110 Sermon Illustrations on Secularism

The Power of Christmas: What it teaches us all, believers and atheists alike.

________

The Battle of Christmas is becoming a major event in the current history of liberty. In city after city in the United States and Europe, a war of sorts is being declared on Jesus Christ. He has been designated PERSONA NON GRATA. In public life, He is officially abolished. European bureaucrats do not even want Christianity mentioned in the new European Constitution, or to have anything to do with the European Commission.

In one of our own fair cities, one may no longer speak of the “Christmas Season” — only of “Sparkle Season.” Elsewhere, in personal greetings the correct phrase is no longer “Merry Christmas” but something more indirect and evasive like “Best wishes of the season.”

What is going on? We seem to be returning to a degree of Christophobia, after a tremendous run of 1,669 open and happy Christmas celebrations since the very first one in A.D. 336 in Rome. After the killing of Christians by the Roman emperors had ceased, and Constantine at last removed the legal impediments to the public expression of Christianity in A.D. 313 (and, incidentally, a few years later fixed the date of Christ's birth on December 25), Christophobia faded, except for the totalitarian banishment of Christianity, and all religion, by the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

Now, in the New Europe, the Italian minister for European affairs was forced to describe the convictions of his personal conscience on homosexual conduct. The EU authorities were not content with two prior assurances from him (in the same interrogation) that he respected the laws and civil rights of homosexuals out of respect for their personal dignity, and would uphold political and civil protections for them. No such questions were asked of Romano Prodi or any other European official. It would be unconstitutional in the United States to impose a religious test for public office. Governmental bodies even in Europe should make no intrusions into the realm of conscience; what counts in a public official is his commitment to the rule of law and faithful protection of civil and political liberties.

THE POWER OF TRUTH

Many Europeans still recall that in 1948, when Communism took over many nations to the East (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and others) and threatened to win elections also in the West (France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere), what saved the latter group was the sudden strong emergence of the Christian Democratic parties, drawing on spiritual resources many centuries old.

Then, some decades later, what saved Central and Eastern Europe from the deadly grip of the Iron Curtain was Solidarnosc, a labor union steeped in Christian principles of liberty and non-violence. Christians and Jews together upheld the priority of the human spirit over the might of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov together celebrated the power of truth over the regime of lies. Theirs was at bottom a Hebrew notion: that one of the names of the Almighty is Truth, and that the power of truth is shattering and irresistible.

As Natan Sharansky reminds us in his new book on the power of freedom, THE CASE FOR DEMOCRACY: THE POWER OF FREEDOM TO OVERCOME TYRANNY AND TERROR, he found strength in identifying himself with his family and their Jewish roots going back some 55 centuries. And in the same process of self-identification many others reopened their inner ties to Jesus Christ.

It is important to plumb the depths of this rediscovery. The KGB prescribed 18 different diets for prisoners, scaled for severe punishment. They also prescribed 20-some degrees of torture. Yet what Sharansky and many others discovered is that under interrogation power passes from the torturer to the tortured. For what the interrogator wants only the one interrogated can give him, and as long as the latter holds on to fidelity to truth all the power is his. For the interrogator wants him to lie. The interrogator tempts him and tries to undermine his resistance by asking relentlessly, “Who will ever know? All those who agree with you have been compromised; they have been told you have confessed to spying; everyone has contempt for you; you are alone; be practical; just tell us what we want to know, no one else will ever see it. Who cares about you anyway? Just end this. For you and for me, just end it.”

But when a person under torture refuses to be unfaithful to what he sees as the light within him, he soon begins to wonder about the nature of that light. If it is part of himself, where is it? When his torturer torments his flesh, emotions, passions, imagination, mind, and even his self-identity, then what on earth is that light? What is he being faithful to? And why does it seem so important, so absolutely vital, to be true to it? Some in this nothingness begin to address that light as a person, whose name is Truth.

And so the chain of reflection runs like this: Truth is not a proposition, but a person — a light, a kind of intelligence, who in the songs of one's childhood is called Lord, or Creator, or Beloved, or Judge, or One-to-be-feared. It is God. For others, not willing to turn to God, the experience of this searing demand for honesty remains as a burning memory, radiating as a sentinel over the rest of their lives.

WHAT IS CAESAR'S

In this way, by a kind of VIA NEGATIVA, were some of the hidden depths — and real strengths — of the Western tradition rediscovered in the 20th century.

What we mean by God is something like irrepressible inner light, which is not quite a part of us, but apart from us, and yet deep within. It is closer to us than we to ourselves.

As Sharansky also notes in passing, although he is not a Christian, Jesus Christ taught humans to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. One does not have to be Christian to take that lesson, or perhaps even to admit that Jesus Christ is the world's greatest teacher of the illegitimacy of totalitarian government. The very idea of everything belonging to Caesar is false in principle. The modern idea of democracy follows in the wake of this teaching of Christ.

In parallel fashion, a leading figure of Enlightenment thought in Italy today, Eugenio Scalfari, the founder and publisher of LA REPUBBLICA, has reminded readers of his own paper that Jesus Christ introduced into modern Europe the idea of the dignity of every single individual, especially the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable. That is what gave meaning to the terms Equality and Fraternity in the triadic slogan of the French Revolution. To come to the aid of the poor is an essential idea of modern democracy.

And this idea, too, springs in great vividness from the Christmas scene of the endangered infant, the poor shepherds, and the humble animals seeking shelter in the stable under the cold stars, celebrated by angels. It is the poor and the humble who are chosen by the Creator for His greatest gifts.

INDIVIDUAL AND CREATOR

There are other ideas key to democracy embedded in the Christmas drama. Here I must acknowledge that I am using “democracy” where in many ways a term such as “republic” would more accurately serve; but contemporary usage almost demands it. One of the most important of these other ideas is the inalienable liberty of individual persons.

And how is this form of liberty rooted in Christmas? Read again Jefferson's argument in his Bill for Religious Liberty and Madison's argument in his REMONSTRANCE. For both, religion is a duty every person owes to his Creator — a self-evident duty but one to be rendered according to the conscience of each individual. And why is that? Because that is the decree of the particular God they have in mind. That God is found in Judaism and Christianity, in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and also Jesus, Who demands to be worshiped “in spirit and in truth.”

This God, as William Penn of the Society of Friends explained, created the world so as to place within it women and men to whom He could offer His friendship. They would be free to accept or reject his friendship, since He wished not slavish friendship but the friendship of the free. “The Light was sent to shine in the darkness, and the darkness grasped it not.” Since He made the universe for friendship, the Creator had to make it free. Freedom lies at the heart of things.

And so, to continue the Jeffersonian and Madisonian argument, each man must make a choice, face-to-face with his Creator. This choice cannot be put off on one's mother or any other person: It is inalienable. The choice cannot be evaded. And if it is the inalienable duty of every individual, then it must also be an inalienable right. This duty belongs to every individual, and no state or jurisdiction can block its accomplishment. This is a duty precedent both in time and in obligation to all others. It is precedent to civil society, and it is precedent to the state. It is rooted in the relation of individual to Creator.

So powerful is this relation that it holds even for those who deny that there is a God. For the Creator leaves it within individuals' freedom to make such a denial. As Jefferson spells out, we humans can bow our knee to nothing else besides evidence, and if the evidence for God in this world does not convince us, so the Almighty has left us free to conclude. It lies in his almighty power to coerce us, but the Holy Author of our religion chose not to do.

And who was this Holy Author? For heroes such as Sharansky it is the God of his fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For the great majority of Americans, the Holy Author of our religion is Jesus Christ, whose birthday the whole nation celebrates on Christmas.

There are many reasons why atheists should (and a good many do) celebrate Christmas. Among these are simple ones, like the color and brightness and good spirits of that time. Other reasons include the contributions this humble child born in a manger has made to the thrust of Western experiments in freedom. These reasons are as easily understood by atheists as by devout Christians (who come in every degree of understanding, or lack thereof). At times they have been BETTER understood by atheists, at least in practice.

OUR INALIENABLE LIBERTY

In any case, knowing that this really is a wonderful life, in which implausible dreams can come true, I have been dreaming that one Christmas soon some atheist will start a movement of “Atheists for Christmas.” The purpose would not be to declare that such atheists are Christians. Rather, they or others similarly placed are in a position to state, without partisanship, the positive contributions that Christmas dramatizes for the understanding of freedom and virtue in our time.

It is not just that without Christmas the year would be much drearier. It is rather that Christmas is in fact centered upon the mystery of liberty. During one Christmas or another, each of us is going to have to make a decision: “Who IS this baby in the manger?” The consequences for our own lives that follow upon that question are tremendous. Yet the child appears before our eyes, not in the glory of his terrible swift sword, but in helplessness and need — not as overpowering, but as altogether unthreatening. The decision thus depends upon the free conscience of the observer, upon his inalienable liberty.

For that reason, too, Christmas also instructs us to recognize all around ourselves many persons of good will. Even when their answers to that question differ from ours, we owe their inalienable dignity our respect and honor. Freedom, then, and also charity, forbearance, and tolerance — and not merely tolerance, as George Washington confided to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, but mutual respect — are all implicit in the scene at the crib.

Therefore, those of us who are Christians ought to launch a reciprocal campaign of “Christians in Gratitude to Atheists,” to honor the contributions of nonbelievers to our free institutions. Let us give credit to all who helped add to natural rights, the free institutions that support them, and the consent of the governed, due process, and the separation of powers.

The defenders of liberty in this coming century may be not too many but too few, and all of us will surely need one another before this century is done. We will also need Christmas, and all that it strengthens in us, and reminds us of.

________

Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own website is www.michaelnovak.net.

*

In Pennsylvania, a priest faithfully ministered to death-row inmates year after year — until a new warden ordered him to leave. In other prisons around the country, authorities restrict inmates' access to Bibles and Bible commentaries. Inmates are forbidden to wear yarmulkes, or limited to one religious program a week, forcing them to choose between Bible study and worship services.

Does this sound like religious freedom to you? Or more like government actively INTERFERING with religious rights, in violation of the Constitution?

Sadly, attempts to scour public life of anything remotely resembling religious activity are increasing — both inside and outside prison walls. When religious believers fight back against such violations of religious freedoms, we're immediately accused of trying to impose theocracy on America.

Nonsense. A theocrat wants to force everyone to believe in his own god and follow that god's rules. Christians are doing the opposite: trying to protect the right of citizens of ALL faiths to worship as they see fit.

Why do militant secularists attempt to snuff out religious practice, even in prisons, where it is so desperately needed? Partly, it's a fanatical hostility toward religion. But these efforts also reflect a serious misunderstanding both of the role religion should play in public life and of religion's social benefits.

First, we don't enjoy religious freedom because the courts allow it. The founders secured this basic human right in the Constitution because, as the Declaration of Independence recognizes, the right to worship is given by God, not government.

Second, religion provides demonstrable social benefits. For example, Dr. Byron Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania studied graduates of Prison Fellowship's InnerChange Freedom Initiative program for two years following their release. He found that they had a recidivism rate of only 8 percent compared to more than 20 percent for similar inmates and 67 percent nationally. This is great news to anyone but a secularist ideologue. Even while this study was underway, Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued the state of Iowa, claiming the program violates church-state separation. What's galling is that they not only would destroy the religious rights of prisoners, but they would also deny society the advantage of changed lives: that is, fewer crimes.

The abuse of prisoners' religious liberties is why Prison Fellowship supports the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), signed into law in 2000. The law promptly came under attack, and the Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in a case that will determine whether prisoners' access to religious materials and programs can be protected by congressional action.

On this Sunday, Religious Freedom Day, get your church and your friends to join in praying that the Court will uphold this statute. The religious liberty of prisoners must be protected; nowhere do the lost need the Gospel more.

America's founders wisely made religious freedom the first right; they knew that without it, all other rights are meaningless. Two centuries later, the prisoner sitting in his lonely cell, stripped of his Bible, his minister, and his right to worship, knows exactly what they meant.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Adelle M. Banks, “Appeals Court Upholds Law Protecting Prisoners' Religious Rights,” Beliefnet, 16 December 2004.

• Pat Nolan, When Prisoners Return (Prison Fellowship, 2004).

• For more information on criminal justice reform and religious freedom for prisoners, visit Justice Fellowship's website.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 050107, “The First Freedom: Religious Freedom Day.”

• Learn more about InnerChange Freedom Initiative.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030618, “Shutting the Revolving Door: IFI and Texas.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030701, “Anatomy of a Conversion: Prison Programs and the Public Good.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030214, “The Risk of Doing Good: Lawsuits and Faith-Based Solutions.”

________

Copyright © 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

In many circles today, we are given the impression that we face a choice between thinking and faith. We are given the impression that somehow the postures of faith and reason are mutually exclusive. We live with words in our culture that seem to confirm a fact and value divide. There is a real world of objective things, science, and hard realities. And there is the world of tastes, opinions, and personal values. The gulf, we are told, is real and to be held to at all times. This division is further reinforced by the notion of public and private worlds, whereby one set of values or criteria rules in one sphere and a different set rules in the other. And this is then often compounded in the church with the divide between sacred and secular. The language employed is one that clearly divides that which is deemed “of God” — preaching, praying and evangelism — and that which is deemed of “the world” — business, politics, media, and so forth.

Within such a context, belief is seen as something mystical, existential, and defying rational boundaries or requirements. For the Christian in such a context, thinking, theology, and reasoning can be seen as unnecessary distractions to “simple” or “pure” faith.

Yet the biblical reflection of faith is quite the contrary. Throughout Scripture we are reminded of what it means to be made in the image of God, and what it means to live and function in a created order. God has given us various faculties that are the vehicles of our knowing and understanding. Reason, experience, and revelation are all legitimate means and provisions of God for us and to us.

