Wednesday 16 December 2009

US Idolatry and False Messianism, Part IV

God is Progress, and Progress is God

Over one hundred and fifty years, to the end of the eighteenth century, the faith of American Christians was gradually and subtly secularized. This was not an isolated phenomenon: it was just one more manifestation of the growing influence of the Enlightenment and its substitute religion of secular rationalism. This secularization matured into a fully-blown belief in American Manifest Destiny--an ideology which puts forth America as the most exceptional nation upon the earth, with a special calling to bring freedom to all mankind.

This, in turn, has made the US the most bellicose and warlike nation in the world. For the past fifty years, US forces and military have been fighting someone, somewhere. It is the only nation in the past two hundred years to have been engaged in a Fifty Years War, and counting. Shamefully, much of the animus and impetus for the idolatry of Manifest Destiny has come from within the bosom of the Christian church itself.

Idolatry can overtake a people in two ways: by imposition as a result of being conquered by another nation, or by subtle insinuation into the culture from the inside out. The Enlightenment apostasy was very definitely of the latter kind: from the inside out. Ironically, by the twentieth century, the United States would be acting relentlessly in the world to advance the idolatry of the Enlightenment just as much by armed conquest as by subtle insinuation. But we get ahead of ourselves.

Let us recapitulate the perversion of the Christian faith which had taken hold in most Christian churches in the US by the end of the eighteenth century. Hatch summarizes the idolatry this way:
“Following the logic of their own eschatology, clergymen placed the American nation at the center of redemptive history. They knew that only a republic could 'wake up and encourage the dormant flame of liberty in all quarters of the earth . . . and thereby open and prepare . . . minds for the more easy reception of the truth and grace of the gospel.'” (Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 156). The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England
In the end, the cause of liberty had become a sacred or religious in the United States.

If we fast forward one hundred years to the closing of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries these beliefs had flowed fully into deeply held convictions about America's place in the world, about it being a harbinger of goodness and grace to mankind, about a Manifest Destiny of the United States to usher in an age of peace and prosperity and liberty for all, and to a belief in America being exceptional, unlike, or better than, all other nations upon the earth. America would lead all the rest of the nations of the earth to greatness.

We argue that there is a direct connection between Hillary Clinton (and numerous predecessors) in our present age asserting that it is the duty and role of America to “make the world safe for democracy” and the widely held views at the end of the eighteenth century that America would lead the world, through liberation of all the nations, to embrace the Gospel of God. The only thing that has “got lost in the translation” is the bit about the Gospel (which was inevitable, since God is not to be served by our craven lies.) But the development of the idolatry into its current form did not happen accidentally. There is one more significant iteration to be noted—which occurred in the last half of the nineteenth century, and it to this that we will turn next.

The nineteenth century was the century of nationalism in the West. Unified nation states were formed (Germany, under Prussian dominance, Italy); bloody wars were fought of forced unification were fought when a nation state broke up (the American Civil War); and national rivalries intensified through imperial expansion of Western nations around the world. The United States was not immune from these currents. The assertion of national superiority was found in that nation as well, as we have seen.

The United States believed (and still believes) it represented a never-before-seen development in human history—certainly in the modern period. It is a nation formed around philosophical ideas of liberty, equality, and human rights. These rights were universal, common to all men. Therefore, it falls upon the United States, as its particular burden and responsibility, do all it can to extend these ideas, beliefs, freedoms and rights to all mankind.

But throughout the nineteenth century it was also widely held in the United States and in the churches that the extension of these rights to all mankind was to be via peaceful means. It was loosely linked to the Christian faith and the Christian Gospel. Just as the Gospel was to be spread peacefully by means of merely proclaiming God's message of redemption in Christ, the United States was to prepare the way for the Gospel going to all the earth by maintaining an open hand of friendship toward all people, showing them by word and deed how free people lived.

Thus the United States maintained a foreign policy of splendid isolation in which they stayed away from entangling alliances that might lead the nation into war. People are mistaken, however, if they believe that splendid isolation meant non-engagement with the rest of the world, and withdrawing into a fortress. The opposite was the case. It sought to trade with all; interact with all; open up its borders to all. It was, however, reluctant to enter into treaties and alliances with other nations, for such entanglements could not only lead to war, but they necessarily divided the world up, excluding some nations and peoples. The United States preferred to maintain a posture of neutral friendliness towards all so that the light of Nature would break forth around the entire world. It was the Manifest Destiny of the United States to undertake this great duty and responsibility. It had been blessed by a deistic god: therefore it was responsible to share that blessing with others.

For a time it appeared that Enlightenment rationalism and the Christian faith could cohere. They were apparently kissing cousins. Many otherwise faithful and true Christians were deceived into believing this to be the case. They believed that the exercise of autonomous human reason upon the “raw material” of Nature would lead men inevitably to a belief in Nature's God. For a long time many unconverted thinkers more or less agreed. They spoke openly and enthusiastically of a god, but, of course, the god of which they spoke was not the God Who had revealed Himself in the Scriptures. As Unbelief matured in the West, unsurprisingly Christian beliefs were assumed less and questioned more: lo and behold, suddenly Nature began to “tell” a different story.

