By Pastor
e are far down the wrong road here in 1998. Just one wrong turn when following directions will render you lost. If you are heading West from New York to Michigan, for example, but inadvertently turn onto I-95 South, you're in trouble. And if you take I-95 all the way to Florida, it matters little if you make a right or a left in Jacksonville. If Michigan is your goal, you've got some back-tracking to do! Similarly, we are poor little sheep who have lost our way. "Baa, baa, baa." The critical moment of change occurred in the '60s, yet here we still are wondering what happened.
It's not possible to understand the '90s apart from the '60s. And it's not possible to understand the '60s without considering them as the time when America-and with her, the West-changed her religion. The times, they sure were a-changin'.
It is said that today we are deep in a Culture War. But culture is nothing other than religion externalized and made explicit. What we are experiencing today is not a war of cultures, but the ritual adoption, the outworking of a different religion, a religion that long ago won the hearts and minds of a people. The real battle-the battle for the soul of Western Civilization, the battle between Christianity and evolutionary, egalitarian Humanism-was over and won in the '60s. The rest is mere formality: implementation and clean-up.
That is what we are experiencing today as we approach the Third Christian Millennium. Any attempt to deal with the moral morass surrounding us while neglecting its religious character is vain. For behind all cultural institutions, before all cultural expressions, underneath all laws, mores and practices, there is religious faith. We must not be fooled by modern secularism's claim to religious neutrality. It is anything but that.
The '60s was the time when we formally converted from Christianity to Humanism. The old was forsaken, the new embraced. Every institution (family, church, state and school) was despised for whatever Christian character it manifested. Every authority (parent, pastor, policeman and professor) was challenged. Every convention and taboo was flouted. The '90s is merely the outworking of the '60s' faith: it is a growth in the dis-grace and ignorance of the religion of revolution (cf. 2 Peter 3:18).
It was in the '60s that our civilization underwent its most dramatic change. That consisted in a glaring particular: the demand to sin without consequences. That is what marked off sin in the 60's from sin in all prior decades in America. Being populated by humans, there was always sin enough. But the Public Square had heretofore been guarded by a Christian ethos (or the shell which remained of it). In the '60s, sin came out of the closet. Like a child stepping into the gutter after being told by the parent not to, the '60s generation brought sin into the streets, into the faces of all authorities, and asked, "What are ya gonna do about it?"
The answer was a resounding whimper: "Not much." Perhaps many were hoping it was a phase that would pass. It wasn't. It didn't. The proverb, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it," admits of more than one interpretation. Most commonly it is regarded as a promise. It could just as easily be a warning, for literally it says, "Train up a child in his own way and when he is old he will not depart from it." In other words, to fail to correct a child is to confirm him, perhaps irretrievably, in a self-centered, sinful lifestyle.
And this is precisely what happened in the '60s. Defiance in every quarter was met with nominal or no discipline. The status quo was caught completely off guard: the war was being waged by their own children, and the "powers that were" did not know what to do or how to respond. Though there was some violence, it was a relatively unbloody coup-and successful beyond the experience, or even the expectations, of their spiritual forebears who bled for the same cause in France 200 years before. The Revolution was won by the children of the '60s who could rightly say, "We are the people our parents warned us against."
Of course, the '60s didn't just happen. Before the new religion could overtake the Public Square, the old had to be dislodged. Specifically, the Bible, the Book of the old order, had to be removed. This was accomplished not all at once, but by a process that had been vigorously operating for a solid century. By the 1960s, the Bible's voice had effectively been removed from discourse about polity, whether civic, scientific, even ecclesiastical. The time, therefore, was ripe. Sin didn't simply emerge from the closet: it pounced.
While space (I trust the reader understands) forbids anything like an extensive analysis of the whole, or even the parts, of this "changing of the gods," several contributing factors can at least be identified.
The first component of the new religion to achieve success in the West was egalitarianism. What G. Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876) so well called "The Revolutionary Principle" had, despite the warnings of Dutch and American Christian thinkers, displaced the Bible as the standard for determining right and wrong in social policy. Moses was out, Robespierre in.
In America, this change occurred under the banner of abolition. Though the Bible countenances some forms of slavery in some circumstances, it was held that all slavery is essentially and always (not merely undesirable but) immoral, if not inhuman.[1] The trend of this sort of argumentation was clear to some. They warned that if the Bible's teaching on slavery could be ignored-or worse, if it could be made to appear intrinsically unrighteous in itself-then the Bible would become functionally impotent in determining social policy. If a well-exegeted appeal to Scripture on the question of slavery could be silenced by a flimsy appeal to man's supposedly enlightened sense of fairness, why should we not expect man's idea of fairness to overrule Scripture whenever a conflict appeared?
Thus before the triumphant abolitionists even had time to relish their victory, women's suffrage emerged and employed the same tactic. If the Bible's clear teachings on male/female relations could not be interpreted down into the service of egalitarianism, well then, we'd just have to dismiss its ethical teachings on the question altogether. Man's sense of fairness must be right. And it was thus that what Van Prinsterer feared came to pass. He had written, "What we oppose is the Revolution...the systematic overturning of ideas whereby state and society, justice and truth are founded on human opinion and arbitrariness instead of on God's ordinances."