In the Prophets and in the Psalms we see many references to using reason in relation to faith. The book of Job is an extended discussion on the “reasonableness” of Job's situation, and though reason does not discover a right answer and makes many blunders, it is not refuted in and of itself. The entire wisdom tradition enjoins the pursuit of knowledge and understanding as an expression of worshipping God. Nowhere do we get the impression of blind faith or esoteric leaps into ecstatic union.

And in the life of Jesus, the sound use of soul, heart, and mind is further exemplified. His teaching required careful listening and comparison, as in the Sermon on the Mount. He asked questions which were structured to require reasoning, such as in the healing or the paralytic. (See Matt. 9:1-8.) Even when asked by John about whether he was the Christ (Mt. 11:1-6), Jesus essentially told John to think through his own conclusions, sending messengers back to report what they heard and saw. Christ's use of questions, parables, and dialogues shows boldly that reasoning is not ruled out of our spiritual life but is a central component of it.

When reason and faith are set up as juxtaposing postures, much is lost. Authors R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley describe the current divisions among us with a warning: “The church is safe from vicious persecution at the hands of the secularist, as educated people finished with stake burning circuses and torture racks. No martyr’s blood is shed in the secular west. So long as the church knows her place and remains quietly at peace on her modern reservation, let the babes pray and sing and read their Bibles, continuing steadfastly in their intellectual retardation: the church’s extinction will not come by sword or pillory, but by the quiet death of irrelevance. But let the church step off the reservation, let her penetrate once more the culture of the day and the face of secularism will change from a benign smile to a savage snarl.”

In a world of many voices and demanding messages, faith and reason must be seen as interrelated partners and not enemies. The outcome of faith is a more complete understanding of truth than was possible otherwise. The outcome of seeking, knowing, and following Christ is a complete, coherent, and abundant life of which no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him.

________

Copyright © 2005 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

*

“I don't go to church, and I don't know one person who does,” says Brian Kenny, 39, who is studying psychotherapy and counseling at Dublin Business School. “Fifteen years ago, I didn't know one person who didn't.”

Church attendance in Ireland, though still among the highest in Western Europe, has fallen from about 85% to 60% from 1975 to 2004, according to the Dublin Archdiocese.

While it is still illegal for a woman to have an abortion in this mostly Roman Catholic country, Health Minister Mary Harney made front-page news in July when she said birth control pills should be available for girls as young as 11 in some circumstances. And for the first time, according to church records, not one priest will be ordained this year in Dublin.

Mary Haugh, who has gone to Mass here seven days a week for almost all of her 79 years, is saddened by these changes. “It's a Godless society,” she says.

Ireland is not an exception. Every major religion except Islam is declining in Western Europe, according to the Center for the Study on Global Christianity at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass. The drop is most evident in France, Sweden and the Netherlands, where church attendance is less than 10% in some areas.

Last month, Pope Benedict XVI lamented the weakening of churches in Europe, Australia and the USA. “There's no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ,” he told Italian priests. “The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying.”

The forces driving the decline include Europe's turbulent history, an increasing separation between the church and government - and perhaps ... most of all, the continent's unprecedented affluence.

“For most of history, people have been on the borderline of survival,” says Ronald Inglehart, director of the World Values Survey, a Swedish-based group that tracks church attendance. “That's changed dramatically. Survival is certain for almost everyone (in the West). So one of the reasons people are drawn to religion has eroded.”

Though many Europeans say they consider themselves Christians, far fewer actually attend services. One need only see the overwhelming number of gray-haired heads in church pews to know attendance will keep falling if something doesn't change dramatically.

Benedict, who visits Cologne, Germany, next week for World Youth Day, is expected to tell some 400,000 young people there that they are the future of the church. But the pope and other leaders of traditional churches admit that their struggle for souls in Western Europe is their greatest challenge.

The need to revive the Roman Catholic Church in Europe was among the main reasons Benedict, a German cardinal, was chosen to succeed Pope John Paul II. “Nobody is better informed than Pope Benedict on the European scene and the secularism of Europe,” British Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor told the Associated Press shortly after Benedict was named pope. “I think all of us ... are concerned about this question.”

ONE RESULT: FEWER CHILDREN

Among the most striking consequences of the decline of religion has been fewer children. The birth rate throughout much of Western Europe has fallen so drastically that the population in many countries is shrinking, indicating that women throughout Europe now routinely use artificial birth control, in defiance of the Roman Catholic Church's teachings.

“The biggest single consequence of the declining role of the church is the huge decline in fertility rates,” Inglehart says. With fewer people entering the workforce, countries like Italy, Germany and France won't be able to maintain the generous welfare programs that have given most workers a lifetime of economic security.

The waning influence of religion also has brought a change in attitudes and laws on issues such as divorce, abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.

In June, for example, Spain became the fourth country in the world to legalize gay marriage, after the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada. The measure was supported by more than 60% of Spaniards, according to a poll in December by the Center for Sociological Investigation. In the USA, where religion and church attendance are comparatively stronger, 11 states voted last year to amend their constitutions to ban gay marriage.

Europeans debate whether these changes are positive or negative for society. But it is evident people feel freer to make decisions within their own moral framework.

“The declining (church) attendance is really dramatic, but what is even more important is that the churches are losing the ability to dictate to people how to live their lives,” Inglehart says.

The Roman Catholic Church still wields some power. In May, the Vatican helped defeat a referendum in Italy that would have made fertility treatments more accessible. The Vatican urged people not to vote. Because turnout was less than 50%, the results were invalid.

Nevertheless, slightly more than a mile from the Vatican, at the Sant' Anastasia church, there were just 28 worshipers at a recent Sunday Mass. The mostly gray-haired women sat in pews built to hold up to 400. “Now, it's only a wedding or maybe the funeral of someone important that can fill the whole church,” says Giovanna Lutti, 79.

In 1900, almost everyone in Europe was Christian. Now, three out of four people identify themselves as adherents to Christianity. At the same time, the percentage of Europeans who say they are non-religious has soared from less than 1% of the population to 15%. Another 3% say they don't believe in God at all, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity.

In 12 major European countries, 38% of people say they never or practically never attend church, according to the World Values Survey in 2000. France's 60% non-attendance rate is the highest in that group. In the USA, only 16% say they rarely go to church.

When the trend began varies from country to country. Wars and revolutions have played a decisive role in shaping faith in Europe. The spread of religion and the conversion of the masses often were bloody affairs - from the Crusades and the papal wars to the Spanish Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation. Uprisings against ruling religious powers were equally brutal, as was the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland pitting Protestants against Catholics. That battle may only now be nearing an end with last month's promise by the separatist - and Catholic - Irish Republic Army to disarm.

When Gen. Francisco Franco seized control of Spain during the civil war in the 1930s, for instance, he worked with the clergy to spread a “National Catholicism” that enforced his social and political codes. Since Franco's death in 1975, Spain has become more secular. Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, elected in March 2004, has eliminated the one-year separation period before a divorce, authorized stem cell research and is working on a bill that would make religious education in public schools elective.

The government initiatives are a response to a changing society, says Luis López Guerra, the undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice in charge of religious and social affairs. “Spain's a Catholic country in the sense that virtually everyone born here is baptized a Catholic,” he says. “But Spanish society has become much more open, more tolerant, more secular.”

NOT JUST THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Andrew Greeley, a priest, professor at the University of Chicago and prolific author on Christianity, argues that despite the drop in church attendance, Christianity is not on the wane everywhere in Europe. “Religion declined abruptly in England and the Netherlands. It is stagnant in West Germany, and it is flourishing in Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia,” he says. “I get upset about the sweeping generalization about the decline in religion. Religion is always declining and always reviving.”

It is not just the Catholic Church that has seen its numbers fall; some Protestant churches have been affected. Among the most striking examples is the Swedish Lutheran Church. For generations, “You didn't become a member when you were baptized. You became a member when you were born,” says Carl Johan Lidén, a priest for the church in Stockholm.

In 2000, the church was separated from the state as part of the country's secular trend. People now can write to their local parish telling the vicar they no longer wish to be members and opt not to pay taxes to the church, which range from 2% to 3% of their income.

Although some 85% of Swedes are church members, only 11% of women and 7% of men go to church, the government says.

In Sweden, and throughout Scandinavia, the decline of the church also has been matched by a drop in the number of marriages. There is virtually no social stigma for unmarried parents. More than half of the children in Sweden and Norway are born to unmarried mothers, according to the European Union. In Denmark, it's 45%.

The separation between church and state in Europe is becoming standard. After vigorous debate, European leaders rejected any mention of the role of Christianity in a new constitution for the 25 European Union countries. Italy's nominee for justice minister of the EU, Rocco Buttiglione, was rejected because he was openly religious and condemned homosexuality.

Asked by USA TODAY about the consequences of the decline of religion, Buttiglione said, “If we ignore our pasts and try to create a Godless society where things like money or ambition or property are worshiped, then the society loses. ... It is a battle we are fighting at the current time.”

The battle is more apparent in Western Europe, where a half-century of peace has meant economic and political stability. World Bank data show the per capita gross domestic product in Western Europe has tripled since 1980.

It's a different story in Eastern Europe, where the economies are weaker - and citizens less secure. That partly explains why religion remains strong in countries such as Russia, Poland and Ukraine. “For the masses, religion provides a sense of certainty in an uncertain world,” he says. And since the collapse of communism and its anti-religious ideology, people in Eastern Europe are taking advantage of their new freedom to worship.

As Western Europeans have moved away from traditional worship, more people say they are “spiritual” rather than religious. Steve Hollinghurst, an Anglican priest, says, “It's very much what's appealing to people now - spirituality that works with my lifestyle. ... Faith and spirituality are now viewed as consumer products. And that's had an impact on the way people view institutional churches.”

“Materialism has taken over. It has replaced God,” says Haugh, the Dublin churchgoer.

But Kenny, the Dublin student, says he's merely typical of his generation. “I'm very spiritual,” he says. “I speak to an energy force I call God, and I get answers,” he says. “If you can get a spiritual connection without going to church, why go to church?”

*

As he urged closer ties with Europe Monday, President Bush played down the current political disputes. “No power on earth will ever divide us,” he said.

That may be true when it comes to Iran's nuclear program. But his remark ironically hints at a transatlantic chasm over US and European values, and the role each side assigns to a fundamental facet of human life: religious faith.

Two events last year neatly frame the challenge: In the United States, a California man tried to remove “One Nation, Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. Americans cried foul - roughly 90 percent wanted to keep the phrase - and on June 15, the Supreme Court halted the bid on procedural grounds.

Three days later, in Brussels, officials agreed on the final text of the European Union's new Constitution. The charter made no mention of God, despite calls that it recognize Europe's Christian roots.

Indeed, its secularism has led to jokes that Europe is one big “blue” state. But Europeans aren't laughing. Buffeted by the crosscurrents of secularism, Christianity, and Islam - and mindful of a history of religious violence - they are wrestling with their values and identity as never before.

“The clash between those who believe and those who don't believe will be a dominant aspect of relations between the US and Europe in the coming years,” says Jacques Delors, a former president of the European Commission. “This question of a values gap is being posed more sharply now than at any time in the history of European-US relations since 1945.”

Religion's role in public life, and its influence on politics, have been center-stage questions worldwide since Sept. 11, 2001. But the debate in Europe has been complicated by the continent's difficulty in integrating its fast-growing Muslim immigrant minority. It has been sharpened by tragedies such as the bombing of a Madrid train station last March, and the brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist last fall.

Those incidents “will reinforce secularism” in Europe, predicts Patrick Weil, a sociologist of religion at the Sorbonne in Paris. “The tendency now in Europe is to say we have to be clear on the limits to religious intervention” in public life. “We are not going to sacrifice women's equality, democracy, and individual freedoms on the altar of a new religion.”

Secularists who think like that are swimming in friendly waters in Europe, where religious convictions and practice have dropped sharply in recent decades, and where mainstream churches - especially the Catholic Church - continue to lose members and influence.

Today, just 21 percent of Europeans say religion is “very important” to them, according to the most recent European Values Study, which tracks attitudes in 32 European countries. A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly three times as many Americans, 59 percent, called their faith “very important.”

Although a Gallup poll found last year that 44 percent of Americans say they attend a place of worship once a week, the average figure in Europe is only 15 percent, although the picture varies widely across the Continent.

GODLESS SECULARISM?

For some Europeans, that slump marks a defeat for moral values at the hands of godless secularism.

“The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion,” complains Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian politician whose ambition to become the European commissioner for justice was thwarted last year by the European Parliament, which objected to his description of homosexuality as a sin.

“It is an atheist, nihilistic religion - but it is a religion that is obligatory for all,” Mr. Buttiglione adds.

Luis Lopez Guerra, the Spanish government's point man in its campaign to wrest from Catholic influence social legislation on questions such as abortion, divorce, and gay marriage, sees things differently.

He wonders why, in a country where less than half the population ever goes to church, he should have found a Bible and a crucifix on his desk, along with the Constitution, when he was sworn in as undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice a year ago.

The Spanish government's plans to legalize gay marriage this spring, to liberalize divorce and abortion laws, and to permit stem-cell research, do not represent an attempt to impose an atheist state religion, he insists. Rather, he says, they “extend civil rights and make the law independent of Catholic dogma.

He adds, “The government has a responsibility to represent the majority of the people. Our policy has to depend on the people's will, not on the preferences of the Catholic church.”

Spain is currently the front line in the Vatican's rear-guard battle to retain church influence over public policy in Europe. But with public opinion ranged firmly on the government's side, there seems little it can do but make its displeasure known.

Pope John Paul II lashed out at Madrid recently, accusing authorities of “restriction of religious freedom” and “relegating faith to the private sphere and opposing its public expression.”

The changes in Spain, Catholic church leaders worry, are part of a broader trend. Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, recently attacked “a new holy inquisition ... motivated predominantly by prejudice toward all that is Christian.”

Other traditional churches have felt the same cold winds. The president of the French Protestant Federation, Jean-Arnold de Clermont, warned Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin last December of a climate of “secularist zeal” that was undermining all faiths.

