, after heated debate, delegates voted to leave out of the preamble to the constitution all references to God or to Christianity. Secularist forces led by delegates from France prevailed over dissenting votes from Germany, Italy, the Vatican, and a few other countries. The section of the preamble that deals with the sources of Europe’s values now merely mentions “the cultural, religious, and humanist inheritance of Europe.”

The leaders of the European Union have not yet voted on the new constitution, and several countries are still fighting to include references to the God of the Bible. The constitution, as it currently stands at least, is a sad commentary on how much postmodern man has forgotten — even postmodern religious man. For many who voted against the references to Christianity call themselves Christians, including the president of the convention, a French Roman Catholic.

Woodward quotes an Irish delegate as saying, “I am most firmly convinced that God is everywhere. I am very doubtful how apt a place Article Two in the constitution is for Him to appear in.” In other words, religion is okay — as a private practice. But it has no business in the public square even as a fact of history.

What the delegates don’t seem to realize is that if their ancestors had believed that, they wouldn’t have the privileges they enjoy today.

It was not just “religion” that shaped Europe’s heritage. It was a specific religion with its own unique, transforming set of values. According to Woodward, “Surely it was Christianity that made the human person, as a child of God, central to European values. And it was the canon law of the Catholic Church, the oldest legal system in the West, that nurtured respect for law long before the rise of Europe’s nation-states.”

Though it is considered politically incorrect to say so, the heritage of the West is like none other the world has ever seen. It gave us new concepts of law, government, and human rights — based on biblical values. Its artists and composers created masterpieces that have lasted for centuries — to glorify God. In the sciences, in literature, in mathematics, in medicine, and in so many other areas, the story is the same. If Europe ignores the pivotal role of Christianity in the development of its culture, Woodward writes, it rewrites history and “disavows its own past.” No wonder Europe is losing its moral authority in the world.

We’ve often said here at BreakPoint that the Christian faith affects every area of our lives. The history of Europe provides a perfect example. It’s impossible to avoid the obvious presence of God in the story of Western civilization. But as the European constitutional convention proves, unless we in the West make an effort to study and preserve and, yes, fight for the precious heritage we have been given, the obvious is all too easy to avoid.

FOR FURTHER READING:

Kenneth L. Woodward, “AN OXYMORON: EUROPE WITHOUT CHRISTIANITY,” NEW YORK TIMES, 14 June 2003. (Archived article; costs $2.95 to retrieve. Or call 1-877-3-CALLBP for a free copy.)

Patrick Quinn, “NATIONS DEBATE ON GOD IN EU CONSTITUTION,” Associated Press, 20 June 2003.

“EUROPE’S PROPOSED CONSTITUTION: WHERE TO FILE IT,” THE ECONOMIST, 19 June 2003.

Janet Bush, “WHO ASKED FOR A EUROPEAN CONSTITUTION?“ EU OBSERVER, 18 June 2003.

Philip Jenkins, THE NEW CHRISTENDOM: THE COMING OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Lesslie Newbigin, THE GOSPEL IN A PLURALIST SOCIETY (Eerdmans, 1990).

Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, CHRISTIANITY ON TRIAL: ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANTI-RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY (Encounter, 2001).

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Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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Edited comments from an address at the National Conversation on Renewal and Outreach by Rev. Tim Keller.

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How do we, as a denomination, do renewal and outreach in the emerging post-everything United States culture? “Post-everything” people are those who are now in their teens and twenties – and they are our future.

These persons are increasingly post-secular. They are much more open to the supernatural, to spirituality, and to religion but not necessarily to Christianity. They are also post-ideological. On the one hand, they are perhaps too concerned about issues of social justice to be labeled ‘conservative.’ On the other hand, they are also post-liberal. Not only is the old Liberalism too self-righteous for contemporary tastes, it is also cracking up due to 9/11, the demise of socialism, and war. The emerging culture is also post-modern. Our society increasingly is increasingly opposed to purely rationalistic explanations for experience, and does not accept the hard-nosed, scientific secularism of the past.

