Introduction
It is an old error, and an old trick, to blame the straight road for the behavior of those who veered off it. This is like blaming a math class for those who flunked out of it. And while there are times when an orthodox math class had a terrible teacher, and consequently shares some of the responsibility, it is still not the part of wisdom to blame the straight for those who bend it crooked.
Some Roman Catholic apologists will want to take what I acknowledge here below and say that Protestantism is essentially to blame for the secularism we see around us. But this is the post hoc fallacy—after this, therefore because of this. If that reasoning were sound we could say that the Roman church was the cause of the Reformation. Which, come to think of it, it was. Why isn’t that the post hoc fallacy? Another subject for another time.
For the present, I do want to argue that secularism, our current spiritual disease, is a Protestant heresy. Further, I want to argue that America was founded as a uniquely Protestant nation, and consequently has been the place where this particular heresy has taken the deepest root. This is not the fault of the Protestant faith itself, as some would have it, but it is the responsibility of Protestant ministers to know something about the history of this, and to be apprised of how this deadly temptation works.
If you are a guide in the mountains, you should know where the cliff edges are. If you are a pilot at sea, you need to understand where the reefs are. If you are a packer of parachutes, you should know which three mistakes are the most deadly ones.
And if you are a Protestant minister, you should understand how the secularists came in to spy out our liberty, and how they turned it over to license.
First, an Old Indictment Reapplied
If this section seems to you as though I am changing the subject, you can jump down and read the rest of the post first, and then come back to this section. It should be obvious by that point how everything hangs together.
The prophet Jeremiah had a lot to say to his countrymen, and as I was reading Jeremiah again recently, I was struck with how similar all forms of backsliding are. The temptations, the lies, the excuses, the warnings . . . certain things don’t change.
Our leaders have forsaken God (Jer. 1:16). But what iniquity did we find in Him that would justify such an abandonment (Jer. 2:5)? He established our feet in a beautiful land—where and how did He wrong us in this? So we decided to cash in our glory, making a bad trade on the exchange and coming away with no profit at all (Jer. 2:11). As the number of our cities increased, so also did the number of our gods (Jer. 2:28). At first our slippage was furtive, but over time we became shameless about it all, like a whore’s forehead (Jer. 3:3). Our politicians were willing to invoke the name of God, in a “God bless the red, white, and blue” sort of way, but this was just turning to the Lord feignedly (Jer. 3:10). God’s response to us has therefore been blunt—heal your backslidings (Jer. 3:22). What He wants is for us to get our abominations out of His sight, and the only place where such iniquities can be hidden from His sight would be under the blood of Christ (Jer. 4:1). But instead, we have preferred to become sottish children (Jer. 4:22). Fed to the full, we veered off into adulteries—porn sites, whorehouses, and our neighbors’ beds (Jer. 5:7). An ominous sign for us will be when we hear our streets filling up with languages we don’t understand (Jer. 5:15). And yet our rebellious heart has still revolted and gone (Jer. 5:23). Religious leaders, priests, ministers, mavens . . . they all prophesy falsely, and the people eat it up (Jer. 5:31). Every one is given over to covetousness (Jer. 6:13). The only way out is to return to the old paths, for it is only there that we will find rest for our souls (Jer. 6:16)—from which we should understand that the old paths bring us back under the yoke of Christ (Matt. 11: 29). Instead of being soft before the Lord, we are just brass and iron (Jer. 6:28). If we amend our ways and doings, we may continue to dwell in this place (Jer. 7:3), but no guarantees otherwise. Our religion is given over to hucksters; we have made the house of the Lord into a thieves’ kitchen (Jer. 7:11). A nation of know-it-alls, we do not receive correction, not even a little bit (Jer. 7:28). We are given over to perpetual backsliding (Jer. 8: 5). When forced to confront a wound, we heal it lightly, saying “peace” when there is none (Jer. 8:11). There truly is no balm in Gilead (Jer. 8:22). We chase after all our iniquities until we are out of breath from the running (Jer.. 9:5). Death has come up to our windows, and is peering in at us now (Jer. 9:21). We turn to the external forms of religion, praying to pictures and statues, to anything that has no breath in them (Jer. 10:14). Our pastors have all become brutish (Jer. 10:21). These pastors, entrusted with great responsibilities, have actually destroyed the Lord’s vineyard (Jer. 12:10). But a nation that will not obey the Lord will be plucked up and destroyed soon enough (Jer. 12:17).
And when I say that certain things don’t change, it is important to note that the entire arc does not change.
The Watchdogs That Didn’t Bark
Secularism is not a workable common sense solution for getting along in a pluralistic society. Secularism is simply apostasy and godlessness. And the fact that there are numerous Protestant theologians and ministers who are privately orthodox, and who would never themselves burn incense to the Queen of heaven on their own rooftops, but who nevertheless publicly argue for a “neutral” public square illustrates—as few other things could illustrate—that the heresy of secularism has made deep inroads among us. Nothing else can account for such confusion.
The motives for these compromises are mixed and varied. For some it is just inertia, teaching what they have been taught. For others it is simple cowardice. They have a mortgage and a timid wife, and cannot afford to be tagged as a “Christian nationalist.” For others it is an intellectual inability to follow the simplest of arguments—and the impossibility of neutrality is the simplest of arguments. In most cases, this inability to track with the argument has a moral component to it. For others it is leaving room in the budget for private lusts.