Such zeal has known peaks and troughs over the centuries, but it is not new to Europe, where political leaders and ordinary citizens experienced religion and felt its weight in ways quite unknown to Americans.

The differences are rooted in the 18th century, when the Enlightenment, the philosophical revolution that laid the foundations of the modern Western world, was interpreted quite differently by Americans and Europeans in one crucial respect.

ENLIGHTENMENT DIVERGENCE

In Europe, says Grace Davie, an expert on religion at Exeter University in England, “the Enlightenment was seen as freedom from religion ... getting away from dogma, whereas in the [US] it meant freedom to believe.”

In America, a country founded in part by religious dissidents fleeing an oppressive government, “religious groups are seen as protecting individuals against the interference of the state,” says Mr. Weil.

In Europe, on the other hand, the post-Enlightenment state “is seen as protecting individuals from the intrusion of religious groups,” Weil argues, after centuries during which the official church, be it Catholic or Protestant, had always been closely identified with temporal powers.

While religion and democracy have always been intertwined in America, where churches were at the forefront of battles against slavery and in favor of civil rights, this has by no means been the case in Europe. There, estab-lished churches in countries such as Spain and France long opposed political reform.

European mistrust of public religion is heightened even further, however, when it is mixed with patriotism in the kind of rhetoric that President Bush often uses.

“God and patriotism are an explosive mixture,” cautions Nicolas Sartorius, an éminence grise of the Spanish left who spent many years in jail during Gen. Francisco Franco's dictatorship. The dictator's guiding ideology, he recalls pointedly, was known as “Catholic nationalism.”

After a tortured, centuries-long history of wars fought over religion, in whose name millions died, Europeans are deeply skeptical today of patriotic exhortations infused with religious meaning, says Karsten Voigt, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's adviser on relations with Washington.

And nowhere is this truer than in Germany, he adds. “The mixture of patriotism and religion is anathema and heresy in German religious life because it was misused and went too far in the past,” Mr. Voigt explains. “Remember, German soldiers in World War I wore belt buckles reading 'Gott Mitt Uns' [God With Us].”

Dominique Moisi, one of France's most respected political analysts, agrees. Viewed from this side of the Atlantic, “the combination of religion and nationalism in America is frightening,” he says. “We feel betrayed by God and by nationalism, which is why we are building the European Union as a barrier to religious warfare.”

HOW VALUES AFFECT POLICY

EU members have gone further than any other group of nations in pooling their national sovereignty in the interests of collective security. It's a concept completely foreign to the US, where Bush has repeatedly insisted that he will do whatever he sees fit to protect Americans.

That divergence “is a matter of principle, a matter of values,” says Martin Ortega, an analyst at the EU's Institute for Security Studies in Paris. “Europe's history has led Europeans to a more cosmopolitan worldview, which tries to understand 'the other,' “ he suggests.

One of the implications of this approach, Mr. Ortega argues, is that a ban on the use of force except in extreme circumstances has become a European value, just like its corollary: reliance on international law.

That, too, sets Europe apart from America in a fundamental way when it comes to coping with world crises.

The differences were stark over the war in Iraq. They persist with regard to Iran, where Europe's three largest nations are pursuing diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from enriching uranium - efforts the US has refused to join.

The values gap is evident in Washington's wariness of multilateral approaches to world affairs: The US has rejected the Kyoto treaty, designed to slow global warming, which came into force last week, while the EU embraced it. And Europe supports the International Criminal Court, which the US opposes.

Some European leaders, eager to mend diplomatic fences with the US, fear that such different perspectives could tempt Washington to dismiss Europe as an unreliable ally.

“In some segments of conservative US opinion, anti-European feeling is on the rise,” worries Mr. Voigt. “They see us as soft on terrorism, or as simply immoral.”

On the contrary, retorts Ortega, who describes himself as a Catholic believer, “I interpret my religion in a more modern, humane, and universal manner. I find the American manner quite antiquated. For example, I'm sure that when President Bush applied the death penalty in Texas, or decided to use force in Iraq, he felt it compatible with his religious beliefs.”

In fact, the fundamental values that Europe and the US proclaim are almost identical.

Few Americans would quibble over the proposed EU Constitution's declaration that “the Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights.” It goes on to promote “tolerance, justice, solidarity, and equality between women and men.”

PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES

These shared sentiments, however, flow from different metaphysical head waters. In his inaugural address last month, Bush founded his commitment to human rights on the belief “that every man and woman on this earth ... bear[s] the image of the Maker of Heaven and Earth.”

That thinking does not sit well in Europe, where human rights are rooted in a tradition of secular humanism, which holds that mankind is capable of ethical conduct and self-fulfillment without recourse to the supernatural.

In Europe, secularism is not understood as necessarily hostile to religion. In France, the term denotes a level playing field, on which the state allows all religions to operate freely, but stands aside. Elsewhere, it means an indifference to faith. More generally, secularism refers to an approach to life grounded not in religious morality but in human reason and universal ethics.

At the same time, European governments have chosen to adopt a broader set of moral values in setting their foreign policy than they see apparent in US policy, which to them often seems wholly focused on “the war on terror.”

That leads them to attach more importance to issues such as the en-vironment and poverty, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac stressed in speeches to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this month.

Though the broad moral values at the foundations of public policy in Europe draw clearly on Christian inspiration, the established churches are equally clearly losing their grip on social attitudes to personal moral questions.

A look at the dramatic fall in birthrates all over Europe reveals how faithfully couples are following Catholic teaching on contraception. And as religion's importance fades in people's lives, their permissiveness increases, the European Values Study found.

For example, of the 10 countries where religion is most important to people's lives, eight are among the 10 least tolerant of euthanasia. An increasing number of European governments are following Britain's lead in legalizing stem-cell research, with public support, despite opposition from Catholic leaders.

But even if churches are emptying across Europe, and citizens are reluctant to imbue policy with religious significance, that hardly makes the Continent atheist, pollsters and religious leaders say.

Rather, suggests Archbishop John Foley, the US head of the Vatican's Council for Social Communications, “many people in Europe consider it poor taste to mention your beliefs. It is perceived as rendering other people uncomfortable.”

While only 41 percent of Europeans say they believe in a personal God, another 33 percent believe in a spirit, or life force.

It is on that reservoir of spirituality that religious leaders of several faiths hope to draw, in order to bring religion back from the margins of public life in Europe. And they are finding encouragement from some unlikely sources.

In France, perhaps the most militantly secular society in Europe, and which this year celebrates the 100th anniversary of a law separating church and state, one of the men most likely to succeed Jacques Chirac as president broke a strict political taboo late last year.

In a book-length series of interviews entitled “The Republic and Religion: Hope,” Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of the ruling conservative Union for a Popular Movement, broached controversial subjects such as state funding for religious institutions.

He was motivated by a feeling that would be banal in the US, but which for a French political leader is almost revolutionary: “That the religious phenomenon is more important than people think, that it can contribute to peace, to balance, to integration, to unity and dialogue,” he wrote. “The Republic should debate this, and reflect on it.”

________

Sophie Arie in Rome and Mark Rice-Oxley in London contributed to this report.

*

A century ago, German sociologist Max Weber put forth a novel theory of economic growth. In “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Mr. Weber argued that Calvinist ideals fostered a disciplined work-and-save attitude that accelerated the creation of wealth. The implication - that Protestant economies outperform Catholic ones - has drawn skepticism ever since.

But today, researchers are reexamining whether there might be a link between religious belief and economic performance.

In a 2003 study of nearly 60 countries, Harvard researchers Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary found that certain religious beliefs did contribute to economic growth. Notably, they concluded that a belief in hell was a slightly more potent economic spur than a belief in heaven.

Last year, Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University, examined the connections between faith and work ethic in light of divergent trends he found in the United States and Europe.

Religious belief in North America has “been amazingly resilient” amid big economic gains, he says, disputing the notion that wealthier countries necessarily become less religious.

But abroad, Ferguson noted that a decline in European working hours coincided with a decline in faith. “Americans don't in fact do better work than Frenchmen,” he wrote. “They just do more work. A lot more.” Between 1979 and 1999, the average US working year lengthened by nearly 4 percent. Yet in Germany, France, and Spain, that figure dropped by at least 10 percent. “Europeans now seem to believe in holidays, not in holy days,” he adds.

This divergence, Ferguson, argues, coincides with a period of European de-Christianization, and American re-Christianization. “It's extremely hard to establish a causal relationship between changes in belief and changes in economic behavior,” he cautions. But, he says, “something of Weber's theory seems to work.”

Material prosperity, of course, is not the point of most religious teachings. And religion is clearly not the sole determinant of economic performance. China's official atheism hasn't stopped its rapid gains. Growth has been weaker in Muslim nations, where belief in potential damnation is high. And Ferguson notes that previous generations of Americans emphasized high levels of saving. Today, he says, they “work very hard in order to consume very hard.”

In Europe, the number of people who regularly attend religious services has steadily declined over the past few decades.

Meanwhile, the number of Muslims on the continent has tripled in the last 30 years.

Percentage who report worshipping at least once a week:

Ireland 56%

Poland 54

Italy 32

Portugal 29

Greece 26

Spain 20

Austria 19

England 13

Netherlands 12

Belgium 11

Switzerland 11

Germany 8

Norway 5

Sweden 5

Denmark 3

________

Source: European Social Survey (2003), U.S. Department of State

[Secular commentary on atheist Newdow's attempt to strike "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance]

When Michael Newdow stood before the Supreme Court on Wednesday and made the case for atheism, he probably didn't win many converts. But his quixotic crusade to rid the Pledge of Allegiance of the words “under God” is a peculiarly American act of courage. And somewhere the spirits of Jefferson, Madison and Franklin may well be smiling.

Few questions have inspired as much myth and misconception as the place of God in America. For example, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance last year — the decision that is before the Supreme Court now - Attorney General John Ashcroft said that God is mentioned “in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, national anthem, on our coins and in the Gettysburg Address.”

Well, he was 80 percent right - but he was wrong on the most important item. The Constitution is the creation of “we, the people” and never mentions a deity aside from the pro forma phrase “in the year of our Lord.” The men who wrote the Constitution labored for months. There's little chance that they simply forgot to mention a higher power. So what were they thinking?

They certainly were from a background in which religion was important. Eighteenth-century America was largely Christian and overwhelmingly Protestant, and the dominant Protestant denominations (Congregationalism in New England, the Anglican Church in the South) even enjoyed state subsidies. Quakers were hanged in the early Colonial era, while Roman Catholics faced discrimination in matters of voting and property. In other words, young America may have been a Christian nation, but it wasn't a very tolerant one.

But the founders were also children of the great intellectual ferment known as the Enlightenment. In the debate over the place of God in public America, few framers are cited more often than Ben Franklin. In the summer of 1787, with the Constitutional Convention haggling over the nation's fate, Franklin proposed opening the day's meetings with a prayer, a proposal often cited by public-prayer advocates. But these advocates leave out the rest of the story.

After Franklin's motion, Alexander Hamilton argued that if people knew that the delegates were resorting to prayer, it would be seen as an act of desperation. Then Hugh Williamson of North Carolina pointed out that the convention lacked the money to pay for a chaplain, and there the proposition died. Franklin later noted, “The convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary.”

Alongside Franklin's doomed proposal, George Washington's religious fervor is often cited. The father of our country was a regular churchgoer, but what's left out of the story is that he usually left services before Communion. He was a deist who called on Providence, an amorphous power he referred to as “it.” Nominally Episcopalian, Washington was also a Freemason, along with many other founders. A semisecret society, Organized Freemasonry was formed in London in 1717 by a group of anticlerical free thinkers dedicated to the ideals of charity, equality, morality and service to the Great Architect of the Universe.

Then there is Jefferson, who inveighed against “every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” by which he meant organized religion. In 1786, his Statute for Religious Freedom was approved by the Virginia Legislature through the efforts of James Madison, a chief architect of the Constitution and later an opponent of the practice of paying a Congressional chaplain. This statute guaranteed every Virginian the freedom to worship in the church of his choice and ended state support of the Anglican Church.

But more important than the founders' private faith was the concept that they all embraced passionately: the freedom to practice religion, as well as not to. They had risked their lives to free America from a country with an official religion and a king who claimed a divine right. They believed that government's purpose was to protect people's earthly rights, not their heavenly fates. As for Jefferson, he wrote that it made no difference to him whether his neighbor affirmed one God or 20, since, he added, “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

It was this concept — that the government should neither enforce, encourage or otherwise intrude on religion — that found its way into the godless Constitution in the form of the First Amendment. Even the presidential oath of office, which is laid out in the Constitution, does not mention the deity. George Washington ad-libbed the “So help me God” at his inaugural ceremony. Every president since has added this personal oath. They choose to say it; the Constitution does not compel it.

The Supreme Court may embrace Dr. Newdow's passionate plea, side with “under God” or split 4-4 and leave the lower court ruling alone, and it won't pick our pockets or break our legs. But the sight of one man standing up to challenge God and country is something that Madison, Jefferson and Franklin would cheer, and every American can celebrate.

*

At the end of his glorious exposition of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in Romans 1-11, the Apostle Paul writes a song of praise to God:

Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and

knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments

and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind

of the Lord, or who has become His counselor?

Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to

Him again? For from Him and through Him and

to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.

Then in Romans 12:1, he immediately turns to address the people of God: “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.”

THEREFORE. What a significant word. With this Paul turns to press his case. If all this be true -- if God is truly as glorious as Paul says -- then an entire structure of discipleship follows. All this -- from the Gospel defined to God's glory manifested -- now points us to our proper response and mode of life. On this therefore hangs the great question of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, obedience or disobedience, discipleship or disaster.