In general the Presbyterian Church of America knows how to thrive in the shrinking enclaves of traditional people, but does not know how to thrive in this increasing post-everything culture. Michael Wolfe, in New York Magazine said we are fundamentally two nations. “There is the quicker-growing, economically vibrant, morally relativist, urban-oriented, culturally adventurous, sexually polymorphist and ethnically diverse nation. Then there is also the smaller-town, suburban, nuclear-family, religiously oriented, traditional values, white-centric other America with its diminished political and economic force.”

America still has enough places dominated by this latter “nation” that the Presbyterian Church of America can continue to grow among already-conservative people. However, our usual methods of ministry do not work effectively in the parts of the country and the sectors of society that have the greatest power in our culture. Our ineffectiveness as a denomination in working with post-everything America is a failure across party lines. Whether we identify ourselves as “Evangelically Reformed,” “Confessionally Reformed” or “Old-school” we face similar failures. All our parties tend to limit their evangelism and discipleship to people who are basically traditional in their mindset.

For instance, our typical evangelistic presentations are effective with persons who assume they should be good. Then the gospel-presenter tries to show them than they are not good enough — they fall short of God’s perfect standards — and therefore they need Jesus to forgive sin and help them do the right thing. This presentation was quite appropriate for almost everyone in my parents’ generation. My parents, who are evangelical Christians, and my in-laws, who are not at all, had basically the same social and moral values. If you asked them the questions such as, “What do you think about pre-marital sex, or homosexuality, or pornography?” both sets of parents would have answered the same. They were part of a world in which Christianity was the folk-religion even if it was not the heart-religion of most people. They believed that the purpose of life was to be a good person. This world no longer exists everywhere.

On the other hand, if you say to those in my kids’ generation, “You know you have to be good,” they will say, “Who’s to say what good is?” So what are we to do with these post-everything persons who are increasingly dominating our society? The traditional gospel presentations will not make much sense to many of them.

I think that a) if we have the humility to admit that we are not doing the job, but b) at the same time (in a non-triumphalistic way) advance the answers Reformed theology especially provides, then there is great hope for our church. We must first give high priority to finding ways to minister in three areas: universities, big cities, and ethnically diverse situations. University towns are incubators where we can learn how to address the ideas of the rising culture. The new world usually emerges in the big cities and if we learn to face it and engage it there, we will be able to do the same in the rest of the country. In short, we must go to the ‘leading edges’ of our society and learn how to preach, model, and sing the gospel in ways that both challenge and attract (rather than merely confusing) people.

People may respond, “Well I’m not in a university town or a big city. I’m in a suburban or rural community, so such persons are not my concern.” The fact is there are already many kinds of post-everythings in your town. Because of technology, mobility, and myriad other influences, post-everything people are everywhere. We may not see them in our churches because we minister in ways that exclude post-everythings – they are either offended or confused immediately after walking in the door. Further, we are not presently forced to think about the post-everythings because there are so many traditional people that our churches can still grow and, thus, we feel that we are doing a fine job. Still, we must go to the university towns, big cities, and the ethnically diverse places because there we will learn to understand and reach America’s future.

The next thing we must do is use the Reformed resources that God has especially granted this church to minister to the emerging culture in the following ways:

First, remember that post-everything people like narrative and story. They tend not to like the older kind of preaching that simply enunciated doctrinal principles. Neither are they excited about the newer user-friendly sermons of seeker-churches on “How to Handle Fear,” “How to Balance Your Life,” etc. So, do we throw overboard everything we have done? Absolutely not. We turn to Geerhardus Vos who says that every single part of the Bible is really about Jesus. If you know how to do Christ-centered preaching, then you turn every single sermon into a kind of story. The plot of the human dilemma thickens, and the hero that comes to the rescue is Jesus. Christ-centered preaching converts doctrinal lectures or little how-to talks into true sermons. Post-everythings who are interested in narrative are reached by such preaching that is deeply Reformed.