Joining, aiding, and abetting egalitarianism was the second component of the new religion: evolutionism. And here it was Herman Bavinck (1854-1921), perhaps more clearly than anyone, who saw where evolution would lead. In a startlingly prescient article published in 1901, Bavinck wrote, "Unless we are mistaken in our interpretation of the signs of the times, the twentieth century upon which we have just entered is to witness a gigantic conflict of spirits_ [for] man has undertaken the gigantic effort of interpreting the whole world and all things that are therein in their origin, essence and end by what is called purely and strictly scientific methods, that is, without God, without any invisible, supernatural spiritual element and simply alone from the pure data of matter and force."
Bavinck knew that compromise with evolutionists was a fatal strategy. "All conservatism stands weak over against radicalism, with which it agrees in principle. He who fully accepts the theory of development in the sensual observable world cannot dismiss at once and without explanation when spiritual phenomena appear. Even though provisionally a small domain is then set aside for faith, this domain is bound to become ever smaller.... One fortification after another must be sacrificed, one line of defense after another be abandoned, and one concession after another be granted."
In other words, if men may interpret any "data" with a blind eye to Scripture, trusting their own, unaided "wisdom," they will seek to interpret all data in the same way, including religious data. The soul would be treated as just another department of science. Religion would be treated either as a psychological/sociological phenomenon, per Sigmund Freud and William James, et al, or a chemical phenomenon, per Francis Crick and Carl Sagan, et al. If evolution (or, as Bavinck called it, "development") is true, then the only truth, or at least the only knowable truth, is man's truth.
With the Bible being ruled irrelevant to civic ethics, then irrelevant to truth, per se, it just remained for the church to "rule" it irrelevant in the church-which it did. The third component, the capitulation to egalitarianism and evolutionism by the Western church, was swift and pathetic, though, thank God, not entire. Nevertheless, the church was badly wounded, and hardly able to fend off the invasion of the Higher Critical method. The result was the wholesale abandonment of historic orthodoxy in favor of religion baptized at the font of egalitarian, evolutionary Humanism. Creeds were kept in form but emptied of their content. As J. Gresham Machen pointed out, all was retained, but all was denied, because it was retained merely as useful and not as true. Having capitulated to the demands of egalitarians and evolutionists, the church, aided by her handmaiden, pietism, adjusted its vision and narrowed Christ's claims so as to encompass no more than the individual soul. The truth claims of the word of God would now be reduced to "true for me" claims, and would extend no further than my breath. Covenant community cannot thrive in an every-man-for-himself atmosphere.
So strong were our Christian roots, however, that they could not yet be utterly, self-consciously abandoned. But they were now so weakened as to be of use only in slowing the tide, not in turning it. In fact, the church, with some sterling exceptions, got into a canoe and went along for the ride, offering perfunctory resistance by refusing to paddle.
By the end of World War II, the Christianity of our founding was a mere memory. The fourth component, the State, was now quite comfortable in its new role as Messiah. By the '50s it was firmly established as that to which men should look for salvation.
I had an interesting experience last night which made clearer than ever to me the religious character of the State. In the providence of God, we have been taking advantage of an opportunity to minister to a staff member of the mission to the United Nations from a violently anti-Christian, sold-out Marxist nation (discretion dictates that I not mention which one). A few of us were invited to a reception in honor of their leader. The toast to said leader-whose picture was on the wall, flowers lined up on the floor on either side-was all but a hymn bidding all glory, laud and honor to be bestowed upon him. It was like a reading from the Satanic bible. The message was dramatic: Men will either recognize Jesus as King of kings or they will take the glory that belongs to Him and confer it upon themselves, embodied in the State, and will seek all covenant benefits from it.
So also in socialist America: The usurpation of rights which once belonged sovereignly to families would, from the '30s and '40s, proceed apace. If the Bible could not constrain the State, it is foolish to think the Constitution could. Challenges would henceforth be offered only on particulars, no longer on principle. The State would go on to become the largest land-owner, the largest employer, the distributor of welfare, and the guardian of children, as well as their sovereign educator. And the church stayed in the canoe.
With the fifth component, the traditional Christian family, cracking under the pressures, parents felt incompetent to raise children. One wonders how mothers and fathers ever managed! But not to worry. Along comes Dr. Benjamin Spock (of Dutch descent; his family name was originally spelled Spaak), who in 1946 would write a book, Baby and Child Care, that would have a profound influence on America and the world. With the Holy Bible now deemed incompetent in civic ethics, a hindrance in the knowledge enterprise itself, of merely memorial value in the church, and a competitor to the claims of sovereignty by the State, it was a small step to make it irrelevant to the family. And that Spock's book-intentionally or unintentionally-did.
Spock's book was, according to the Associated Press, "the how-to guide for bringing up the baby boom generation." Spock himself was branded "the father of permissiveness." Indeed, in a 1974 interview he said he believed he had gone too far in championing permissive parenthood. But it was too late. While his book would have been ignored in a generation with strong Biblical convictions, it appeared as an example of the wrong medicine at precisely the wrong time. What has often been called "The Parents' Bible," The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) would become the biggest selling book in United States history after the Bible with 50 million copies sold.
...continued in Part 2...
1. It shouldn't be necessary to add, but I fear I must, that there is no implication here that I would countenance race-based slavery at all or that I am advocating a return to slavery, per se. On the contrary, I would see all men free. But freedom is more than a slogan. It has conditions, and those who would be free must abide by them. It is this writer's opinion that there are more slaves in the United States today than there were before 1865; it's just that now we have slaves to a new master, the welfare State. It is one of the tasks of the church to prepare all men for freedom through the Gospel.