Paul is making more than a request, and he offers more than an imperative. By the mercies of God, he urges us to present ourselves to God as a living sacrifice. Theologically and biblically speaking, this appears to be an oxymoron. Logic defies the combination of “living” and “sacrifice.” The sacrificial system was a graphic picture of our need for atonement and God's provision, and it pointed to the atonement accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ on that cruciform altar at Calvary.

As the book of Hebrews explains, “But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.” [Hebrews 9:11-12, NASB]

What can this text mean, but that we are the dead made alive in Christ? As those who are dead to ourselves, we devote ourselves as living sacrifices of God. As those who are alive in Christ, we present ourselves as a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God.

Paul turns to define in greater detail how a living sacrifice would live in the light of the cross to God's glory. We are not to be conformed to this world, but rather we must be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The language here is graphic and accessible. We understand immediately what is being demanded. Living sacrifices cannot be worldly in form of life, in disposition, nor in intellectual framework. The living sacrifice is not to be conformed to the present evil age, but to be transformed by the renewing of the mind.

This is, to say the least, a very inconvenient text for those who want to blend in with the larger culture. In fact, Paul's word here is a manifesto for cultural, behavioral, and intellectual confrontation. We are not to be indistinguishable from the world in our thinking, our worldview, our lifestyle, or our worship. Instead, we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

Theological education stands at a crossroads. There are inescapable choices to be made, and these choices will determine whether evangelical institutions will remain recognizably Christian or fall into the same pattern of intellectual, theological, and moral collapse seen in so many colleges, universities, and divinity schools.

Historians have traced the progressive accommodation and intellectual surrender of Christian institutions in the face of a secular culture, and one of the most astonishing facts is how quickly the decline took place. Colleges, universities, and seminaries established for the training of faithful ministers and resoundingly committed to biblical truth forfeited those commitments in a breathtakingly brief period of time. Within just a few generations, the worldview of Christianity had been supplanted by the secular worldview of modernity.

Of course, champions of the secularized academic culture celebrate the very pattern we lament. These advocates of established secularism present their victory as the liberation of institutions and individuals from the intellectual shackles of revealed religion. This intellectual Prometheanism is the dominant fact of life in the American academic culture, and it tempts both the Christian scholar and the Christian academy.

Swimming against the tide is tiresome and intellectually demanding. Going with the flow of the dominant culture is the easiest option. But this is not an option for the living sacrifice, who must stand on biblical truth, reason through the complexities of thought, and out-think the opposition.

“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” This kind of talk can get you into a great deal of trouble in the secular academy -- and in the circles of compromised Christianity.

There are three urgent realities embedded in this great text, and all three demand the attention and the discipleship of every true believer -- especially those who would serve the church as ministers of the Word and of the Gospel.

FIRST, PAUL CLEARLY AFFIRMS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LIFE OF THE MIND, AND CALLS UPON CHRISTIANS TO SUBMIT TO THE RENEWING OF OUR MINDS IN THE FRAME OF GOD'S GLORY. There is no room for anti-intellectualism in the Christian life, nor for intellectual egotism and pride. The frame of God's glory reminds us that all we know of God and His ways is given us by grace. We are absolutely dependent upon revelation, for God's ways are unfathomable and His judgments are unsearchable.

Theological education exists, at least in part, to equip ministers with the ability to think, to reason, to analyze, to learn, and to synthesize biblical truth, so that this truth may be imparted to others through preaching and teaching and ministry. We dare not lose sight of this great purpose.

The frame of God's glory demands our best devotion to this task, even as the Christian ought to grow increasingly to love the things of God and to seek understanding in all things. We are to have the mind of Christ, and this certainly requires that we think. The anti-intellectualism of contemporary evangelicalism has led to nothing less than unconditional surrender. We have left generations of young Christians unequipped for the battle of the mind, and the losses are staggering.

At the same time, we can give no quarter to intellectual pride. There is no place for an arid, intellectual sterility. What we know, we know by grace.

SECOND, PAUL WARNS AGAINST THE SCANDAL OF SECULAR CONFORMITY. The living sacrifice must resist the intellectual conformity so arrogantly demanded by the secular culture and its secular academy.

The current proletariat of the academic culture demands naturalism and excludes supernaturalism. All views are tolerated except any view that will not tolerate all things and call all things true. Postmodernism has degenerated into a circus of moral relativism, sexuality majors, gender feminism, semiotics, and fictionalized history.

Against this tide, the Christian scholar must engage the academy without compromising Christian truth, and without conforming to the prevailing worldview. This is no easy task, but it is a necessary one.

THIRD, PAUL CALLS US TO THE POWER OF INTELLECTUAL TRANSFORMATION AS THE ANTIDOTE TO INTELLECTUAL CONFORMITY. This, too, is all of grace and all for God's glory. We cannot renew our own minds any more than we can save our own souls. We are saved by grace, and we are transformed by grace. The one cannot be severed from the other.

Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ must be thinkers whose minds are captive to the Word of God, and whose entire intellectual structure is shaped and determined by biblical truth. Our captivity to the Word of God is a scandal in the secular culture, and among the Christians enamored with that culture. The secular intellectuals are blind to their own intellectual captivity to the spirit of the age. We, on the other hand, must wear our captivity to the Word of God as a badge of intellectual honor and integrity.

This intellectual transformation is a spiritual reality meant to demonstrate the power and the wisdom of God even in the midst of a fallen world. This is our spiritual service of worship.

________

This is an edited transcript of an address given to the faculty and students at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.

*

Ben Stein, a lawyer by training, served as a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon before he became an actor in Hollywood. He is probably best known for his role as the dreadfully dull economics teacher in the film FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF.

Mr. Stein currently offers occasional commentaries for the CBS Sunday Morning news program, and his commentary on December 18, 2005, is quoted below:

====================

Here at this happy time of year, a few confessions from my beating heart. I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica [Simpson] are.

I see them on the cover of PEOPLE and US constantly when I’m buying my dog biscuits. I still don’t know. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores who they are. They don’t know who Nick and Jessica are, either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they’ve broken up? Why are they so darned important?

I don’t know who Lindsay Lohan is either, and I don’t care at all about Tom Cruise’s baby.

Am I going to be called before a Senate committee and asked if I’m a subversive? Maybe. But I just have no clue who Nick and Jessica are. Is this what it means to be no longer young? Hm, not so bad.

Next confession: I am a Jew and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish, and it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautifully lit-up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees.

I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel discriminated against. That’s what they are — Christmas trees. It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say ‘Merry Christmas’ to me. I don’t think they’re slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. I shows that we’re all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year.

It doesn’t bother me one bit that there’s a manger scene on display at a key intersection at my beach house in Malibu.

If people want a creche, fine. The menorah a few hundred yards away is fine, too. I do not like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can’t find it in the Constitution and I don’t like it being shoved down my throat. Or maybe I can put it another way. Where did the idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica and aren’t allowed to worship God as we understand him? I guess that’s a sign that I’m getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America we used to know went to.

There is no mistaking the presence of unique challenges to the life and mindset of the modern day Christian. Our secularist, privatized, consumerist worldview has wielded a religion (indeed many religions) that has little or nothing to do with life itself. Coupled with secularism’s privatizing of religion from the public realm, consumerism’s pull creates a context whereby the choice of belief is not only a personal matter, but a matter entirely divorced from the history and communities that inform these beliefs. As David Wells notes, “God has been evacuated from the center of our collective life, pushed to the edges of our public square to become an irrelevance to how our world does its business. Marxism rested on a theoretical atheism; our secularized world rests on a practical atheism in the public domain, though one that coexists with private religiosity.”(1) This chasm between public and private, sacred and secular, forces a theology whereby God is largely absent, unknown in the public arena, and silent unless spoken to.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with our evacuation of God and subsequent practical atheism, we live within an understanding of unbounded freedom to pursue and consume whatsoever we will. While we may recognize secularism for what it is, Wells warns: “[W]e do not recognize the corrupting power of our affluence for what it is.... We consider our abundance as essentially harmless and, what is just as important, we have come to need it. The extraordinary and dazzling benefits of our modernized world, benefits that are now indispensable to our way of life, hide the values which accompany them, values which have the power to wrench around our lives in very damaging ways.”(2) Our sheer appetites, which we readily appease as if angry gods, bring us to the conclusion that we ourselves are the center of collective life, echoing the call of secularism that God is where God belongs -- in quiet, private corners. Even in the church, this outlook is often practically lived if not publicly admitted.

Yet, this dichotomy that is now readily accepted between matters of private faith and public life belies a betrayal of the very identity the Christian sets forth. The hope within us is not something we are able to keep private -- for if the very public act of Christ’s resurrection from the dead was not real, then the very faith our culture would have us keep in private is futile. The events of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and the faith that upholds them, do not allow for the dichotomies of public and private, spiritual and physical, sacred and secular. The call of Christ is one that encompasses every possible realm, thus making “private faith” an unintelligible distinction.

Nonetheless, while the challenges of practical atheism may indeed be the outworking of a unique cultural moment, it is hardly a new way of life. Though the causes and contexts are certainly different, our current cultural mood is in some ways comparable to the scene Paul discovered in Athens. Standing before these men and women, Paul gently bid them to see their philosophy amounted to little more than practical atheism. Where there was belief that amounted to very little, where gods were acknowledged but unknown, and worship was offered in ritual, fear, and apathy, Paul set before them the God who is there, the God who is known. While the cultural challenges before us are intricate and unyielding, and we will try and fail and try again to clear away the obstacles that prevent our neighbor from seeing Christ, one of the clearest apologetics we can offer is that of a life touched by the God who is there. If atheism is intellectually implausible, practical atheism is unlivable when it is placed beside the one who is known.

Thus we might be encouraged, for regardless of the risks and opportunities that fill the world around us, so it is filled of the unfailing love of a present God. And it is this reality that despite ourselves or our obstacles compels the blind to see. On such matters of the Spirit, 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards once noted, “Though great use may be made of external arguments ... for they may be greatly serviceable to awaken unbelievers, and bring them to serious consideration, and to confirm the faith of true saints ... [T]here is no spiritual conviction ... but what arises from an apprehension of the spiritual beauty and glory of divine things. And such a direct apprehension is a gift mediated only by the Holy Spirit of God.”(3) In our pluralistic, privatized, and practically atheistic culture this Spirit indeed continues to move.

________

1. David Wells, “This Unique Moment: The Changing of the Guard and What It Means For Christians Today,” Modern Reformation, Sept./Oct. Vol. 4, No. 5, 1995, 10.

2. Ibid., 11.

3. Jonathon Edwards, Treatise on the Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 307.

________

Copyright © 2007 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20914]

Michael V. Fox doesn't believe that faith-based scholarship of the Bible is possible -- and he wants to see such scholars marginalized in the larger world of scholarship. In an essay posted at the Web site for the Society of Biblical Literature [SBL], Fox argues, “In my view, faith-based study has no place in academic scholarship, whether the object of study is the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or Homer. Faith-based study is a different realm of intellectual activity that can dip into Bible scholarship for its own purposes, but cannot contribute to it.”

That is a shocking claim, but Fox is simply asserting what many others in the academy have thought for a very long time. Even if the secularization of the larger academy is a FAIT ACCOMPLI, Fox and many others are concerned that the majority of scholars studying the Bible are believers of some sort, mostly Christians and Jews involved in the serious study of the Bible.

Fox teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and he is unsparing in his denunciation of what he calls faith-based scholarship. In reality, what he means is that scholars who study the Bible as believers forfeit any claim to scholarship. Could there be any more telling evidence of what the secularization of the academy has wrought?

The naïveté of Fox's approach is self-evident, but he apparently fails to see that even an atheist brings a certain “faith” to the work of scholarship. As he sees it, Jewish scholars who would wish to publish academic research on the Old Testament are simply to be discounted because they may well believe in the existence of deity and may see the Old Testament writings as sacred. Beyond this, Christians are to be discounted wholesale, and Christians who engage in biblical scholarship are to be denied the status of scholars, regardless of which testament is their focus of study.

“Faith-based study of the Bible certainly has its place,” Fox concedes -- but those places are “synagogues, churches, and religious schools, where the Bible (and whatever other religious material one gives allegiance to) serves as a normative basis of moral inspiration or spiritual guidance.” His next statement serves as the theme for his entire essay: “This kind of study is certainly important, but it is not scholarship -- by which I mean WISSENSCHAFT, a term lacking in English that can apply to the humanities as well as the hard sciences, even if the modes and possibilities of verification in each are very different.”

Look carefully at Fox's next sentence: “Any discipline that deliberately imports extraneous, inviolable axioms into its work belongs to the realm of homiletics or spiritual enlightenment or moral guidance or whatnot, but not scholarship, whatever academic degrees its practitioners may hold.”

This is where Fox's own lack of intellectual honesty brings his argument to a standstill. Does he really believe that he, or anyone else for that matter, comes to the task of scholarship with absolutely no “extraneous” presuppositions? No, Fox concedes that “everyone has presuppositions and premises,” but he insists that, for scholars such as himself, “these are not inviolable.” He continues, “Indeed, it is the role of education to teach students how to recognize and rest their premises and, when necessary, to reject them.”

Of course, this simply begs the question. Why is the presumption of atheism any LESS inviolable than belief in Jesus Christ as Lord? In its own way, the same argument holds true for assertions of agnosticism, since the true agnostic argues that the question of God's existence simply cannot be answered. That is about as inviolable an axiom as one is likely to encounter.

Give Fox his due, he attempts to exclude believers from the academy with fair warning. “Faith-based Bible study is not part of scholarship even if some of its postulates turn out to be true.” Thus, even if the believing scholar makes a scholarly argument that non-believers find convincing, that work is still to be denied the status of scholarship, simply because the person is neither agnostic nor atheist.

Fox does attempt to distinguish between “faith-based Bible study” and “the scholarship of persons who hold a personal faith.” He explains, “there are many religious individuals whose scholarship is secular and who introduce their faith only in distinctly religious forums.” Nevertheless, Fox never really explains how these persons are anything other than secular in their scholarly conclusions. Does he believe that persons live in separate intellectual spheres and can operate as authentic believers in one sphere but not in any other?

