Chesterton once commented that a man who does not believe something will fall for anything. The observation certainly holds for societies, and only a blind man could fail to miss that such a necessary gullibility is currently driving our culture. The gullibility is not created by various social pressures; rather, such pressures reveal the gullibility.
For example, one such set of pressures is the problem of immigration. Now the debate over immigration is a complicated one, and my purpose here is not to get involved in that debate. Rather, my point is to show why the debate (on all sides) can be so acrimonious. One of the central reasons is that our receiving culture no longer has a principle of assimilation, for the simple reason that it has no set principles at all. In a previous time, we were able to receive immigrants in an orderly fashion because we had some defined principle of assimilation, and those who came did so in order to be assimilated according to that principle. This is no longer the case. A people or culture without core principles will pay lip service to tolerance only as long as it is easy to do so. But when difficulties arise, the tolerance can turn vicious overnight. Of course we still want to say we have a guiding principle, which is to say “democracy.” It sounds good. But to use Mencken’s phrase, democracy is simply the method whereby we determine truth by counting noses and promulgate the results afterward with a club. Or, as one university professor has memorably put it, democracy is two coyotes and one sheep deciding what to have for lunch. In this sense, democracy is nothing but the tyrannical regime of King Numbers. The principle is that a majority can set aside all the principles.
For our fathers, freedom used to mean liberty under law. Because there was a basis for the law, there was also a basis for the liberty. But now, with all due respect to the late Janis Joplin, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. A central part of our present turmoil is found in our widespread cultural rejection of a confessional and evangelical faith. This began almost two centuries ago, when we turned away from the objective truth of the Reformed faith, and turned aside to a new and spontaneous experiential faith. The exact nature of the religious experiences did not really matter that much — whatever works for you, whatever the pleasant sensation was there buzzing behind your eyes and between your ears.
The wholesale rejection of this older reformational worldview began in our nation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the resulting darkness came with a gradual intervening twilight; it was not the kind of darkness that comes to a room when someone hits the light switch. When the prodigal son ran off and began spending his inheritance, he did not find himself broke after five minutes of wasting money. When the inheritance is considerable, as ours was, some considerable time may elapse before the checks start to bounce. To continue the analogy, our nation began with an enormous amount of what might be called Reformation capital. We spent all our principles, and now, here we are. We will fall for anything.
Because Reformed thinkers understand that a sovereign God exercises that sovereignty over everything, they have a basis for worldview analysis in the light of Scripture. They may address economics, immigration, education, history, and so forth, all from a biblical foundation. Now of course this creates a temptation which encourages a pragmatic return to Reformed theology because it can “get us out of this fix.” Down through the centuries, civil leaders have frequently turned to the church in search of some prop for the existing status quo order. Men and women who love Jesus Christ must never consent to a Machiavellan adoption of a Christian worldview. We believe as we do because it is true, not because it might help. At the same time, the circumstances of the prodigal son turned him back to the truth, back to his father. Pig food can make one begin to think profitably. So as we look at the cultural pig food surrounding us, it ought to drive us to meditation. What are the biblical principles for cultural order and stability?
We have been propagandized well. Some readers may have reacted to the earlier treatment of the word democracy. Don’t our boys in the military fight for democracy? Is not our foreign policy based on the establishment of democracies around the globe? Is not tyranny the opposite of democracy? But the founding fathers of our nation, well-trained in the older more Calvinistic ways of thought, rejected democracy as a form of government. It was a form of government calculated to make them wake up in the middle of the night, sweating. They wanted, rather, a republic, and in this desire showed their Reformation heritage.
What is the difference between a democracy and a republic? Our country developed along republican lines simply because generations of Protestants were experienced citizens in the commonwealth of the church. They were accustomed to hear the preaching of covenant theology, which is representative theology, and which leads inexorably to the practice of representative government. Representative government is the defining heart of a republic. A republic is conducive to liberty, and our fathers gave us a republic because they were the heirs of reformational thinking. So must we be. Those of us who want a return to liberty must also desire the tree on which such liberty grows.
Now of course the point is not immigration, or democracy, or a host of any other issues. Rather the point is what it takes to restore cultural backbone — the faith of our fathers.