The Danger of Christianity to Secularism

By Rod Hemphill
1/26/07

Back in November 2006, there was a lot of flack regarding an NBC special in which Madonna, wearing a crown of thorns, was to be suspended on a cross in a mock crucifixion. At the same time, NBC was stripping the scripture references from the TV version of Veggie Tales. Since then (and long before too) the rights of Christians have been flagrantly violated under the misperception that prayer and prayer clubs in schools are prohibited by the U.S. Constitution, as supposedly are any religious displays in public places, "under God" being part of the Pledge of Allegiance, crèche displays and carols at Christmas, and on and on.

Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship has demonstrated tremendous success in its program to rehabilitate volunteer convicts on Christian principles, in contrast to the abject failure of all secular and governmental programs. Under the governmental programs, most all released prisoners commit more crimes and are returned to prison versus the re-incarceration of very few graduates of Prison Fellowship's program. Yet governmental agencies are shutting down Prison Fellowship programs because they are religiously based, while at the same time they bend over backwards to protect the religious rights and not offend prisoners whose religious faith is Wahhabism -the radicalized version of Islam which provides a religious foundation to Islamist terrorism.

While there may some exceptions, many of America's school textbooks have been stripped of all references to the positive influences Christianity has had on the founding and history of our nation, and any references to Christianity which are mentioned are misrepresented in a negative light. The religious faith which was such an important part of the life and thinking of the founding fathers and the creation of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution is ignored, and even the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of governmental non-involvement in the religious life of the people has been perverted to provide a basis for ridding religion from public life, in effect making government hostile to religion.

One TV news program reported on some secularists who are saying that Christianity is a bigger danger to America than is terrorism. While this may be from the fringe Leftists of American society, both America's TV and print media continue to treat the various religions with tolerance, if not some respect . . . except Christianity, that is.

And now the media's bias against Christianity is in the news again. The media and secularism in general have been holding "open season" on Christians and their faith . . . probably because, as part of the secularist establishment, they despise Christianity and its moral strictures and orthodoxy's refusal to accommodate their pagan and destructive philosophy of relativism, and have noticed modern Christianity's history of allowing those infected with the secularist spirit to nibble away at Christian values, restrict and violate the rights of Christians, and pervert common decency into an untenable counterfeit known as "political correctness," all with scarcely a murmur from the Christian community.

It's only recently that American Christianity has started standing up to the obscenities and injustices of the secularists and challenging them in the courts, in the media, and on the internet. But we gave up a lot of territory before we began to rise to the fight, and now that we have allowed the secularist cancer to become entrenched, it's going to be a long and nasty fight to restore common decency and the values which create and maintain a healthy society to our culture, and to demonstrate convincingly to the American people how these agenda-driven secularists control and manipulate the basic institutions of our society in attempting to bend reality to fit their desires, in contrast to the laws of reality --which are the only laws that work in this world.

But if we've given them years of latitude to wreak their havoc on the American (and European) people, they have given us that many years of evidence of the utter failure and incompetence of their value systems, and the fact that although they may redefine "reality," reality is God's creation and in the end, they have not changed it at all. Reality is just the way things are, and not what they might redefine it to be. Reality is God's anvil upon which the laws of life in this world are hammered out. And those who rebel against this reality don't break these laws --they only break themselves upon this anvil of reality.

Their failure is seen in the lives and families they have led astray and devastated in the process, and their growing desperation is seen in their marrying pseudoscientific and other scientifically unsupportable claims to actual science and presenting them with no distinction as to where the science ends and their presuppositions and personal agendas begin. It's seen in their need to control and manipulate the news media to their favor and to the exclusion or a biased version of news otherwise favorable to Christians. It's seen in their need to squelch all contrary opinion in the universities, which is ostensibly one place where all ideas are supposed to be free to be considered on their merits. It is conspicuous in their inability to prove their position logically or scientifically, which is especially evident every time they resort instead to ad hominems, shouting down their opposition, denying equal access to the media, refusing to even admit the problems that exist in their theories as they are taught in our schools, and in insisting upon training students in their views only and intimidating or punishing dissenters from their points of view, instead of training students to examine all the evidence, to think critically, and come to their own independent conclusions; and on and on it goes.