Fox's frustration is clear: “There is an atmosphere abroad in academia (loosely associated with postmodernism) that tolerates and even encourages ideological scholarship and advocacy instruction. Some conservative religionists have picked this up. I have heard students, and read authors, who justify their biases by the rhetoric of postmodern self-indulgence. Since no one is viewpoint neutral and everyone has presuppositions, why exclude Christian presuppositions? Why allow the premise of errancy but not of inerrancy? Such sophistry can be picked apart, but the climate does favor it.”

Fox may dismiss these arguments as “sophistry,” but he never answers his own questions. Why should the premise of biblical errancy be considered ideologically neutral, but the assertion of biblical inerrancy is considered to be evidence of distorting bias?

“The claim of faith-based Bible study to a place at the academic table takes a toll on the entire field of Bible scholarship,” Fox laments. “The reader or student of Bible scholarship is likely to suspect (or hope) that the author or teacher is moving toward a predetermined conclusion. Those who choose a faith-based approach should realize that they cannot expect the attention of those who don't share their postulates. The reverse is not true.”

Get it? In Fox's scheme, the secularist wins the coin toss whichever side turns up. “The best thing for Bible appreciation is secular, academic, religiously-neutral hermeneutic.” That is an astounding claim, and one that demands a far more developed argument and series of definitions. Does Fox actually believe in the myth of a “secular, academic, religiously-neutral hermeneutic?” Does he believe in the Easter Bunny?

He cites with appreciation the work of Jacques Berlinerblau, who also argues for a secular hermeneutic. In a response to Fox's essay, Berlinerblau stated that he read Fox's essay “with appreciation and glee.” Berlinerblau, who teaches at Georgetown University and Hofstra University, is the author of THE SECULAR BIBLE: WHY NONBELIEVERS MUST TAKE RELIGION SERIOUSLY, published by Cambridge University Press. Berlinerblau congratulated Fox for calling “attention to a topic that is virtually taboo in biblical scholarship.”

Berlinerblau criticizes the world of biblical scholarship for its “demographic peculiarities,” most specifically the fact that the vast majority of Bible scholars are members of some church or synagogue. He sees this as historically understandable but academically unsustainable. “They continue to ignore the fact that the relation between their own religious commitments and their scholarly subject matter is wont to generate every imaginable conflict of intellectual interest,” Berlinerblau asserts. “Too, they still seem oblivious to how strange this state of affairs strikes their colleagues in the humanities and social sciences.” Significantly, Berlinerblau seems to understand that this imbalance is overwhelmingly in favor of the secularist. “Before this response begins to sound like the prelude to a class-action suit, permit me to observe that the type of discrimination encountered by secularists in biblical studies IS PRECISELY WHAT BELIEVERS WORKING IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES HAVE ENDURED FOR DECADES. The secular bent and bias of the American research university is well known. It is undeniable that many of its workers are prejudiced against sociologists, English professors, and art historians who are 'too' religious.”

But, back to believers engaged in biblical scholarship, Berlinerblau is concerned “by the degree to which explicitly confessional researchers sit on editorial boards of major journals, steering committees, search committees, and the hierarchy of the Society of Biblical Literature.”

In contrast to Michael V. Fox, Berlinerblau does not appreciate believers who attempt to compartmentalize their faith and their scholarship into separate worlds. “It is another category of Biblicists that, to my mind, is far more problematic” Berlinerblau explains. “It is comprised of researchers who in every facet of their private lives are practicing Jews or Christians but who -- somehow -- deny that this may influence their professional scholarly work (which just happens to concern those documents that are the fount of Judaism and Christianity!)”

Sounding slightly less alarmist than Fox, Berlinerblau warns of “a collective ideational drift in the field” of biblical studies -- “one that makes it difficult to think or speak about the Scripture in certain ways.”

Berlinerblau must be given credit for a finely-tuned sense of humor. Consider this paragraph: “Assume for a moment that you are an atheist exegete. Now please follow my instructions. Peruse the listings in OPENINGS [a listing of academic posts looking to be filled]. Understand that your unique skills and talents are of no interest to those institutions listed there with the words 'Saint' and 'Holy' and 'Theological' and 'Seminary' in their names. This leaves, per year, about two or three advertised posts in biblical studies at religiously un-chartered institutions of higher learning. Apply for those jobs. Get rejected. A few months later learn -- preferably while consuming donuts with a colleague -- that the position was filled by a graduate of a theological seminary. Realize that those on the search committee who made this choice all graduated from seminaries themselves. Curse the gods.”

In his indispensable work, THE SOUL OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, George M. Marsden explains how academia came to embrace this degree of secularism: “One way to describe the current state of affairs, however, is that, in effect, the only points of view that are allowed full academic credence are those that presuppose purely naturalistic worldviews. Advocates of postmodernist viewpoints have, as a rule, been just as committed to exclusively naturalist premises for understanding human belief and behavior as were their turn-of-the-century predecessors who established evolutionary naturalism as normative for academic life. One must wonder, however, whether there are adequate grounds for most academics to insist on naturalistic premises that ignore the possibility of fruitful religious perspectives.”

Evidently, Professor Fox needs to read Professor Marsden's book. Then again, I hold little hope that it would make much of a difference. If nothing else, Professor Fox's essay, published by the Society for Biblical Literature, indicates where the debate in those circles is headed.

All scholarship is based in some faith and deeply grounded in some set of presuppositions. For the vast majority of those engaged in academia today, that faith is some form of ideological secularism. Christian scholars should always be absolutely transparent and clear about their confessional commitments. As a matter of fact, this should be an absolute requirement of their confessional institutions. At the same time, we should never allow that those who hold alternative worldviews are any less ideologically or intellectually committed. The radical nature of Professor Fox's proposal indicates just how committed he is to his own faith -- and how blind he is to his own faith-based perspective. Watch this debate with interest -- it is not going away any time soon.

In a very real sense, the modern world began 350 summers ago when a young man was excommunicated by the Jewish community in Amsterdam. The excommunication of Baruch (later changed to Benedict) Spinoza is one of the hallmark events in the development of the modern mind and modern secularism. The anniversary of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication also serves as a reminder of the ideological roots of modern biblical criticism and the political agenda behind Spinoza's critical approach to the Bible. Born November 24, 1632 to Michael de Espinoza and Hana Debora, his second wife, Baruch Spinoza was a son of privilege. His ancestors had fled Portugal and Spain during the Inquisition and the Spinoza family became pillars of the Marrano Jewish community in Amsterdam.

As a boy, Spinoza was noted for his brilliance. In his fascinating new book, THE COURTIER AND THE HERETIC, Matthew Stewart quotes a Polish observer who noted the brilliant young Jewish boys of Amsterdam, speaking of them as “small as grasshoppers” who were also “like prodigies because of their unusual familiarity with the entire Bible and the science of grammar.”

No one knows exactly what happened between Spinoza's childhood and adolescence as an orthodox “grasshopper” and his emergence in early adulthood as a scandalous heretic. As a matter of fact, the actual writ of excommunication, pronounced on July 27, 1656, provides little specificity. Instead, the declaration indicates that the ruling council of the Jews in Amsterdam had “for some time known the evil opinions and work of Baruch de Espinoza” and, having “endeavored by various ways and promises to bring him back from his evil ways,” nonetheless excommunicated him for his “horrible heresies” and “awful deeds.” The sentence of excommunication was the most serious ever handed down by the Jewish authorities of Amsterdam: “We warn that none may contact him orally or in writing, nor do him any favor, nor stay under the same roof with him, nor read any paper he made or wrote.”

Within four years of his excommunication, Spinoza would complete his most famous work, the ETHICS, in which he would promote a theory of pantheism more extreme than anything yet encountered in Western thought. As Jewish scholar Yirmiyahu Yovel notes, “With these ideas Spinoza distances himself from both Judaism and Christianity, and even from the accepted philosophical traditions; he was a heretic not only from the point of view of the established religions, but also from the point of view of the freethinkers and from the several varieties of philosophic deism they were espousing at the time.”

As Yovel explains, the deistic heresies “have at least acknowledged the existence of a transcendent deity elevated above the world.” Spinoza, on the other hand, simply denied any distinction between God and the universe. “In short,” Yovel explains, “Spinoza proclaimed himself a heretic not only among the faithful, but also among representatives of the accepted heresy of his period, thus separating himself from all of the major spiritual currents of his time.”

In the end, Spinoza would deny any concept of a personal God, all claims to divine revelation, any claim of biblical inspiration, and the validity of miracles. In essence, he serves as the father of modern biblical criticism. As a matter of fact, Spinoza is the first major figure credited with proposing an exclusively secular reading of the Bible. The philosopher Leo Strauss acknowledged Spinoza's legacy over three decades ago: “In our time, scholars generally study the Bible in the manner in which they study any other book. As is generally admitted, Spinoza more than any other man laid the foundation for this kind of Biblical study.”

Interestingly enough, the focus of Spinoza's early heresies was Judaism, but he soon turned his critical attention to Christianity. Spinoza saw dogmatic Christianity as the great enemy of the modern age and his project of biblical criticism was expressly intended to liberate Christianity from its dogmatic moorings.

As Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg note, “Spinoza's intent is clear, if indirect: false Christianity is dogmatic Christianity of any stripe. It is a child of unreason. For the sake of reason, dogmatic Christianity must be overcome.” Harrisville and Sundberg then explain why biblical criticism came to serve as Spinoza's major proposal for removing the threat of dogmatic Christianity. “What is needed is something to direct the passion of the multitude from false religion to true religion.... Since the Christian Bible is the authoritative source for the Christian religion, its understanding must be reshaped by rational criticism. Spinoza's political program of reform, then, is established in the exercise of biblical criticism.”

Most modern persons would doubtless be surprised to know that the main ambition behind the emergence of biblical criticism was political -- to transform the society by removing the obstacle of orthodox Christianity. Yet, as Spinoza's essays in his most notorious work, the THEOLOGICAL-POLITICAL TREATISE make clear, this was precisely Spinoza's ambition.

In Spinoza's view, both Jews and Christians had simply mistaken the particularity of their religious texts for a claim to divine revelation. Since Spinoza believed in no personal God, it was impossible for God to have inspired the Bible in any sense. Instead, Spinoza believed that the Bible was simply a product of human authorship, reflecting all of the historical circumstances, prejudices, and faults of those authors. As a thoroughgoing rationalist, Spinoza believed that the goal of human existence should be to live by the service of reason alone. Nevertheless, he believed that the vast majority of human beings were driven by emotion and passion, and were thus unable to understand what was known by the rationalist elite. Thus, the masses are attracted to simplistic and fanciful ideas such as miracles.

Spinoza's rejection of the miraculous was absolute. In the first place, he did not believe in a God who would act in any personal manner. Beyond this, his absolute denial of any distinction between God and nature meant that it would be impossible for any action or event contrary to nature to occur.

As Spinoza wrote: “The universal laws of nature are merely God's decrees, following from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. So if anything were to happen in nature contrary to her universal laws, it would also be necessarily contrary to the decree, intellect and nature of God. Or if anyone were to maintain that God performs some act contrary to the laws of Nature, he would at the same time have to maintain that God acts contrary to his own nature -- than which nothing could be more absurd.”

The idea of a supernatural deity who revealed himself in the Bible is nothing more than superstition, Spinoza insisted. And superstition is “the bitter enemy of all true knowledge and true morality.”

Spinoza denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and the inspiration of the Scriptures as a whole. The prophets were simply men of elevated moral insight, whose actual worldviews and understanding of reality were often woefully deficient.

In one central paragraph, Spinoza offers his approach to understanding the Bible: “Now in exactly the same way the task of Scriptural interpretation requires us to make a straightforward study of Scripture, and from this, as the source of our fixed data and principles, to deduce by logical inference the meaning of the authors of Scripture. In this way, by allowing no other principles or data for the interpretation of Scripture and study of its contents except those that can be gathered only from Scripture itself and from a historical study of Scripture -- steady progress can be made without any danger of error, and one can deal with matters that surpass our understanding with no less confidence than those matters that are known to us by the natural light of reason.”

As Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler suggests, Spinoza denies that the Bible provides “privileged knowledge of natural or spiritual phenomena.” In Spinoza's view, the enduring message of the Bible is merely obedience to God, altruism, and submission to the divine predetermination of all things.

With specific reference to Israel, Spinoza denies that the Jews were in any way “elected” by God. Instead, they were simply the product of historical circumstance, benefiting from historical, geographical, political, and economic realities. The Torah was simply a fortuitous development that offered rules and precepts that aided the Jews in their endurance, survival, and national development. The Bible is simply the work of human writers who were often ill informed, prejudiced, and superstitious.

As Matthew Stewart argues, “In short, Spinoza presents a thoroughly secular and historicist reading of the scriptures -- entirely unexceptional by modern standards -- according to which the Bible is clearly the work of human hands, and the truths it relays are, in the main, not FACTUAL but MORAL.”

Armed with his new philosophy, Spinoza saw himself, as Stewart acknowledges, as “the spiritual leader of a global revolution.”

The foundations of modern biblical criticism, and the secular worldview from which these foundations emerge, are all present and visible in Spinoza's writings. Indeed, one of the most fundamental distinctions common to the critical reading of the Bible -- the distinction between MEANING and TRUTH -- is well established in Spinoza's thought. In Spinoza's own words, “the point at issue is merely the meaning of the texts, not their truth.” Or, as Harrisville and Sundberg explain, “The distinction between truth and meaning is crucial to Spinoza's argument. Truth refers to matters of universal significance that reason is able to discern regardless of time and place. Meaning refers to the cultural expressions and artifacts of specific peoples bound to time and place.”

Thus, the miracle accounts found in the Bible are described as meaningful, even if untrue. The “truth” of the Bible is found only in its call to “true virtue.”