How the Lie Worked
Protestant America was the first instantiation of what I have been calling mere Christendom. When the Constitution was drafted and ratified, it was a compact between thirteen distinct Christian states. With some of them, those with established state churches, the Christianity was explicit and specific (e.g. Connecticut). With others, the Christianity was broader and generic (e.g. South Carolina). With the one outlier, the Christianity was implicit (e.g. Rhode Island).
Now these different states were all different flavors of ice cream, but they came together and what they established was an ice cream shop. There was an essential coherence between what was in each cartoon, and what was on the sign outside. They had different flavors of ice cream, sure, but it was all ice cream. The genus and species line-up made sense. Your pre-school kid could easily understand that the 31 flavors at Baskin Robbins were all, nonetheless, ice cream. It wasn’t complicated.
And it was an ice cream shop, not a vanilla or a chocolate mint shop. The particular flavors were in the states. The shop as a whole was a mere Christian shop.
It all made sense in a way that it would not have made sense if they were selling three flavors of ice cream, a couple of Thai dishes with noodles, gluten free cookies, beef jerky, 24-packs of Coors lite, and little plastic packets of gummy bears. An ice cream shop is not the same thing as a convenience store, and a convenience store is not the same thing as an ice cream shop.
We began with a particular faith (Protestant Christianity, the ice cream). As the nation grew, pressure mounted to expand the offerings (Catholic gelato). Eventually some began to argue that it shouldn’t be an ice cream store at all, but rather an anything-you-can-put-in-your-mouth store. Who’s to say what ice cream really is anyway? That way the skeptics could have their black licorice. But now, nearing the end of the road, we have gotten ourselves to the point where a Supreme Court justice doesn’t know what “food” is, not being a nutritionist, and we have teachers in the government schools who are trying to make the kids swallow down brass carpet tacks.
All of this is the result of a deliberate muddling of what is meant by genus and species, coupled with a refusal to acknowledge that there are in fact profound societal differences between various genuses—Christianity and Islam, and Hinduism, and so on. We have numerous ministers today who would completely fail a “one of these is not like the others” test.
Let’s Make This Simple
Here is the thought experiment. Let us presuppose an absolute “worldview neutrality” set up. Let’s flatten everything. The government is truly neutral. The clerk behind the desk has been specifically trained to have no dog in the fight, whatever fight it is. The behavior of all our government institutions, and the officials who staff them, makes no distinction whatever between Christians, Muslims, or Melanesian frog worshipers. The clerk behind the counter says “equal footing” is his middle name. Okay, got it?
So how many wives do we get?
You do know that our current legal requirement of monogamy is decidedly favoring the Christian understanding of marriage, and is consequently an instantiation of hate, don’t you? Don’t you?
The Muslims say you get up to four. And as I pointed out years ago in my somewhat prescient debate with Andrew Sullivan, our current requirement that marriage be limited to two is a clear form of institutional bigotry, aimed directly at the Bs in the LGBTQ+++ people. Excuse me, the MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ people. Hard to keep up these days. But let’s just focus on our societal hatred of the Bs for now.
A B is a bisexual, and a bisexual is someone who is attracted to both sexes. Now there are two of those sexes, which means that if a B is to get married, he (or she) must pick one, and exclude the other one. If a B guy picks a woman, then he has no lawful marital way to express his sexual interest in men. Oh, the perfidy! Our bigoted society has in effect said to him that if he wants to express himself in that way, it must be adulterous. He needs to have an affair. We have mandated that the Bs have to cheat. But why do the Ls and the Gs get to express their sexuality in marriage, but the Bs don’t get to?
Meanwhile, the polyamorists want the liberty to form as big a daisy chain as they want.
If you try to solve this, as I believe Andrew Sullivan tried to, by saying that “traditionally” we have limited marriage to two people, our reply is brusque. Some might even interpret it as caustic. Tradition? Who cares about that anymore?
The Mistake Was Understandable
To say that this mistake was understandable is not to say that it was excusable. It was inexcusable. But fortunately, the words inexcusable and unforgivable are not synonyms. What cannot and should not not be excused can nevertheless be forgiven. For more on that, return to the section above where we were reprising Jeremiah.
But it was understandable. The early American republic had hammered out a way for Methodists, and Baptists, and Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, and Episcopalians, and so on, to get along with each other. The folks in these traditions knew very little about the internal workings of these other denominations, but they found that when they came together in the legislature that they all belonged to the same genus. When it came to challenging social issues, there was a general consensus. Abortion on demand was unthinkable, for example. Obergefell was equally unthinkable. And even on the vexed issue of slavery, where there was division and war, there was still a broad consensus among believers about how slaves, if there were to be slaves, should be treated—as can be seen by comparing Hodge in the north and Dabney in the south.
After that war, as time went on, and people were minding their own business, and other people were going to sleep at the switch, the demographic make-up of America began to change radically. Some of it was the apostasy of the mainline denominations and some of it was the importation of immigrants from all over tarnation. To the extent Christians were aware of the formation of these other subcultures, they did not know about the internal workings of them either. But they were able to look around and see that the sky was still blue and the grass was still green.
I have heard somewhere that there is a character in one of Hemingway’s stories who was asked how he went bankrupt. His answer was ‘first gradually, and then suddenly.” It was the same thing here. At first everything seemed the same . . . until the day when it suddenly went different. Entirely different.
And so we come to the position that I now hold, the position that has me labeled in some quarters as something of an extremist. My position is that a small box of brass carpet tacks, regardless of how small, is not the same thing as ice cream. And, as Luther once put it, here I stand.