The remarkable strength and vitality of the American church from its very beginning with the Pilgrims in 1620 until the mid-nineteenth century can be attributed to its success in resisting Satan’s two-fold attack that has plagued the church throughout its history since its birth 2000 years ago. The first attack comes from within through attempts to corrupt the doctrinal truths of the Bible and undermine unity within the body of Christ. The second attack arises from without through the assimilation and accommodation of worldliness in the church including the contra-biblical relationships between the church and state.
The humanistic spirit of the world became a cultural force that swept over the American Beulah Land during the last half of the nineteenth century. The enormous changes that occurred in the six decades between 1870 and 1930 profoundly transformed the way Americans thought and acted in all spheres of American life. By 1870 the nation had been guided for 250 years by a central cultural vision infused with the collective Judeo-Christian worldviews of the great majority of Americans since the Pilgrims undertook to establish a colony “…for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith…”[1] Protestant cultural authority was at its peak in 1870, but a brief sixty years later it had been relegated to the shadows within every institution of American life, despairing of approval and hoping only for an occasional hint of recognition from the new masters of American culture. The once prevailing Christian Protestant dominion had surrendered substantially all of its social power, institutional influence, and cultural authority and did so without much of a whimper. For the first time in American history a vast schism had developed between the religious and secular. How did this tragedy happen? Was it accidental or planned?
Who were the humanist secularizers and what was their agenda?
Christian Smith edited a book titled The Secular Revolution in which he and other authors describe the secularization of American public life. In the Preface of the book Smith identifies the instigators and their motives with regard to the enormous transfer of cultural power in America between 1870 and 1930.
…American public life was secularized by groups of rising scientific, academic, and literary intellectuals whose upward mobility—made possible by expanding industrial capitalism and an enlarging state—was obstructed by the Protestant establishment. Seeking to increase their own cultural authority and class autonomy—and to reinforce their own intellectual identities—these knowledge elites struggled to displace Protestantism’s authority and to advance themselves as new, alternative cultural authorities…What these secularizers were actually pursuing was not primarily a neutral public sphere, but a reconstructed moral order which would increase their own group status, autonomy, authority, and eventually income.[2] [emphasis added]
Smith divides these secularizing activists into two groups: intellectual elites who were members of the knowledge class (the scientific, academic, and literary intelligentsia of their day) and the romantic intellectuals comprised mostly of journalists, independent writers, and artists. The secularizing activists were found in many different groups and at different time periods during the six decades under discussion and were not all alike. Generally, they tended to be skeptical, free-thinking, antagonistic toward traditional authority and conventions, and sought the privatization or extinction of religion. But regardless of their individual motivations and priorities, they had all had drunk deeply from the well of the Enlightenment philosophies of humanism, materialism, positivism, and naturalism.[3]
What were the humanist secularizers assumptions and tactics?
A second question arises as to how these secularizing activists were so successful in wresting control of the culture from the Protestant establishments. Smith notes seven contributors to the secularization process.
• The source of all real knowledge is assumed to the product of science as defined by the aforementioned Enlightenment philosophies of humanism, materialism, positivism, and naturalism. Religion was no longer thought of as having a role in defining “true knowledge.” It had become irrelevant except for the supernatural, personal preferences, and values, all of which were outside of science and the production of new knowledge.
• Institutions of higher education began favoring “objective,” a-religious, and irreligious concepts of knowledge and marginalized religious concerns of morality and values.
• Mass primary and secondary education was transformed into a supposedly “neutral” arena which banished any discussion or practice of religious matters.
• The guardianship of public culture was removed from Protestant to secular hands as liberal political theory privatized religion and made it irrelevant to public deliberation.
• In the judicial sphere, secularists erected a strict wall of separation in which religion no longer had a voice in defining and guiding normal human relations as they involved the state.
• Secularists established a “naturalistic, psychologized model of human personhood” to give a new understanding of the human self and his care. The Protestant conception of man and his spiritual and moral health were banished as credentialed therapists and psychologists replaced the clergy in defining the nature of man.
• The centralization of corporately-owned print broadcast media caused a move away from religion-friendly reporting practices to a supposedly “objective” and “neutral” brand of journalism. As a consequence, religious and other perspectives oriented towards objective truth and biblical values were marginalized.[4]
Why were the humanist secularizers so successful in such a short period of time?
We have spoken of the Protestant domination of American life that had been achieved by the middle of the nineteenth century. Perhaps a more accurate description is the Protestant domination of American life by the evangelical populist churches, particularly the Methodists and Baptists which together had approximately fifty-five percent of all adherents to the Christian religion in the United States by 1850.[5] One may rightly ask how the secularist steamroller so easily and completely flattened 250 years of Protestant cultural supremacy in a relatively short span of sixty years between 1870 and 1930.