Harrisville and Sundberg understand the revolutionary character of Spinoza's thought: “In retrospect, Spinoza appears to be the trailblazer of a revolutionary position. In his work the Bible has become the object of historical science. This science is unalterably opposed to the proposition that the foundation of biblical study is revealed religion. The only proper foundation of religion is human reason.”

Further: “The motivation for historical criticism of the Bible is clear. It is a primary means to free society from the destructive force of religious passion. That is to say, the purpose of this new exegesis is not proclamatory or dogmatic, but political. The content of the Bible is investigated with an eye firmly fixed on its social effect. By undercutting religious passion, Spinoza encourages doubt. From doubt, Spinoza believes there will spring the social good of tolerance.”

Thus, the anniversary of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication in Amsterdam 350 years ago serves as a reminder of the radical roots of modern biblical criticism -- and of what little remains when divine revelation is denied. The Bible is left as nothing more than a “meaningful” witness to the religious passions of the ancients, marked by all of their own prejudices, faults, and misconceptions.

Once again, we face the basic fault line in modern thought -- the line between the belief that the Bible is indeed the written Word of God and the belief that the Bible is nothing more than a fallible moral witness. Matthew Stewart is absolutely correct in noting that Benedict Spinoza's concept of biblical criticism is now seen as “unexceptional” in the modern secular academy. Beyond this, Spinoza's distinction between meaning and truth has found its way into all too many pulpits, churches, seminaries, and denominations. We can only hope that a reminder of what took place in Amsterdam 350 summers ago might serve to remind the believing church of what is at stake today.

Watching the news in the last few weeks, I couldn’t help but wonder: Who let the dogs out? And who decided to sic them on Christians?

At the University of Virginia, the school paper, THE CAVALIER DAILY, recently ran two cartoons that deliberately offended Christians. One, titled “A Nativity Ob-scene,” features Joseph asking Mary about a nasty rash. Mary tells him her rash was “immaculately transmitted.”

The second comic is titled “Christ on a Cartesian Plane.” It depicts the Crucifixion with a parabolic graph superimposed on the figure of Christ.

The CAVALIER DAILY initially refused to apologize for giving offence — even though editors apologized last year for a cartoon homosexuals found offensive. After more than two thousand angry calls and e-mails, the editors and cartoonist finally did apologize.

And then there were those charming comments from Rosie O’Donnell, speaking on the ABC TV program THE VIEW. While discussing the September 11 anniversary and the war in Iraq, O’Donnell compared “radical Christianity” to the beliefs of Islamo-fascist terrorists who murdered three thousand people on September 11. She declared, “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.”

Her comment shocked co-host Joy Behar, who said, “But Christians are not threatening to kill us. There’s that difference.” O’Donnell refused to back down.

Today even Christian vegetables are not immune to attacks. NBC recently began airing the popular VEGGIETALES cartoons on Saturday mornings. Each cartoon ends with a Bible verse. That is, they are supposed to. But just two weeks before the first episode was due, NBC ordered the producers of VEGGIETALES to edit out all biblical references. After all, they might offend people! Is this the same network that tells parents that if they are offended by prime-time sex and profanity to just turn the channel or use a V-Chip? Is this the same network that will allow Madonna to sing a song from her tour — the one she performs while suspended from a crucifix? Evidently, blasphemy and four-letter words are fine, but any positive mention of God is so offensive it has to be censored.

I may be particularly sensitive these days to religious bigotry because of what Prison Fellowship has lately endured. Last June, a federal judge shot down the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, an extremely effective pre-release program for prisoners launched by Prison Fellowship. Why? Not because of what the program did, but because of who we are. And we, as he defined us, were evangelicals who could not say or do anything without intending to convert someone else.

When we Christians see our faith treated with such hostility, our blood starts to boil. But we should remember that the Church was born into a hostile environment. Throughout history, the Church has always made its most profound witness when it was under attack. Why? Because then, more than at any other time, we have the opportunity to demonstrate the unmerited love, patience, mercy, and grace of God.

Indeed, when the culture sets the dogs on us, we have a biblical responsibility to speak the truth, yes, but to speak it in love. In so doing, we provide our greatest witness and unleash the greatest power: That’s the power of the love of God in Jesus Christ.

________

Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Founded in 1693, the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia — my ALMA MATER — is the second-oldest college in the United States after Harvard. Like Harvard, William and Mary was founded for explicitly Christian purposes: The Royal Charter listed the training of “ministers of the gospel” and the propagation of the Christian faith among the “western Indians” among the school’s founding purposes.

Not surprisingly, given the school’s history, one of the oldest buildings on campus is the chapel, designed by Sir Christopher Wren who also designed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. On the altar stood a gold cross that was donated to the school by the nearby historic Bruton Parish church in the 1930s.

I say “stood” because in October, William and Mary President Gene R. Nichol ordered that the cross be removed from the altar. His goal was to “make the Wren Chapel less of a faith-specific” place and to “make it more welcoming” to people of “all faiths.”

As you probably guessed, Nichol could not cite a specific instance of non-Christians being made to feel unwelcome by the presence of the cross.

Not surprisingly, the decision did not go over very well with William and Mary alumni and students. One alumnus wrote Nichol asking whether William and Mary students are “so fragile that the mere symbol of a religion, which they may or may not agree with, should reduce them to [a] pool of blubbering Jell-O?”

Even worse, from the school’s point of view, were the words of an alumna who has been “very generous to the college since [she] graduated.” She pledged not to “donate another penny to the school until the cross is returned to the altar” and to encourage other donors to do the same.

After the intense reaction, which included editorials in leading Virginia newspapers criticizing the move, Nichol offered another rationale: that the cross was not part of the original design of the chapel, and removing it is in keeping with the restoration of the Wren Chapel. This is my favorite, really.

This concern for William and Mary’s history here is, at best, selective. The concern for the “original” William and Mary is limited simply to architecture: the Wren Chapel being restored to its original design. But if returning to originality were really the main concern, then there would be a discussion going on about returning William and Mary to its original mission of training ministers of the Gospel and propagating the Christian faith. That discussion is not occurring.

While a subsequent compromise will allow the cross to be displayed during Christian events, the fear of offending someone still prevailed. This “fear” is also why Christian programs like the InnerChange Freedom Initiative® launched by Prison Fellowship are under attack by people who think that unwanted exposure to religion will irreparably damage people.

Understanding this fear still leaves us with the question of how do we respond in a culture that is increasingly less welcoming to our faith? For both the Christian students at William and Mary and for you and me, the answer is to be “Christ-bearers,” ourselves — living crosses.

________

Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

With contested questions of church and state abounding in our times, the religious convictions of the Founding Fathers become the stuff of controversy. In this regard, one of the more enigmatic of the Founders was George Washington himself. Just what did our first president believe about God?

The prevailing secular wisdom of recent decades held that Washington was a Deist. While the ‘Father of the Nation’ did use rather Deistic-sounding phrases and expressions, Washington clearly believed in a God who ruled directly in the affairs of nations -- something the god of the Deists would not (or could not) do.

Writing in today’s edition of USA TODAY, Michael and Jana Novak, authors of WASHINGTON’S GOD, argue that Washington had a very clear confidence in God’s providence. As they explain, “From his days as a 22-year-old lieutenant thrust into leadership on the western frontier, through his experiences as the commander in chief of a rag-tag but determined army facing the strongest army and largest navy of his time, Washington learned invaluable lessons about the character of men and the nature of God. These experiences proved to him that an intervening force was at work in American history and in his life. That knowledge sustained him.”

More:

In his private letters and public statements as commander in

chief and president, Washington seldom missed an opportunity to

give praise to Providence and to beg God to continue favoring

this nation. In his farewell address, Washington considered his

legacy to our young nation and wrote these words:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political

prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In

vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should

labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these

firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere

Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to

cherish them.”

Washington’s religious behavior, especially as a public official,

might displease those today who argue against religion in the

public square. Yet it was his trust in Providence that allowed

him to be the man that he was, and to achieve what he did.

Washington’s God, who is active in human affairs, was there at

the darkest days of our founding.

As we celebrate the birthday of a great man who made his nation

great, a nation that is again facing a great test of patience and

determination, we can take strength from Washington’s certainty

that God always favors liberty.

We are wise to avoid the rush to remake George Washington in our own image, whether ardent secularist or fervent evangelical Christian. Washington, like all of us, was a man of his times. His expressions of Christian belief must be placed within the context of his Anglican experience in Virginia -- a tradition not given to flowery expressions of personal belief.

This much is clear: Washington was no secularist, nor was he what we would now describe as an Evangelical believer. Most likely, he was a traditional Anglican believer whose trust in divine providence shaped every moment of his illustrious life. What George Washington believed about the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not fully clear. That Washington believed in a God who ruled over the nations and intervened in human affairs is clear -- and Washington was confident that God favored the cause of justice and liberty.

FOR FURTHER READING: Peter A. Lillback, President of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, argues that we should understand Washington as a devout Christian who embedded references to his personal faith in his many writings and public statements. In his article, “WHY HAVE SCHOLARS DOWNPLAYED GEORGE WASHINGTON’S FAITH?,” Lillback argues:

Within this vast collection of Washington’s own words and

writings, we now have a remarkable ability to uncover what

earlier scholars were unable to access. And when we let

Washington’s own words and deeds speak for his faith we get quite

a different perspective than that of most recent modern

historians. Washington referred to himself frequently using the

words “ardent,” “fervent,” “pious,” and “devout.” There are over

one hundred different prayers composed and written by Washington

in his own hand, with his own words, in his writings. He

described himself as one of the deepest men of faith of his day

when he confessed to a clergyman, “No Man has a more perfect

Reliance on the alwise, and powerful dispensations of the Supreme

Being than I have nor thinks his aid more necessary.”

Rather than avoid the word “God,” on the very first national

Thanksgiving under the U.S. Constitution, he said, “It is the

duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty

God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and

humbly to implore his protection and favor.” Although he never

once used the word “Deist” in his voluminous writings, he often

mentioned religion, Christianity, and the Gospel. He spoke of

Christ as “the divine Author of our blessed religion.” He

encouraged missionaries who were seeking to “Christianize” the

“aboriginals.” He took an oath in a private letter, “on my honor

and the faith of a Christian.” He wrote of “the blessed religion

revealed in the Word of God.” He encouraged seekers to learn

“the religion of Jesus Christ.” He even said to his soldiers,

“To the distinguished Character of Patriot, it should be our

highest Glory to add the more distinguished Character of

Christian.” Not bad for a “lukewarm” Episcopalian!

Historians ought no longer be permitted to do the legerdemain of

turning Washington into a Deist even if they found it necessary

and acceptable to do so in the past. Simply put, it is time to

let the words and writings of Washington’s faith speak for

themselves.

________

Lillback is also author of GEORGE WASHINGTON’S SACRED FIRE.

Somerfield, a chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom, decided to lecture shoppers about Easter. “Brits are set to spend a massive 520 million pounds [US$1.02 billion] on Easter eggs this year,” it said in a press release, “but many young people don’t even know what Easter’s all about.” It then went on to tell everyone: “the birth of Jesus.”

A hasty revision, which made reference to “Britons’ mounting ignorance regarding Easter,” changed the references to “rebirth” before a third version was released to use the word “resurrection” after it had “consultations” with the Church of England.

________

London Times

French President Nicholas Sarkozy is an unlikely scourge of European secularism: He is on his third marriage and has been called the “playboy president” by his critics.

But it is what Sarkozy has just said about the role of religion in French life that has really got his critics up-in-arms.

For more than a century, what the French call laïcité has been the defining characteristic of French politics and public life. The word, which has no English equivalent, goes beyond the separation of church and state. It is a kind of secularism that tends to see “any strong religious views as a direct threat to [France’s] freedom and way of life . . .”

Thus, discretion about one’s religious views, especially among leaders, is regarded as “a necessary part of being French.”

Sarkozy disagrees. In a book he wrote before becoming president, Sarkozy declared, “I am of Catholic culture, Catholic tradition, Catholic belief, even if my religious practice is episodic.”

He continued this theme after becoming president. He has criticized removing references to “Europe’s Christian roots” from the European constitution. In a speech in Rome last December, he emphasized France’s Christian roots. He invoked France’s ancient title of the “Eldest Daughter of the Church.”

He proposed a new version of laïcité, one that “does not consider religions a danger, but an asset.” That is because, according to Sarkozy, when it comes to teaching right and wrong, “the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor.” Well said.

Sarkozy has also stood up for France’s often-beleaguered Jewish community. He recently announced that, starting next fall, French fifth-graders will have to learn the story of at least one of the 11,000 French children killed in the Holocaust.

He defended his plan by blaming the wars of the twentieth century on the “absence of God.” He further shocked French sensibilities by adding that Nazi racism was “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

This latter point is not hypothetical for the French president, whose maternal grandfather was Jewish.

Critics are appalled by Sarkozy’s invocations of religion. As one socialist leader put it, “a speech citing God not only on every page, but on every line, creates a fundamental problem for the republic.” Others chide him for disregarding the separation of church and state.

And, of course, they do not hesitate to point out the gap between his rhetoric and his lifestyle.

I wish that Sarkozy’s “religious practice” was less “episodic.” Nevertheless, I am gratified that he is taking on what has been called a “major taboo” in French public life. This may be the first time since the French revolution that a French leader has spoken seriously to the people about God.

A French-born writer, Hilaire Belloc, put it this way, “the faith is Europe.” Without Christianity, Europe would not exist. European secularism and the denial of its Christian roots have cut it off from its own heritage, leaving it vulnerable to the challenge of Islam.

After all, you can not fight something with nothing, which is what a “post-Christian” Europe is left with. That is why I welcome Sarkozy’s message — however unlikely the messenger.

________

Copyright (c) 2008 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good..

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

WHY IS THIS GOING TO HAPPEN?

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap ofbelieving in a cause more than a faith.