Second, remember that post-everythings are experientially oriented. They do not just want intellectual propositions. For them life’s meaning is grounded in what they experience. Of course, as Reformed Christians we are very word-centered, and we know that eternal truth is not based on our subjective experience of it. But Reformed preachers have a tremendous resource for an experience-oriented generation in Jonathan Edwards. Edwards taught that a sermon should not only make truth clear, but also should make truth real. In Edwards we find ways to preach that are Reformed, committed to objective truth and, at the same time, deeply experiential.

Third, remember that post-everythings are very much against moralism and self-righteousness. But Reformed preachers have Martin Luther to help with this concern. Traditional gospel presentations assume that the people want to be “good.” But our kids’ generation wants to be “free.” Luther said, “Look, you want to be free? Good. It’s good to be free. But you’re not. You are living for something and, whatever that something is, it enslaves you.” If a person lives for reputation, then he is a slave to what people think. If a person lives for achievement, then he will be a workaholic. As did Luther, we should tell such people, “You want to be free? Fine. But you’re not going to be free unless Jesus is your salvation.” When post-everythings rejected Christianity they thought moralism and Christianity were the same thing. But we can show post-everythings that the two are not the same, and that freedom really is in Jesus.

Fourth, take note of post-everythings’ concern for social justice. They innately sense that the church is not credible without care for mercy and justice. We can address these concerns with the wisdom of Hermann Ridderbos and other Reformed theologians who stress the coming of and the presence of the Kingdom. The Reformed understanding of salvation is not simply that God is rescuing individual souls out of the material world, but rather he is also redeeming all of creation. God is going to bring complete healing and shalom to the material world eventually. This makes Christianity (as C.S. Lewis says) “a fighting religion” against poverty, hunger, and illiteracy. We must bring this Kingdom message of Reformed theology to post-everythings.

Fifth, recognize that post-everythings love art because they love the material world. Abraham Kuyper’s understanding of Reformed theology enables us to say to post-everythings, “Christianity is not just a way for you as an individual to get peace, love and groovy vibes in Heaven. Christianity is a comprehensive worldview. You can be a Christian artist, dancer, manager, or minister and these are all ways of living out the gospel.” When post-everythings hear that, they get extremely excited. They have never considered that Christianity embraces the whole of life.

Finally, remember that post-everythings are not strongly swayed by evidences and proofs. If you start to present evidence for the deity of Christ or the proofs of God, post-everything eyes will glaze over. But the presuppositional apologetics of Cornelius Van Til can work with post-everythings. I think Reformed theology provides us with tools for our culture that Josh McDowell’s kind of evidential apologetics does not.

I see people who are desperately trying to reach the post-everythings who in their desperation are trying to throw out essential elements such as the substitutionary atonement, forensic justification, imputed righteousness, the Sovereignty of God, or the inerrancy of Scripture.

Many of them are probably over-adapting to the post-everything situation. But while they do not have our theological resources, often we do not have their level of engagement with the people of the emerging society. To correct this, let us confess that we really have failure across all our parties to reach the coming society, and let us resolve to use the premier resources of Reformed theology. If we can make these changes, then we may really start to see renewal and outreach, and we might actually be a resource for the broader body of Christ in this culture.

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The Affirmative Action Office at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, laid down the law. In a “Christmas Warning” titled “How to celebrate Christmas without offense”, the AAO suggested “It is inappropriate to decorate things with Santa Claus or reindeer or other 'Christmas' decorations. Good ideas for decorations during this time are snowflakes, snowpeople, [and] poinsettias to give a feeling of winter.” The AAO did not provide “warnings” for other winter holidays, such as Hanukkah or Kwanzaa. “So if the multicultural Gestapo remove Santa, what do they do if they stumble on a Nativity scene,” asked Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights President William Donahue -- “smash it with their clubs?” After Donahue complained to the university, it rescinded the advisory.