The American church following the end of the Civil War was at the height of its power and authority but was ignorant of and unprepared for the spirit of the world about to invade, overwhelm, and subdue it and the culture. The attack on the American church came from without in the form of various Enlightenment philosophies centered on humanism which rapidly captured the institutions of American life. Because the church did not recognize the spirit of the world in its generation, it was unprepared and failed to adequately defend the faith and American culture for which it was responsible.
The big lie: Duality of truth
The spirit of the world is a deceptive, lying spirit. When Satan attempts to deceive someone who is familiar with the truth, he chooses a more subtle attack in which a little truth is mixed with the lie to make it more palatable. Christian America of the 1870s revered the Bible and its truth and would not easily relinquish its beliefs in favor of an obvious lie. Satan chose to convince Christians that truth did not flow from a single authority but that there were two sources of truth—religious truth and all other (secular) truth newly revealed in an enlightened age of science and reason. In the secular segment were matters of the brain in which science and reason were located. These truths were considered to be public truth, objective by nature, and applied to everyone. The truths derived from science and human reason must be applied to the physical sciences, social sciences, politics, economics, and all other segments in the public life. The religious half of humanism’s dichotomy of truth was limited to matters of the heart in which its truths are oriented to the supernatural, are religiously based, and involve issues of value and personal morality. These include matters that are considered to be personal beliefs, non-rational, subjective, and have no basis in fact in the natural world and therefore privatized which is to say they have no voice in the affairs of the other spheres of American life.[6]
The church accommodates or ignores the big lie
Christianity’s declaration is and always has been that it is total truth—a unified and integrated claim about all reality. But in the early twentieth century, both liberal and conservative branches of the evangelical church embraced different elements of the concept of a dichotomous truth. On the one hand, liberal churches readily embraced the dichotomy of truth. The remaining conservative evangelical churches chose to ignore the big lie promoting a dichotomy of truth and isolated themselves from the culture at large.
Even though conservative evangelical churches ignored the big lie and withdrew from the culture at large, Nancy Pearcey convincingly presents a strong case that certain characteristics, trends, and patterns within the populist or conservative evangelical church existing from colonial times caused them to unconsciously accept certain elements of the humanistic heart/brain dichotomy of truth in which the religious realm is limited (and also trivialized) to matters of value and private preference.[7] As a consequence, the evangelical church has become powerless and lethargic because it does not recognize and understand the humanistic spirit of the world that continues to prevail in America since the 1870s. This has occurred because of a growing ignorance among evangelicals of Bible knowledge, the failure to challenge a hostile culture, and because of an accommodation of the spirit of the world within the churches.
One of the central purposes of this book is to expose the prevailing spirit of the world that has invaded the church. Only when the church understands the nature of the enemy and his attacks can it mount an adequate defense of the faith. This understanding will come only when the church recognizes the prevailing spirit of the world at work in the present generation. John warns against the world and what it has to offer, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the father but is of the world.” [1 John 2:15-16. RSV] Here we see the spirit of the world is centered on self, pride, power, human wisdom, fleshly desires, and anything else that stands against God, the Bible’s teachings, and His people.
In all of church history the spirit of the world has been its arch-nemesis whether the assaults came from within or without. Satan is the cunning master of deceit and temptation and continually refashions the spirit of the world so that it will appear as a new thing to be unconsciously accommodated and absorbed by the less vigilant of each generation. But, the spirit of the world remains unchanged beneath a shroud of lies and deceit. Whether absorbed by the church or an individual, it is similar to a narcotic that entices and thrills for a season but eventually enslaves and kills. Pearcey cut to the heart of the matter when she said that Christians are called to resist the spirit of the world but to do so we must first recognize the form it takes in our present day.[5] If the church is to survive and once again become a cultural force in America, the church body and its leadership as well as individual Christians must recognize and resist the spirit of the world in whatever form it takes in the church and in the culture at large.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Henry Steele Commager, ed., “Mayflower Compact,” Documents of American History, Vol. 1 to 1865, (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1934), p. 15-16.
[2] Christian Smith, “Introduction,” The Secular Revolution, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), p. 27.
[3] Ibid., pp. 1, 33-34.
[4] Ibid., p. 3.
[5] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 259.
[6] Ibid., pp. 20-21.
[7] Ibid., pp. 119, 255.
[8] Ibid., p. 118.
