And I Will Take My Ultimate on the Side

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I want to write about religious liberty, and in order to do that I must first address the myth of neutrality. But I don’t really want to address the myth of neutrality, but rather the demented, off-the-chain, sociopathic, deranged, vacuous, and sure-to-let-you-down-later-today opium dream of neutrality.

Neutrality is, like, not a thing. It does not exist. It is a lie, pretending to exist. It is an incoherent rambling lie. It is a lie unshaven and with its shirt untucked, and is now gone downtown panhandling for spare change. If you can spare a quarter, he can get all of us into a secular paradise. Finally. The dream is so near, almost within our grasp. We just need to deal with these fundamentalists—we do not deign to call them theocrats. They are theocranks.schaeffer-meme

Okay, enough with that. I am having so much fun somebody might think I am a Calvinist.

Secularism, with its vaunted religious neutrality, from which they pretend to extract a robust doctrine of religious neutrality, has certain dogmatic concerns. Secularism has certain operational definitions of man, society, choice, purpose, liberty, value and meaning. It has operational definitions of other crucial stuff as well, but you get the drift. These definitions together constitute a worldview, with dogmatic content, dogmatic content that excludes the dogmatic content of religions and/or worldviews that differ. Put another way, secularism is a worldview shop competing for market share, all while pretending to be the owner of the entire mall. The referee in our big worldview game—turns out—is one of the players. He is not disinterested.

What the secularist calls religious liberty is actually a thin oak veneer that misrepresents the particle board plank made up of countless secular choices and industrial glue. He—for the time being—lets us choose our church, but we have to agree to do so as consumers, the same way we choose our gas stations, clothing outlets, and grocery stores. The secular society provides us with all the neutral necessities, and ultimate truth is an add-on extra.

The cold porridge of neutral secular values is shared by absolutely everyone, or so the story goes, and you then take it home and add your condiments of choice. Hindus add one thing, Muslims another, and Christians another. But how could it have possibly happened that devout Christians could go along with treating the Ancient of Days, the great Jehovah, El Shaddai, the eternal I AM, as a condiment? Quite apart from specifying what exactly went wrong, we can be assured that something did.

Put another way, genuine religious liberty is a religious value, and this means that the only true religious liberty available has to be a function of the true religion. Clearly this should be obvious. If the fruit of religious liberty is true fruit, how could it possibly grow on a false tree?

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ME
ME
7 years ago

Amen! Ouch, a condiment? That is nearly as bad as that moment of conviction I had when a woman praised me for being a good Christian, one who is benign. Benign, meaning not cancerous, so that’s a good thing, but benign also means a harmless tumor, a clump if pointless and ingrown flesh.

Trust me, you don’t want to be a benign tumor within the body of Christ.

"A" dad
"A" dad
7 years ago

“Secularism” appears to have itself confused with our self evident Creator, who endowed us with our inalienable rights.
Here that line from ghost busters always comes in handy;
“Are you a god?”

????

Abigail Smith
Abigail Smith
7 years ago
Reply to  "A" dad

Or, to quote Groundhog Day, “I am not THE God, but I am A god.”

"A" dad
"A" dad
7 years ago
Reply to  Abigail Smith

Them ground hogs is upity ain’t they?
????

Capndweeb
Capndweeb
7 years ago

“Secularism is the religion of the atheist,” said Uncle Screwtape.
(With apologies to C.S. Lewis.)

Zachary Hurt
7 years ago

Pastor Wilson,
I don’t know whether you’ve been following the latest Roy Moore lynching, but it’s a good example of how pernicious the myth of neutrality is. That lie has corroded even the buckle of the Bible Belt.

doug sayers
doug sayers
7 years ago

There certainly was no neutrality among the referees in that Michigan – Ohio State game last Saturday.

jigawatt
jigawatt
7 years ago

Hi RandMan! Good to see you.