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Saginaw News

Today is the holiday in which we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, and all over the country millions of children are studying his life and his work. They'll learn that his LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL is one of the most eloquent defenses of the law of God that must undergird our nation's laws.

How astonished King would be, were he alive today, to hear the shrill claims from secular ideologues that America was founded as an explicitly secular nation.

In the NEW YORK TIMES recently, Susan Jacoby argued that it's a “misconception, promulgated by the Christian right, that the American government was founded on divine authority rather than human reason.” [see #26526]

Nonsense, Dr. King would have retorted; after all, his entire campaign to abolish unjust laws was predicated on his belief that civil laws must square with the lawgiver God.

As King knew — and most scholars agree — for the first time in history, two ideological streams partially converged in America, one coming from the Judeo-Christian tradition, the other from Enlightenment thinkers. Adherents to both traditions agreed (for different reasons) that the new government should neither establish nor interfere with the church. But this certainly did not mean that America was to be a nation free from religious influences.

George Washington was explicit: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

In his marvelous book ON TWO WINGS, theologian Michael Novak contends that the faith of the founding fathers was deeply rooted in the writings of ancient scripture, especially the Jewish covenant. As he put it, secular writers typically cut off “one of the two wings by which the American eagle flies” — the one that is America's “compact” with the biblical God. They understood, with Thomas Jefferson, that “no nation has ever yet existed or even been governed without religion. Nor can be.” Why? Because, in the founders' estimation, virtue was the precondition for liberty.

While the founders admittedly did not use the word GOD in the Constitution, they didn't need to. The “laws of nature and nature's God” had already been appealed to in the Declaration of Independence, which provided the context for the constitutional debate.

No one made the case better than Martin Luther King, Jr., that America's founders intended religion to undergird America's laws. “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” King wrote. “But conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? The answer would likely make Jacoby, Barry Lynn, and secular ideologues cringe. “A just law,” King said, “squares with the moral law of the law of God. An unjust law ... is out of harmony with the moral law.”

As we celebrate King's birthday and his success in advancing the civil rights cause in America, let's remember that without his defense of the law of God, we would still be a segregated nation today. We need to learn from his stirring LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL that it is the moral law that undergirds the nation's law.

America is a purely secular state? Don't tell that to the gentlemen farmers who founded America — nor to those who today honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Susan Jacoby, “One Nation, Under Secularism,” New York Times, 8 January 2004. [see HolwickID #26526]

• Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. [see HolwickID #22116]

• Read President George Washington's farewell address, 1796 [taken from J.D. Richardson, ed., Compilation of Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 1 (1907), 213].

• Mervyn A. Warren, King Came Preaching: The Pulpit Power of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (InterVarsity, 2001).

• Michael Novak, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (Encounter, 2001).

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030828, “King's Dream: The Good Society and the Moral Law.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030117, “Fighting Unjust Laws: Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.“

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 020121, “The Duty to Disobey: Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.“

• Mark Gauvreau Judge, “The Division of Black America,” BreakPoint Online, 8 August 2003.

• Rev. Thomas A. Tarrants, III was a former Klansman who nearly died from multiple bullet wounds when he was arrested. In prison he came to Christ and now speaks out against racism and for the superiority of the Christian worldview. A CD of his testimony is available: “How a Former Klansman Rejected Racism and Came To Christ.”

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

I remember the day I fell in love again with baseball, back in the 1970s. (I'd been in a 20-year funk since the Dodgers moved to L.A.) A Wheaton College colleague and his wife took Sharon and me to see the Cubs at Wrigley Field. We had front-row, upper-deck seats above first base. Wrigley was beautiful, but the infield warm up impressed me first and most. I couldn't believe the ease with which the third baseman fired the ball “on a rope,” 30-40 yards, back to first. Such strength and skill. I still get chills when I see it.

