These days it seems that nonsense and silliness have more than their share of the headlines. If you haven’t followed the moral indignation of the Left regarding the 2012 placement of a privately-funded monument depicting the Ten Commandments on Oklahoma’s State Capitol grounds, then you probably haven’t heard of Baphomet. Baphomet is a supposed depiction of Satan, a goat-headed figure with horns, wings, and a long beard sitting on a pentagram-shaped throne surrounded by smiling children. The New York-based Satanic Temple has proposed to erect a statue of Baphomet on the Capitol’s grounds in response to the erection of the Ten Commandments monument which a Satanic Temple spokesman says opened the door for placement of their statue on the property. [1]
But sometimes a pesky cultural rash evidenced by an overabundance of nonsense and silliness (e.g., the Baphomet statue) is merely a symptom of a more serious disease that is attacking the culture’s central nervous system—its central cultural vision. A culture’s central cultural vision develops over time as an expression of the collective worldviews of its citizens which create a pattern, design, or structure that fits together in a particular way to explain the world. This explanation of order generally must have a coherence or consistency to give that society orientation and direction for living life. The central vision of a culture reflects its citizens’ values, those things and ideals it considers worth fighting for. Healthy cultures become diseased and decline for two reasons. First, a culture declines and ultimately fails as it loses it cohesiveness or ability to unify its citizenry. Second, even if a culture maintains unity and cohesiveness, its vision of order needed to answer the basic questions of life must over the longer term be based on truth.
In America, the central cultural vision of the Founders and the American colonists before them was based on the principles of biblical Christianity. However, in spite of voluminous historical evidence from the colonial period and founding era, secularists and humanists deny the special role that Christianity played in America’s founding.
A popular culture that misreads and wars against the validity of a morally sound central cultural vision will either be destroyed or cause that society to disintegrate. That is happening in America. The post-Christian and post-modern worldviews misread and are warring against the morally sound central cultural vision upon which the nation was founded, that is, the principles flowing from the biblical Christianity.
Due to rampant radical egalitarianism, surgically precise efforts to separate church and state, and a growing humanistic worldview, all evidence of our Christian cultural heritage is being swept from America and its institutions. Even our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of religion and speech are no longer sacrosanct from such assaults.
America’s central cultural vision built upon biblical Christianity is in danger of utter removal because of a loss of an understanding of the uniqueness of its worth, the loss of America’s ability to exclude those things which strike at the heart of its central cultural vision, and America’s inability to distinguish that which counts for much and that which counts for little. With the steady dismantling and removal of the central cultural vision upon which the nation was founded, America is staggering in a moral stupor as it drinks the poison of humanism with its disintegrating notions of the autonomous individual, relativism, radical egalitarianism, progressivism, and denial of a supreme being. [2]
Without its central cultural vision firmly anchored in transcendent unchanging biblical truth, America will continue its cultural drift to oblivion in a sea of competing voices, each clamoring for recognition of their particular brand of truth. The Baphomet statue controversy is one more fitting symbol of America’s cultural decline because of its loss of cohesion and flight from transcendent truth. If there is doubt about this assessment, one needs only to look at Baphomet’s competitors who also want space for a monument on the Capitol grounds: a Hindu leader in Nevada, an animal rights group, and the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. [3]
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Sean Murphy, “Satanists want Baphomet statue in Oklahoma,” 3NEWS, January 7, 2014. http://www.3news.co.nz/Satanists-want-Baphomet-statue-in-Oklahoma/tabid/417/articleID/327468/Default.aspx (accessed May 6, 2014).
[2] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods-Humanism and Christianity-The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishing, 2011), pp. 404-405.
[3] Murphy, “Satanists want Baphomet statue in Oklahoma.”