Malachi
Malachi
7 years ago

Ah…I see you heard about Chip and Joanna Gaines…

jigawatt
jigawatt
7 years ago
Reply to  Malachi

I think he read RandMan and BJ also.

ashv
ashv
7 years ago

A further discussion of religious liberty (in the form of Cujus regio, ejus religio) as primarily a result of European power politics would be interesting as well.

jillybean
jillybean
7 years ago

If you lived in a nation that was not predominantly Protestant Christian, would you still believe that the only religious liberty worth having is that which is defined by Protestant Christianity? I was looking at a national poll done by Angus Reid in Canada in 2015. When Canadians of all religious backgrounds (or none) were asked to rate their perceptions (positive, neutral, or negative) of 10 religious groups, the results were surprising. While Catholics have 49% viewing them positively and Jews have 39%, evangelical Christians have only 30%–just three points ahead of atheists and Hindus. Wouldn’t it be better for… Read more »

Evan
Evan
7 years ago
Reply to  jillybean

I think “protected by secular law” is false by definition.

bethyada
7 years ago
Reply to  jillybean

I think Doug’s point is that religious freedom is a fruit of a Christian worldview. Secularism is parasitic on Christianity. As such, religious freedom is not a fruit of secularism. It will disappear when it suits the secularists. “We can’t give you freedom of religion when you are so full of hate.”

jillybean
jillybean
7 years ago
Reply to  bethyada

I understand that any liberty given by the government, in the name of a democratic majority, can also be taken away. I understand that a definition of religious liberty arrived at by secular people is, of course, inadequate. That wasn’t exactly my point. If you, as a certain kind of Protestant Christian, are viewed with hostility by the majority of the culture, including the voters, in which you live, you are not going to be able to impose your doctrine of true religious liberty on the people around you. The choice is not: Christian religious liberty or a secular view… Read more »

bethyada
7 years ago
Reply to  jillybean

In as much as systems act justly, regardless of their inconsistency, that is generally a good thing.

Wendell Dávila Helms
Wendell Dávila Helms
7 years ago
Reply to  jillybean

I don’t think we have to reject the protections available to us to make the points Wilson or bethyada are making. First of all, the protections available to us are meaningless when those in power don’t care to respect the meaning. I don’t know anything about Canadian legal documents, but that’s certainly true of the US Constitution. (The inverse is also true: protections not written into the law are created out of words that say not such thing when those in power want to create a new meaning.) Charters offer no protection that those in power don’t care to accept… Read more »

moto hellogoto
moto hellogoto
7 years ago
Reply to  bethyada

truth

"A" dad
"A" dad
7 years ago
Reply to  jillybean

Jilly,
Wilson explains it better here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5j0oy0-KtE&t=36s

While watching, If you close your eyes and think of bears, it might be almost as good as panda porn!

; – )

Matt
Matt
7 years ago

“Secularism” is a poorly defined term. Is the US secularist, religiousist, or some combination of the two? If a combo, how do you distinguish between the two influences?

jillybean
jillybean
7 years ago
Reply to  Matt

I think that “secularist” as used here tends to mean any view that is not rooted in traditional Christian doctrine as defined by American fundamentalist Protestants who have a Reformed interpretation of scripture.

katecho
katecho
7 years ago
Reply to  jillybean

jillybean wrote: I think that “secularist” as used here tends to mean any view that is not rooted in traditional Christian doctrine as defined by American fundamentalist Protestants. jillybean is normally more careful than this. I’m disappointed. While the word “secular” just refers to the temporal, rather than the eternal, the word secularism refers to a specific worldview agenda. The distinction is as important as the distinction between the word feminine, and the word feminism. Secularism is the term invented by atheists (not Christians) to label their own agenda. Secularism is the attempt to approach all areas (not just politics)… Read more »

jillybean
jillybean
7 years ago
Reply to  katecho

You are right, and I was in an irritable frame of mind when I wrote it. It is an important distinction.