I get a similar thrill when I visit art galleries. Artists can be amazing. If you gave me a year, an offer of $1 million and the best of tools, I still couldn't match a square inch of DaVinci or Vermeer. When it comes to painting, I'm a hopeless clunker, so I'm drawn (no pun intended; well, maybe a little intended) to those who execute their paintings with consummate skill.

My work on a Christian website recently took me to London, where I raced to and through four museums in my free time -- the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery one morning, the Wallace Collection and Tate Britain another afternoon.

The artistry was gratifying, but I was struck more than ever by the subject matter -- or rather the change of subject matter through the centuries of Western art.

For roughly the first 1,600 years, A.D., Christianity was the focus. At the National Gallery, I passed through several halls seeing scarcely a secular work. There (and to a lesser extent at the Wallace and Tate), painters frequently turned to the Gospels (the Annunciation, the Nativity, the kings' and shepherds' adoration, Mary's mothering, Jesus' baptism, John the Baptist's beheading, Lazarus' raising, the temple's cleansing, the foot washing, children's blessing, the high priest's interrogation, Gethsemane, the crucifixion, Christ's burial, Mary Magdalene's visit to the tomb, Thomas' incredulity, the supper at Emmaus, Pentecost) and the Roman Catholic saints (Jerome, Eustace, Sebastian, Catherine, Francis, George, Michael, Anthony). Others worked from Acts (Paul's shaking off the viper) and the Old Testament (the flood, worship of the golden calf, Moses in the bulrushes, Egypt's plagues, Belshazzar's feast, Lot's flight from Sodom).

As the Renaissance took hold in the 15th and 16th centuries, everyday people replaced the saints, contemporary settings and dress supplanted the biblical and ancient. New techniques (perspective, natural shading) and materials (tempura, fresco) emerged.

As a child of the Reformation, I have to say I welcome the collapse of the old sacred/secular distinction. I agree with Luther that God calls people to everything from preaching to homemaking to farming to smithing to marketing. The sacred is everywhere, as extensive as the Kingdom. But I do miss generous artistic coverage of biblical stories and personalities. Of course, there were exceptions. William Blake was a virtual industry in this connection in the 19th century, with paintings and illustrations of Satan's smiting Job with boils, Abel the shepherd, heaven's river of life, Joseph and Mary's flight to Egypt, etc. But the generality stands.

Despite the changes, the church was once so much a part of the cultural fabric that artists naturally picked up on its leaders and activities. Seventeenth- century Dutch painters captured Protestant worship services in progress. Eighteenth- and 19th-century English portraiture celebrated such Christians as Robert Raikes (founder of Sunday School), William Wilberforce (who led the Parliamentary fight against slavery) and Hannah Whitehall Smith (who wrote “The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life”).

The 20th century saw the death of cultural piety. Art both hastened and reflected its demise. No greater illustration of this can be found than in the National Portrait Gallery. A short walk from the 1828 Wilberforce by Sir Thomas Lawrence, you find the 1997 prurient self-portrait Gilbert and George - two homosexual artists standing side-by-side in full frontal nudity, with a crude expression at their feet. And the craft is not that impressive -- arty paintwork around a sepia photo.

It would be fun to ask the chief curator, “Have you no shame?” just to see what he would say. Of course, he has none. Shame is a joke now, and likely one turned back on the person who uses the expression without irony. On this modern model, the critic should be ashamed of his “homophobia” or stuffiness -- ashamed of his shame, embarrassed of embarrassment.

I'm not asking that we return to the stylistic days of Duccio and Titian. But just imagine if we had more artists who could work with this conviction:

I love to tell the story

Of unseen things above,

Of Jesus and His glory,

Of Jesus and His love.

I love to tell the story,

Because I know 'tis true;

It satisfies my longings

As nothing else can do.