The secularists insist that the Bible is a book of mythology and religious propaganda, but the fact is that the Bible insists on people being rational, reasoning beings, and it was this Biblical idea impacting the pagan societies that led the world out of its mythologies and superstitions by teaching that this world operates according to rational, predictable laws of reality instead of the capricious whims of the gods, and it was only out of this understanding that true science was finally able to emerge.

The Bible exhorts us to be able to give an answer to everyone who asks us for a reason for the hope that lives within us (1 Peter 3.15). And part of this answer involves the logic of reality (against the fallacies of philosophical and moral relativism), and the findings of science --including the confirmed and valid findings even of atheistic scientists, some of whom admit that their findings seem to necessarily point toward a Creator, although being atheists, they hope (against all reason and probability) to some day discover some other explanation.

What this means is that even though the secularists try to frame the argument by positioning religion as being of (unsubstantiated) faith whereas science is of fact and reason, the exact opposite is the actual case. That is, faith is always based upon a sufficiency of evidence, without which it is not faith, but presumption or superstition. Moreover, faith is supported by factual scientific discoveries, which discoveries tend to disprove the false theories of secularism. And therefore, far from faith being opposed by science, science (including also archaeology and history) is actually the friend of faith in God. It is the secularist, not the believer, who trembles when the facts are known and validated because many of the secularist's favorite theories are not actually, or are insufficiently based on proven, demonstrable facts. This is so definite that those who think otherwise must surely be ignorant of all of the facts, or have misinterpreted the facts in such a way that their interpretation cannot withstand scrutiny, or in some cases, they even admit to being determined to believe in the secularist way regardless of the facts.

The secularists insist that people of faith are superstitious, hung up on antiquated morals and intolerant of those who disagree with them. But it becomes immediately apparent to anybody who cares to observe the scene objectively that cultures and individuals who are characterized by Biblical values (even if they are unaware that their values correspond to the Biblical values) are healthier, more tolerant and inclusive, more trustworthy and stable and more desirable to be around than those cultures and individuals whose values are the self-serving values of secularism, which cultures and individuals have considerably more problems, bad attitudes, intolerance and the problems and dysfunctions which attend those invalid values.

This is not to say that there are no virtuous atheists or Christians who are real jerks. But it's not whether a person calls himself a Christian or an atheist that determines what he is. The kind of life a person lives is determined by the values which that person actually subscribes to. These values give guidance to one's life and control his attitudes and behavior. Taken together, we call a person's value system his "world view" or his philosophy of life. Everybody has one, and part of the Christian's calling is not just to live from within the Biblical values (and in living them, be demonstrating their validity), but to be persuading the world around him that these are the right values, the values that make sense, the values that actually work, and that our culture must return to them because the disintegration of our culture, the increase of all the ills of our society, the increasing coarseness and vulgarity of society, all parallel our society's abandonment of Biblical values and the adoption of those self-serving values which permit or excite an individual's more base desires, but the end thereof is disintegration of the person and his relationships, defeatism and depression. The liberty the illicit values promise is a vapor which is replaced by a growing sense of lostness, purposelessness, and varying degrees of dysfunction. An example of this is given in the article referenced at the end of this commentary.

Anyway, the bottom line of all this is that Christian faith (not secularism) is the faith of reality. And that if we do things according to God's laws of reality, we get results; if we compromise or try to replace those laws with some more to our liking, we get consequences. The laws of morality and righteousness are woven into the fabric of this universe as surely as the physical law of gravity! Since this is the way it is, the values of reality and right relationships should be embraced by all people, not just by people of faith, simply because these are the values that build up a society instead of tearing it apart, these are the values that enable individuals to have healthier, happier, more stable lives. These are the only values that work! It's demonstrated in the history of any society, in the lives of any group of people, and it will prove to be so in your life too. It's just the way it is!

And since a genuinely Christian way is the acceptance of reality, and all forms of secularism are based in a pretended "reality," the secularist establishment is already growing more desperate and vicious as more and more people of Christian faith rise up and expose the secularist values and teachings for the shallow perverted nonsense that it is.

Maybe those far out secularists are right after all: Christianity is a bigger danger to [a secularist] America than is terrorism. They pushed too far. The sleeping giant is awakened.

Referenced article: BreakPoint.org

Other Articles by Rod:
Critique of the Da Vinci Code
Seasons of Life
The Tomb of Jesus. . . and Mary, and Son Joseph?
On Understanding the Trinity
On Celibacy and Marriage

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