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to “do good” is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

7. The money will dry up.

WHAT WILL BE LEFT?

• Expect evangelicalism to look more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith.

• Two of the beneficiaries will be the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions. Evangelicals have been entering these churches in recent decades and that trend will continue, with more efforts aimed at the “conversion” of Evangelicals to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

• A small band will work hard to rescue the movement from its demise through theological renewal. This is an attractive, innovative, and tireless community with outstanding media, publishing, and leadership development. Nonetheless, I believe the coming evangelical collapse will not result in a second reformation, though it may result in benefits for many churches and the beginnings of new churches.

• The emerging church will largely vanish from the evangelical landscape, becoming part of the small segment of progressive mainline Protestants that remain true to the liberal vision.

• Aggressively evangelistic fundamentalist churches will begin to disappear.

• Charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity will become the majority report in evangelicalism. Can this community withstand heresy, relativism, and confusion? To do so, it must make a priority of biblical authority, responsible leadership, and a reemergence of orthodoxy.

• Evangelicalism needs a “rescue mission” from the world Christian community. It is time for missionaries to come to America from Asia and Africa. Will they come? Will they be able to bring to our culture a more vital form of Christianity?

• Expect a fragmented response to the culture war. Some Evangelicals will work to create their own countercultures, rather than try to change the culture at large. Some will continue to see conservatism and Christianity through one lens and will engage the culture war much as before – a status quo the media will be all too happy to perpetuate. A significant number, however, may give up political engagement for a discipleship of deeper impact.

IS ALL OF THIS A BAD THING?

Evangelicalism doesn’t need a bailout. Much of it needs a funeral. But what about what remains?

Is it a good thing that denominations are going to become largely irrelevant? Only if the networks that replace them are able to marshal resources, training, and vision to the mission field and into the planting and equipping of churches.

Is it a good thing that many marginal believers will depart? Possibly, if churches begin and continue the work of renewing serious church membership. We must change the conversation from the maintenance of traditional churches to developing new and culturally appropriate ones.

The ascendency of Charismatic-Pentecostal-influenced worship around the world can be a major positive for the evangelical movement if reformation can reach those churches and if it is joined with the calling, training, and mentoring of leaders. If American churches come under more of the influence of the movement of the Holy Spirit in Africa and Asia, this will be a good thing.

Will the evangelicalizing of Catholic and Orthodox communions be a good development? One can hope for greater unity and appreciation, but the history of these developments seems to be much more about a renewed vigor to “evangelize” Protestantism in the name of unity.

Will the coming collapse get Evangelicals past the pragmatism and shallowness that has brought about the loss of substance and power? Probably not. The purveyors of the evangelical circus will be in fine form, selling their wares as the promised solution to every church’s problems. I expect the landscape of megachurch vacuity to be around for a very long time.

Will it shake lose the prosperity Gospel from its parasitical place on the evangelical body of Christ? Evidence from similar periods is not encouraging. American Christians seldom seem to be able to separate their theology from an overall idea of personal affluence and success.

The loss of their political clout may impel many Evangelicals to reconsider the wisdom of trying to create a “godly society.” That doesn’t mean they’ll focus solely on saving souls, but the increasing concern will be how to keep secularism out of church, not stop it altogether. The integrity of the church as a countercultural movement with a message of “empire subversion” will increasingly replace a message of cultural and political entitlement.

Despite all of these challenges, it is impossible not to be hopeful. As one commenter has already said, “Christianity loves a crumbling empire.”

We can rejoice that in the ruins, new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born. I expect to see a vital and growing house church movement. This cannot help but be good for an evangelicalism that has made buildings, numbers, and paid staff its drugs for half a century.

We need new evangelicalism that learns from the past and listens more carefully to what God says about being His people in the midst of a powerful, idolatrous culture.

I’m not a prophet. My view of evangelicalism is not authoritative or infallible. I am certainly wrong in some of these predictions. But is there anyone who is observing evangelicalism in these times who does not sense that the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential?

________

Michael Spencer is a writer and communicator living and working in a Christian community in Kentucky. He describes himself as “a postevangelical reformation Christian in search of a Jesus-shaped spirituality.” This essay is adapted from a series on his blog, InternetMonk.com.

===============

Summary from writers of the Baptist Press:

In a much-discussed piece published March 10 in The Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spencer predicts a “major collapse of evangelical Christianity” within 10 years that “will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.” (Read it at http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html).

Spencer, a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, warns that this supposed evangelical collapse “will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

“Millions of evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.”

Hysterical alarmism? Quite possibly. Spencer offers little evidence for his assertions. At the very least, his 10-year timetable for doom contradicts the slower religious and cultural shifts in the United States indicated by the ARIS report and other recent studies.

As to outward opponents of evangelical faith, there’s no shortage of them in America -- and many of them would love to silence the church’s voice in the public square altogether. But this isn’t the Middle East or the communist world, or even secularized Europe. We still have a Constitution and a vibrant tradition of freedom of speech and religion.

Spencer, however, eloquently diagnoses one self-inflicted wound that could kill us. In his words:

“We evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing and media have produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey Scripture, the essentials of theology or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.... Even in areas where evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.”

Christian pollsters have been telling us essentially the same thing for years. Are we listening?

Not long ago, organised faith seemed to be on its last legs. Now it is again a force to be reckoned with.

________

The return of ideology has taken us all by surprise, because no one expected it all to be about religion. Twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell and it seemed reasonable to suppose that all the big questions about how to organise society had been solved by history, if you had asked what could possibly disrupt this progressive consensus, hardly anyone would have supposed that the answer had anything to do with God.

There may have been a few prescient pessimists who thought Islam would be an important and dangerous disruption on the forward march to the future - perhaps important and dangerous enough to need quelling with a few brisk, punitive expeditions - but even such pessimists could hardly have imagined the fiasco that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out to be, nor 9/11 attacks and the widespread fear and loathing they have produced.

Nor could anyone have foreseen the emergence of the religious right as such a dominant force in American politics and its extraordinary takeover of the Republican party.

But now the Reaganite model of capitalism is collapsing around us, liberal democracy is no longer poised to take over the world but worrying about where and how it may survive - and the arguments about religion are back as fiercely as ever, and almost as popular. This is extraordinary. Communism would not have fallen in the way it did were it not for the passionate Roman Catholicism of the Poles, and even in the other countries of eastern Europe there were Christian groupings at the forefront of the revolutions of 1989: Lutherans in Germany, Calvinists in Romania. But these atavistic throwbacks, while they might have outlasted communism, seemed helpless against capitalism.

Sure enough, the Catholic church in Ireland imploded in scandals, and even in Poland lost much of its influence. The slow etiolation of liberal Protestantism continued. The simple message of hedonistic liberalism - there is probably no God; there is nothing to worry about; enjoy yourselves - seemed in the west entirely self-evident. The wierdos who didn’t know the enjoyment of this life was all one could hope for were clearly dying off and religion was no more than a “licensed insanity”, in the words of John Bowker, then dean of Trinity.

What changed? What brought us to the contemporary world, where millions of Muslims, Christians, atheists and Hindus understand the existence of infidels and heretics as an existential threat, against which almost any degree of violence is sometimes justified? The one thing that almost all intellectuals would now agree on is that other people’s theological and philosophical opinions threaten the continuation of human life, a belief unknown since the cold war. Of course, we all disagree about which beliefs are dangerous. Nor is there any accepted way to resolve these disagreements, or even to live with them.

Part of the answer to what changed is obviously Islam. Without the attacks of September 11, and before them the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, the idea that religion might be dangerous as well as wrong would not be nearly so widespread. But it is also, I think, related to a general realisation that, for whatever reason, the welfare states of western Europe have fallen far short of their original promise. Whether you blame Thatcherism or the 60s, it no longer seems self-evident that everyone will continue to get richer, less violent and better educated in the way that everyone took for granted in the years when churches were collapsing.

Marx said: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people... The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.”

I agree, but what if we cannot give up the “condition that needs illusions”? What if the demand to give it up is itself as infantile a piece of wish-fulfilment as anything in anyone’s scriptures? The fear of these questions is surely part of the explanation for the hysterical and apocalyptic tone of some atheists.

Asking these questions doesn’t guarantee an answer, but they suddenly seem pressing, which guarantees that religion will continue its resurrection. That’s one reason for the paper’s new site, Comment is free: Belief, today.

________

Andrew Brown is author of THE DARWIN WARS and editor of the Guardian’s new faith site at GUARDIAN.CO.UK/COMMENTISFREE/BELIEF

Merry Christmas. Seriously. And some people do mean seriously.

A vocal faction of believers, grumpy about Christmas gone wild, insist that Christians should get a theological grip.

“Christmas is being marginalized every day of the year, when pastors fail to preach who Christ really was,” says Michael Horton, who blasts these trends in his new book, CHRISTLESS CHRISTIANITY: THE ALTERNATIVE GOSPEL OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH.

Christmas without the specter of the cross, without awareness that this is a baby born to die for mankind’s sins, is a fancied-up fraud, says Horton, professor of theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary California, and associate pastor at Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, California.

“Santa becomes a substitute for Christ. He’ll give you presents whether you were good or bad. It’s hard to imagine Santa returning to judge the human race and consign anyone to hell. But that (judgment) is what Jesus came to save us from,” says Horton, who tells his children Santa works for Jesus.

But other Christians say love, peace, good will and generosity are well worth celebrating.

“A lot of the Christmas celebration is a nostalgic veneer that doesn’t really connect very deeply theologically,” says Mary Helene Rosenbaum, head of Dovetail Institute for Interfaith Family Resources, based in Boston, Kentucky. When she advises religiously mixed families, she finds what works best is pragmatic: Elevate the holiday trappings over doctrine.

“We really are becoming a secular society,” she says. “When you ask people their religious identity, they’re really talking about their sense of community and belonging,” not wrestling with ideas about God.

Even some who lament the rise of a less religious Christmas reluctantly agree with her.

“The focus on peace and giving gifts allows you to safely focus on nice things instead of the idea that God sent his son Jesus to be Christ, who dies on a cross. It’s human nature to want to take the ‘nice’ without the ‘truth,’” says Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research in Nashville.

It’s not that Christmas partying is wrong: There just has to be a larger purpose for it, says pastor and author Rick Warren. His newest book, THE PURPOSE OF CHRISTMAS, cites celebration as one of the three things announced by the angels at Christ’s birth, along with salvation and reconciliation to God.

But social scientists say several trends work against the push to focus on doctrine:

• The percentage of U.S. adults who say they have no religious identity has more than doubled, from 7% in 1990 to 15.2% in 2008, says sociologist Barry Kosmin, principal investigator of the American Religious Identification Survey and a research professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

• Data from Christian trends researcher Barna Research in Oxnard, California, finds the long-familiar bump in Christmas church attendance is mostly somewhat-regular attendees coming in from the cold more often.

• Interfaith marriages — in which couples often blur or ignore religious differences — have increased from 2.9% of U.S. adults in 1973 to 8.5% in 2006, says Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey for the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

But ultimately, the most significant reason behind the shift away from focusing on a religious Christmas that stresses the birth of Jesus may be found in the latest survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The survey found that more than half of U.S. Christians (52%) today do not say Christianity is the exclusive path to eternal life.

Horton blames Christians themselves for taking the Christ out of Christmas. “Secularism cannot be blamed on the secularists, many of whom were raised in the church. We are the problem,” he says.

As you may know, in Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, converting from Islam to Christianity is a crime punishable by death. While they don’t go that far, certain Indian states and Nepal erect formidable hurdles for would-be converts to Christianity.

And then there’s the United Kingdom.

In 2007, a 16-year-old girl was placed into foster care after being assaulted by a family member. Her foster mother had taken care of 80 foster kids over 10 years. She rented a farmhouse and was, by all accounts, completely committed to the well-being of the children placed under her care.

She is also a practicing Anglican Christian. This hadn’t been a problem. No one had ever accused her of taking advantage of her relationship to the girls for proselytizing.

The same is true of the 16-year-old in question. Still, the girl became interested in Christianity on her own; said that she wanted to attend church; and expressed a desire to be baptized. For the girl, baptism was a “washing away of the horrible things she had been through and a symbol of a new start.”

Well, that’s when the fur flew. You see, the girl was born a Muslim, and her baptism is regarded by Muslims as apostasy. If you’re thinking “so what? It’s not Afghanistan,” think again. But this is Britain, where a Christian nurse was recently suspended for offering to pray for her patients.

Thus, when the girl’s case manager learned about her baptism, she “flew into a rage.” Even though the foster mother hadn’t encouraged the girl’s interest in Christianity, she was removed from the list of foster care providers. A child who was in her custody was removed and she “lost the farmhouse she rented to look after vulnerable teenagers, due to the loss of income.”

Even more outrageously, government officials told the girl to stay way from church for six months!

To their credit, neither the foster mother nor the girl passively accepted the rulings. The foster mother has, with the assistance of Britain’s Christian Institute, challenged her removal, and the girl is supporting her efforts.

A spokesman for the Institute called the right to “to change or modify [one’s] religious beliefs” a “core human right in any free society.” He added that he couldn’t imagine an atheist foster parent being removed if “a Christian child in her care stopped believing in God.”

Beyond the double standard, there’s a tragic irony at work here. As journalist Peter Glover wrote in First Things, Britain’s “growing crime rate and out-of-control teenage pregnancies” has created “national anxiety” among Brits.

At the same time, as these cases illustrate, government and media elites have instituted a “determined program to abolish the influence of Christianity.” Brits shouldn’t be “astonished that a culture that set out to devalue its values should find itself awash in crime, sex, and social discord.”

And a country where government officials forbid a girl from going to church has clearly forgotten what makes social accord possible in the first place.

________

Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Could the rise in government spending — from economic stimulus to health care reform to education spending — endanger the vitality of religion in America? That’s a question University of Virginia Professor W. Bradford Wilcox discussed recently in the Wall Street Journal.