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In the past few weeks, the issue of religion and politics has occupied center stage in the presidential campaign. When one person isn't predicting the outcome based on what he claims God personally told him, another person is insisting that, appearances notwithstanding, he is a Christian.

While this makes for fascinating political theater, the important question is: How important is the religious faith of a particular candidate?

In a recent NEW REPUBLIC article, Franklin Foer called Vermont Governor Howard Dean “one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history.” In Foer's estimation, Dean's secularism, and not his policy proposals, is his biggest political liability, particularly in the South and Midwest. His admission that he doesn't “go to church very often,” Foer writes, “[marks] him as culturally alien to much of the country.”

And Dean seems to agree. The past few weeks have witnessed a concerted, almost frantic, and sometimes comical attempt on Dean's part to portray himself as a religious believer. He even talked about his “favorite book” in the New Testament: Job. Judging from the response in the media, few are buying it.

Now, Dean's church attendance, or lack thereof, is the least of my problems with him. Still, his efforts to establish his religious credentials remind me of a similar mistake made by some Christians I know. They tell me that “things would really be different in this country if we could just get more Christians elected to office.” They believe that if we could fill the Congress and the courts and the White House with born-again believers, we'd straighten out this country in a hurry—all problems solved.

Now, while I'm in favor of Christians running for public office, and I'm thrilled when believers are elected, things just aren't that simple. That sentiment ignores biblical principles about the role and limitations of civil government.

Someone who understood these principles was Martin Luther. Luther once compared a man who “would venture to govern with the Gospel” to a shepherd who should place in one fold “wolves, lions, eagles, and sheep together and let them freely mingle.”

Thinking that electing Christians to high public office answers all of our problems ignores a reality that Luther knew: In every society, “the wicked always outnumber the good.”

It's a sinful world. Therefore, government's prime job is to restrain sin and to preserve order. That is its ordained role from God. Our leaders, therefore, have to be those who are best-suited for carrying out these tasks, the most confident and responsible. Or, as Luther is supposed to have said, it is better to be “ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.”

Does this mean that we shouldn't encourage our fellow believers to seek elective office and support them once they do? Of course not. Christians are called to apply biblical truth to all areas of life, including politics and government. Nor does it mean that a candidate's beliefs are irrelevant. A candidate's beliefs shed light on his values, priorities, and character—all of which matter when it comes to governance. A believer should be a force for virtue, and having one in office is a witness, of course.

But this doesn't change the fact that the first requirement is competence. And some non-Christians may be better prepared to carry out government's biblical mandate than some Christians, no matter how often the latter attend church.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Franklin Foer, “Beyond Belief,” New Republic, 22 December 2003 (reprinted on freerepublic.com).

• See Center for Public Justice's Capital Commentaries, “An American Covenant with God?“ (December 15, 2003) and “Religion and Politics beyond the Party Lines“ (December 29, 2003).

• See previous BreakPoint Commentary, “Two Cities.”

• Gene Edward Veith, “Keeping the faiths,” World, 24 January 2004.

• Ted Olsen, “Weblog: Dean Changes Tack on Religion Comments,” Christianity Today, 8 January 2004.

• Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, “Groups Debate Religion on Campaign Trail,” FOX News, 21 January 2004.

• Mark O'Keefe, “Bush has firm hold on the 'religious' vote,” Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 10 January 2004.

• “God and Caesar: The Logic of Christian Political Responsibility“ by Nigel M. de S. Cameron addresses the issues of Christian engagement in the political process and the Christian stake in issues of public policy.

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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On the eve of the new millennium, the prestigious Economist magazine published what amounted to an obituary for belief in God.

Fast forward to November 2007: The cover story of a recent issue of the magazine is titled, “In God’s Name.” In it, the editors admit that they were wrong eight years ago and tell their readers that “religion will play a big role in this century’s politics.”

What happened to change their minds? For starters, they began looking through the correct end of the telescope.