Initially, the Enlightenment philosophes had proclaimed that whilst God had created the world, He had left it to men to learn of Him and know Him through studying His handiwork in Nature. But Unbelief has an inevitable relentless animating spirit which means that Unbelief in the end “will out” and become more and more aggressive. Unbelief, given enough time, becomes more and more consistent and true to itself. There is a progress and maturing of evil, as Romans 1: 21--32 points out. So it was inevitable that the next generation of Enlightenment philosophers and scientists became comfortable with the idea that to all intents and practical purposes Nature itself was god. Unbelief firstly will assert autonomy for human reason over just one atom of the material world; it ends up trying to banish God from the universe entirely.

The nineteenth century in the West witnessed a relentless assertion of Nature over the god they had once acknowledged and spoken of (as, for example, in the American Declaration of Independence). At the same time this was accompanied by a wildly euphoric optimism in human progress and evolution. Rapid development in scientific knowledge, discoveries, and inventions fuelled the euphoria. The so-called “god of the gaps” was shrinking by the day, as scientists, engineers, inventors progressively filled in the “gaps”. The knowledge gained under the aegis of autonomous reason was sure, certain, confirmed, objective and true—or so it was thought.

The explosion of knowledge that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, coupled with the rapid acceptance of a naturalistic evolutionary cosmogony, meant that all previous ages were regarded as being primitive, superstitious, and ignorant—including the Church, the ancient Jewish people, along with religious people of all kinds. Metaphysical speculators were out; engineers were in. America became the "can do" nation. (Obama's campaign slogan in 2009 of "Can we do it? Yes we can" was eerily redolent of the essence of American idolatrous self-belief.)

Christian leaders, theologians and teachers in the United States had generally accepted the autonomy of human reason in its study of the natural world. Men, believers and unbelievers alike, were seen as discovering “true truth” through the research and investigation of Nature; what they discovered, they believed, was God's truth. Reason was a reliable and authoritative guide to discover true truth, which was God's truth, since God is truth. Believers and Unbelievers stood on common ground—or so they postulated.

The depth and extent to which this view was held amongst even the most otherwise orthodox Christians in the United States is illustrated in the following passage written by Benjamin B. Warfield at the end of the nineteenth century:

It is the distinction of Christianity that it has come into the world clothed with the mission to reason its way to dominion. Other religions may appeal to the sword, or seek some other way to propagate themselves. Christianity makes its appeal to right reason, and stands out among all religions, therefore, as distinctively 'the Apologetic religion'. It is solely by reasoning that it has come thus far on its way to its kingship. And it is solely by reasoning that it will put all its enemies under its feet. (Cited in George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism 1870—1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 115. Emphasis, ours.)

However, as Unbelieving rationalists increasingly and more stridently “discovered” the natural order to be an order without any god at all, Christian rationalists, teachers, theologians and leaders began a rapid transformation of the Christian faith. Thinking that they had to act in order to "save" the Gospel and keep it relevant to society, they transmuted the Gospel itself. The Kingdom of God came to be identified with the amazing technological age which they believed was dawning upon human kind at the end of the nineteenth century. The coming of the Kingdom was now synonymous with the progress that mankind (in the West) had made in the past century. The explosion of knowledge, science, and inventions was the very manifestation of God Himself in the world; it was the very coming of His Kingdom.

By this stage, personal and genuine faith in the true Messiah of God was an optional extra—a nice-to-have, but not really necessary. For the Kingdom of God was coming anyway, as mankind progressed from one degree of scientific, technological, and economic glory to another. The churches not only agreed with this wretched idolatry—they became its main cheerleaders. Professing themselves to be wise, church leaders were being given over to darkness.

So, we need to understand the world-view of church leaders at the end of the nineteenth century (ever keeping in mind that preachers and church leaders were far more influential in public discourse than today). By the end of the nineteenth century it was widely believed that the full manifestation of the Kingdom of God was about to dawn upon mankind. Once again man was standing at the very cusp of the end-times. Optimism for the future knew no bounds. But now it was believed that the end-times were an era of unparalleled prosperity and wealth, where mankind enjoyed the full fruits of economic and technological progress. Naturally, as the Kingdom came and technology flowered, poverty would be banished. Injustice would cease. Education would burgeon. Freedom would flourish. And the United States would lead the world in all these things. She was the special favoured nation appointed by this reformulated god to usher in this final glorious era of his kingdom. America would first witness to the world through showing its greatness, its peace, its prosperity, its freedom, its justice. Then it would reach forth its hand and lead all other nations to the "promised land".

And so the stage was now set for perpetual war. In our next post, we will trace how the idolatry of believing that the United States would bring peace to the world has led to that nation engaging in war in almost every continent in the world. When the Living God gives a nation up to its idols, official, institutional, and never ceasing bloodshed results.

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