Wilcox zeroed in on a fascinating study entitled “State Welfare Spending and Religiosity.” The study’s authors, Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde, found an “inverse relationship between religious observance and welfare spending.” Put more simply, the more a government spends on welfare, the fewer people go to church.

This is why it is that church attendance is so low in welfare states such as Denmark and Sweden compared to countries like the U.S. and the Philippines — where government doesn’t provide cradle-to-grave assistance.

Anthony Gill hits the nail on the head. “For many centuries,” he writes, “average citizens and local communities have often relied upon the support of religious organizations to meet their various social needs, including assistance for the poor, counseling in times of crisis, and education for the young.”

But as the government grows, it elbows out the church and other voluntary associations. So Gill writes, “Many people have found that they can get the same services from the government without having to give a time commitment to the local church.”

Now, we would like to think that most people don’t stay in church just because they get can get help in times of trouble. But the truth is that many people first encounter the Church when they are in need: at a crisis pregnancy center, a soup kitchen, or in counseling for drug abuse or alcoholism. So as Wilcox writes in the Wall Street Journal, “Many of those who initially turn to religious organizations for mutual aid end up developing a faith that is as supernatural as it is material.”

Now, as Wilcox points out, there are other factors behind declining church attendance in America. But the recent turning of the body politic toward government as the answer to all our problems does not bode well for the Church.

Nor does it bode well for the future of American democracy.

In his classic book, Democracy in America, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at how Americans could accomplish almost anything through voluntary associations — especially churches. They built schools, hospitals, sent missionaries all over the world. He wrote, “I frequently admired the boundless skill of Americans in setting large numbers of people a common goal and inducing them to strive toward that goal voluntarily.”

De Tocqueville doubted that government could ever accomplish all that American citizens could do through their associations. But he also warned that if government should supplant the good work of these associations, the American people would ultimately end up dependent upon government. And this, he said, would imperil not only American democracy, but “civilization itself.”

In times of trouble, it’s natural to echo the question of the Psalmist: Whence cometh my help?

Sadly, it seems that more and more Americans these days would answer, “It cometh from Uncle Sam.”

________

Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Atheism is on the rise around the world, so does that mean spirituality will soon be a thing of the past? Rachel Nuwer discovers that the answer is far from simple.

________

A growing number of people, millions worldwide, say they believe that life definitively ends at death – that there is no God, no afterlife and no divine plan. And it’s an outlook that could be gaining momentum – despite its lack of cheer. In some countries, openly acknowledged atheism has never been more popular.

“There’s absolutely more atheists around today than ever before, both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of humanity,” says Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and author of Living the Secular Life. According to a Gallup International survey of more than 50,000 people in 57 countries, the number of individuals claiming to be religious fell from 77% to 68% between 2005 and 2011, while those who self-identified as atheist rose by 3% – bringing the world’s estimated proportion of adamant non-believers to 13%.

While atheists certainly are not the majority, could it be that these figures are a harbinger of things to come? Assuming global trends continue might religion someday disappear entirely?

It’s impossible to predict the future, but examining what we know about religion – including why it evolved in the first place, and why some people chose to believe in it and others abandon it – can hint at how our relationship with the divine might play out in decades or centuries to come.

Scholars are still trying to tease out the complex factors that drive an individual or a nation toward atheism, but there are a few commonalities. Part of religion’s appeal is that it offers security in an uncertain world. So not surprisingly, nations that report the highest rates of atheism tend to be those that provide their citizens with relatively high economic, political and existential stability. “Security in society seems to diminish religious belief,” Zuckerman says. Capitalism, access to technology and education also seems to correlate with a corrosion of religiosity in some populations, he adds.

Crisis of faith

Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, France and Uruguay (where the majority of citizens have European roots) are all places where religion was important just a century or so ago, but that now report some of the lowest belief rates in the world. These countries feature strong educational and social security systems, low inequality and are all relatively wealthy. “Basically, people are less scared about what might befall them,” says Quentin Atkinson, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Yet decline in belief seems to be occurring across the board, including in places that are still strongly religious, such as Brazil, Jamaica and Ireland. “Very few societies are more religious today than they were 40 or 50 years ago,” Zuckerman says. “The only exception might be Iran, but that’s tricky because secular people might be hiding their beliefs.”

The United States, too, is an outlier in that it is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but also has high rates of religiosity. (Still, a recent Pew survey revealed that, between 2007 and 2012, the proportion of Americans who said they are atheist rose from 1.6% to 2.4%.)

Decline, however, does not mean disappearance, says Ara Norenzayan, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and author of Big Gods. Existential security is more fallible than it seems. In a moment, everything can change: a drunk driver can kill a loved one; a tornado can destroy a town; a doctor can issue a terminal diagnosis. As climate change wreaks havoc on the world in coming years and natural resources potentially grow scarce, then suffering and hardship could fuel religiosity. “People want to escape suffering, but if they can’t get out of it, they want to find meaning,” Norenzayan says. “For some reason, religion seems to give meaning to suffering – much more so than any secular ideal or belief that we know of.”

This phenomenon constantly plays out in hospital rooms and disaster zones around the world. In 2011, for example, a massive earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand – a highly secular society. There was a sudden spike of religiosity in the people who experienced that event, but the rest of the country remained as secular as ever. While exceptions to this rule do exist – religion in Japan plummeted following World War II, for instance – for the most part, Zuckerman says, we adhere by the Christchurch model. “If experiencing something terrible caused all people to become atheists, then we’d all be atheists,” he says.

The mind of god

But even if the world’s troubles were miraculously solved and we all led peaceful lives in equity, religion would probably still be around. This is because a god-shaped hole seems to exist in our species’ neuropsychology, thanks to a quirk of our evolution.

Understanding this requires a delve into “dual process theory”. This psychological staple states that we have two very basic forms of thought: System 1 and System 2. System 2 evolved relatively recently. It’s the voice in our head – the narrator who never seems to shut up – that enables us to plan and think logically.

System 1, on the other hand, is intuitive, instinctual and automatic. These capabilities regularly develop in humans, regardless of where they are born. They are survival mechanisms. System 1 bestows us with an innate revulsion of rotting meat, allows us to speak our native language without thinking about it and gives babies the ability to recognise parents and distinguish between living and nonliving objects. It makes us prone to looking for patterns to better understand our world, and to seek meaning for seemingly random events like natural disasters or the death of loved ones.

In addition to helping us navigate the dangers of the world and find a mate, some scholars think that System 1 also enabled religions to evolve and perpetuate. System 1, for example, makes us instinctually primed to see life forces – a phenomenon called hypersensitive agency detection – everywhere we go, regardless of whether they’re there or not. Millennia ago, that tendency probably helped us avoid concealed danger, such as lions crouched in the grass or venomous snakes concealed in the bush. But it also made us vulnerable to inferring the existence of invisible agents – whether they took the form of a benevolent god watching over us, an unappeased ancestor punishing us with a drought or a monster lurking in the shadows.

Similarly, System 1 encourages us to see things dualistically, meaning we have trouble thinking of the mind and body as a single unit. This tendency emerges quite early: young children, regardless of their cultural background, are inclined to believe that they have an immortal soul – that their essence or personhood existed somewhere prior to their birth, and will always continue to exist. This disposition easily assimilates into many existing religions, or – with a bit of creativity – lends itself to devising original constructs.

“A Scandinavian psychologist colleague of mine who is an atheist told me that his three-year-old daughter recently walked up to him and said, ‘God is everywhere all of the time.’ He and his wife couldn’t figure out where she’d gotten that idea from,” says Justin Barrett, director of the Thrive Center for Human Development at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and author of Born Believers. “For his daughter, god was an elderly woman, so you know she didn’t get it from the Lutheran church.”

For all of these reasons, many scholars believe that religion arose as “a byproduct of our cognitive disposition”, says Robert McCauley, director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Culture at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and author of Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. “Religions are cultural arrangements that evolved to engage and exploit these natural capacities in humans.”

Hard habits to break

Atheists must fight against all of that cultural and evolutionary baggage. Human beings naturally want to believe that they are a part of something bigger, that life isn’t completely futile. Our minds crave purpose and explanation. “With education, exposure to science and critical thinking, people might stop trusting their intuitions,” Norenzayan says. “But the intuitions are there.”

On the other hand, science – the system of choice that many atheists and non-believers look to for understanding the natural world – is not an easy cognitive pill to swallow. Science is about correcting System 1 biases, McCauley says. We must accept that the Earth spins, even though we never experience that sensation for ourselves. We must embrace the idea that evolution is utterly indifferent and that there is no ultimate design or purpose to the Universe, even though our intuition tells us differently. We also find it difficult to admit that we are wrong, to resist our own biases and to accept that truth as we understand it is ever changing as new empirical data are gathered and tested – all staples of science. “Science is cognitively unnatural – it’s difficult,” McCauley says. “Religion, on the other hand, is mostly something we don’t even have to learn because we already know it.”

“There’s evidence that religious thought is the path of least resistance,” Barrett adds. “You’d have to fundamentally change something about our humanity to get rid of religion.” This biological sticking point probably explains the fact that, although 20% of Americans are not affiliated with a church, 68% of them say that they still believe in God and 37% describe themselves as spiritual. Even without organised religion, they believe that some greater being or life force guides the world.

Similarly, many around the world who explicitly say they don’t believe in a god still harbour superstitious tendencies, like belief in ghosts, astrology, karma, telepathy or reincarnation. “In Scandinavia, most people say they don’t believe in God, but paranormal and superstitious beliefs tend to be higher than you’d think,” Norenzayan says. Additionally, non-believers often lean on what could be interpreted as religious proxies – sports teams, yoga, professional institutions, Mother Nature and more – to guide their values in life. As a testament to this, witchcraft is gaining popularity in the United States, and paganism seems to be the fastest growing religion in the United Kingdom.

Religious experiences for non-believers can also manifest in other, more bizarre ways. Anthropologist Ryan Hornbeck, also at the Thrive Center for Human Development, found evidence that the World of Warcraft is assuming spiritual importance for some players in China, for example. “WoW seems to be offering opportunities to develop certain moral traits that regular life in contemporary society doesn’t afford,” Barrett says. “People seem to have this conceptual space for religious thought, which – if it’s not filled by religion – bubbles up in surprising ways.”

The in-group

What’s more, religion promotes group cohesion and cooperation. The threat of an all-powerful God (or gods) watching for anyone who steps out of line likely helped to keep order in ancient societies. “This is the supernatural punishment hypothesis,” Atkinson says. “If everyone believes that the punishment is real, then that can be functional to groups.”

And again, insecurity and suffering in a population may play a role here, by helping to encourage religions with stricter moral codes. In a recent analysis of religious belief systems of nearly 600 traditional societies from around the world, Joseph Bulbulia at the University of Wellington, New Zealand and his colleagues found that those places with harsher weather or that are more prone to natural disasters were more likely to develop moralising gods. Why? Helpful neighbours could mean the difference between life and death. In this context, religion evolved as a valuable public utility.

“When we see something so pervasive, something that emerges so quickly developmentally and remains persistent across cultures, then it makes sense that the leading explanation is that it served a cooperative function,” says Bulbulia.

Finally, there’s also some simple mathematics behind religion’s knack for prevailing. Across cultures, people who are more religious also tend to have more children than people who are not. “There’s very strong evidence for this,” Norenzayan says. “Even among religious people, the more fundamentalist ones usually have higher fertility rates than the more liberal ones.” Add to that the fact that children typically follow their parents’ lead when it comes to whether or not they become religious adults themselves, and a completely secularised world seems ever more unlikely.

Enduring belief

For all of these reasons – psychological, neurological, historical, cultural and logistical – experts guess that religion will probably never go away. Religion, whether it’s maintained through fear or love, is highly successful at perpetuating itself. If not, it would no longer be with us.

And even if we lose sight of the Christian, Muslim and Hindu gods and all the rest, superstitions and spiritualism will almost certainly still prevail. More formal religious systems, meanwhile, would likely only be a natural disaster or two away. “Even the best secular government can’t protect you from everything,” says McCauley. As soon as we found ourselves facing an ecological crisis, a global nuclear war or an impending comet collision, the gods would emerge.

“Humans need comfort in the face of pain and suffering, and many need to think that there’s something more after this life, that they’re loved by an invisible being,” Zuckerman says. “There will always be people who believe, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they remain the majority.”

Some Christians argue that America’s Founders were overwhelmingly Christian in their faith and outlook, and many were even evangelicals. Most secularists, on the other hand, claim that these men were Enlightenment Deists and Freethinkers, a way of saying they were atheists or at least hard agnostics.

Clearly, there were deeply committed Christ-followers, such as John Witherspoon and Benjamin Rush, who were significant but are often overlooked leaders involved in the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention. At the same time, some of our Founders, though religious, were far from being evangelical, even heterodox. But how many were Deists, as is often claimed? For example, Thomas Jefferson is often cited as a Deist.

Deism teaches that God created the universe but does not in any way intervene in the world. By this definition, none of the Founders would qualify, including Jefferson. Consider these words recorded on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial:

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

In other words, Jefferson was concerned about God judging the nation for slavery. This is something no good Deist would say. He may not have been an evangelical or an orthodox Christian, but Jefferson was no Deist.

Another example is Benjamin Franklin, often recognized as the least religious of the Founders. At an impasse during the Constitutional Convention, Franklin famously said:

In this situation of this Assembly groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that and providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance?

I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without [H]is notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without [H]is aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that “except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without [H]is concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a bye word down to future age. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments by Human Wisdom, and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.

I therefore beg leave to move — that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.

A good Deist would never seek divine intervention or rely on answered prayer. Here Franklin does both. Like Jefferson, if he was a Deist, he was a really bad one. In fact, the faith that influenced the founding was not always faithful to orthodoxy, but it was far more influential than Deism.

________

Copyright (c) 2026 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.