In 1999, the magazine cited the many different conceptions of God as possible evidence that, instead of man being created in God’s image, it was the other way around. They mocked God’s supposed concern for “the diet of the Jews” and the fact that Hindus depicted him as “a blue-faced flute-player with an interest in dairy-farming.”

They opined that for “one of infinite knowledge, he was strangely careless how he spread what bits of it to whom. To some he dictated the Bible; to Muhammad the Koran.”

Thus if God seemed to be “passing into history,” at least in the West, perhaps this passing was “largely his own fault.” So concluded the Economist.

This bit of hubris was explicable, if hardly justifiable: It came at the end of a decade that had seen the collapse of the Soviet Union and a global economic boom. Democratic capitalism appeared to have triumphed so completely that there was talk of “the End of History.”

While a few writers — for example, Samuel Huntington — wrote about the upcoming “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, the Economist’s writers were too busy writing about money to take notice.

Then came September 11. It was a painful reminder that secularized global elites, who live as if God does not exist, were a tiny minority. Outside of what the magazine itself called the “rarefied world of thinkers,” few people doubted God’s existence or His relevance to our lives. On the contrary, they believed that He has definite ideas about how we ought to live.

Today, the magazine agrees with Philip Jenkins that religion will probably be “the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs” in the twenty-first century — referring, as he does, to Islam. What people believe about God will guide their “attitudes to political liberty and obligation, concepts of nationhood and, of course, conflicts and wars.”

What they wrote in 1999 was as substantial as the dot.com-driven stock prices that fueled their hubris.

But because it took September 11 to make the magazine take notice, the special report skews toward religion as the source of conflict: both armed conflict and in the political arena. So, like Christopher Hitchens and his bestselling book, God Is Not Great, they grudgingly acknowledge that belief in God is alive and well. It is just if there is this God, He is the source of all evil. That is as wrongheaded as saying God was passing into history.

Tomorrow, I will tell you about what the magazine calls “the new wars of religion” and how you and I need to respond. I suppose it is good, at least, for the time being that the Economist admits its mistake: Man is, you see, inescapably a religious creature, and the failure to understand this is the worst kind of hubris and very dangerous.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #21551]

Unlike America's, Europe's political establishment is hostile to Christianity.

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George W. Bush concluded his election victory speech with “God bless America.” It's likely that in the European Parliament, the U.S. president would be considered unfit for his job on account of his religious beliefs. Even worse, for Europe's legislators, would be that he's not ashamed to express those beliefs so clearly and so publicly.

If you consider that Mr. Bush won re-election in part because of his firm stand on family values and other moral issues, it becomes apparent that Europe and United States are drifting apart not only on foreign policy but also on their vision of a democratic society and of the proper relationship between politics and ethics.

One of America's founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, was convinced that politics needed values it could not produce itself and had to rely on other agencies (mainly the churches) to nurture the virtues civil life needs. The state could therefore not privilege any church in particular but had to maintain a positive attitude to religion in general.

Jean Jacques Rousseau thought, on the contrary, that the state needed a kind of civil religion of its own and the existing churches had to bow to this civil religion by incorporating its commandments in their theology. Many scholars see in this idea of Rousseau's the seminal principle of totalitarianism. The tradition of Rousseau and of the Jacobins has survived in Europe in less virulent forms than in the not too distant past, but it's still part of the European political and ideological landscape.

These differing philosophical approaches to religion and politics do not give us, however, the whole truth. In the 1960s, both Europe and the United States lived through a cultural era that belittled traditional values and wanted to prepare the young generation for a world of tomorrow in which individual responsibility, self-sacrifice and other virtues of the past would be needed no more. In this world nobody would need moral convictions. It would be a world without the constraint of limitedness disposable resources. Nobody would need to toil for his bread.

Unfortunately that tomorrow did not come. What came, on the contrary, was the collapse of communism. We still live in a world in which resources are limited, we have to work hard to have our share of them, we need the support of a family and we need the old traditional virtues that had been too easily dismissed. Americans have become aware of this state of affairs sooner than Europeans. This is another explanation of the difference between the two sides of the Atlantic. But we can expect also in Europe a change of attitudes within a comparatively short period of time. Our struggling economy and ageing society can survive and be modernized only if we recover at least some of the values of the past -- among them the ethics of hardworking and caring fathers and mothers.

This is difficult to accept in Europe because our intellectuals were always convinced that modernity brings with itself the extinction of religious faith. Now America, the most advanced country in the world, shows us that religion may be and indeed is a fundamental element of a free society and of a modern economy.

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Mr. Buttiglione , Italy's minister of European affairs, last month withdrew his candidacy to become European justice and home affairs commissioner. [He received too much criticism for being a conservative Roman Catholic]

[see #28675 for Charles Colson's interpretation of this article]

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In the aftermath of the recent election, certain disappointed voters have voiced fear of an impending “theocracy” — a takeover of government by “fundamentalists” and “extreme right-wing Christians.” That fear, of course, is wholly unfounded, but news from Cupertino, California, raises the opposite concern.

Steven Williams teaches fifth grade at Stevens Creek School in this Silicon Valley city. Part of the curriculum is American history, but Williams has been prohibited by the school's principal, Patricia Vidmar, from using any historic materials mentioning God. That includes the Declaration of Independence which refers to “Nature's God,” “Creator,” “Divine Providence,” and “Supreme Judge of the World.”

Mr. Williams has sued the school, claiming religious discrimination and violation of free-speech rights. News reports indicate he is a Christian.

One lawyer familiar with the case stated, “the district has chosen to censor men such as George Washington and documents like the Declaration of Independence. [Its] actions conflict with American beliefs and are completely unconstitutional.”

According to various news sources, the principal started her crackdown on Williams last May by requiring him to submit all lesson plans and handouts for her approval. He claims she systematically rejected any statements by American founders that mentioned God or religion. Included in the ban, according to Williams, “are excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's journal, John Adams's diary, Samuel Adams's 'The Rights of the Colonists,' and William Penn's 'The Frame of Government of Pennsylvania.'“

Williams's attorney, Terry Thompson, notes that “Williams wants to teach his students the true history of our country. ... He hands out a lot of material, and perhaps 5 to 10 percent refers to God and Christianity because that's what the founders wrote.” The suit asserts that Principal Vidmar did not subject any other teacher to pre-screening of lessons.

So far the district has neither denied nor confirmed the allegations, but it hardly seems likely that Williams would make all this up. For decades crusaders for secularization, aided by sympathetic courts, have worked diligently to remove all traces of religion from America's public schools, even engaging in revisionism — rewriting history books.

Secularists view the public school as their exclusive domain where no child should be exposed to a religious idea. Such a view is just censorship of Christians. There's nothing neutral about these acts of discrimination. They prescribe secularism as official doctrine.

And frankly, it makes me mad. When I went into the Marine Corps, I was ready to give my life for a country that, in the words of the Declaration, believes that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Words that for millions of Americans through the centuries have been worth dying for are certainly worth teaching to our young people.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Dan Whitcomb, “Declaration of Independence banned at Bay-area school,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 24 November 2004.

• “School Bars Declaration of Independence,” Smoking Gun, 24 November 2004.

• Dean E. Murphy, “God, American History, and a Fifth-Grade Class,” New York Times, 4 December 2004. (Free registration required; $2.95 if archived.)

• Dr. Daniel L. Dreisbach, “A Godless Constitution?“ BreakPoint Online, April 2000.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030710, “Wall of Separation: Text and Context.”

• See the “Worldview for Parents” page “America's Religious Roots.”

• For college students: Call 1-877-322-5527 for FIRE's Guide to Religious Liberty on Campus. This thorough guide explains how the legal and moral arguments for religious liberty apply differentially on public and private campuses. For other guides by FIRE, visit their website.

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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