The Culture Wars, Round III

Culture Wars: Sold Out by False Prophets

The optimism of the Victorian period was pervasive. Darwin was believed to be right. The latest version of mankind was the biggest and the brightest and the best that civilisation had ever seen.

Right across the Western Church leaders and teachers agreed that mankind was entering a new, glorious age where technological and economic advancement was a harbinger of moral and social and ethical progress. The Church, in order to "keep up" came to believe it had to adopt, if not subject itself to the rationalistic questioning spirit of the Age. The Church, to maintain an audience, and to keep the respect of Unbelievers, had to agree with their basic premises. The desire for respect, and the intent to win a hearing led the Church to sell our her Lord, to sacrifice Him on the altar of human autonomy and the exaltation of human reason.

If you cannot beat them, join them was the unspoken wisdom of nineteenth century Church fathers. Many now “wanted a Christian religion that would share joyfully in all the good and beautiful things of the world and enthusiastically correct the faults and defects of society.” (L. Praasma, Elect from Every Nation, [St. Catherines, Ontario: Paideia Press], p.23). Social progress became conterminous with the Kingdom of God. The Church joined with Unbelievers of every stripe: Marxists, environmentalists, idealists, peace activists, trade unionists. They would join with these and co-labour with these so that together the Church could be in the vanguard of those entering the new promised land. This would preserve the Church's existence.

As a corollary, Church leaders and teachers began to teach that it was essential to doubt, if not flat out disbelieve the historic Christian faith. To maintain the credibility of the Church and the faith it had to demonstrate that it fully embraced the critical rationalism of the Age (which, after all, was the secret to prosperity and the bright future of Mankind). The best the more faithful could do was assert that Christianity and the Gospel was probably true, which was to say it was possibly false.

The first step to maintain the relevance and acceptability of the Christian faith was the urgent task of “separating” the essential truths from their historical packaging. So, miracles were embarrassing to the scientific rationalistic mind, but the “essential truths packaged within” the Bible's account of miracles were immediately relevant to the Age if they were unpackaged and re-communicated to continental romantics, German idealists and English empiricists and the like.

The “miracles” were just a literary device of a primitive age to teach us wonder at life, the possibility of a new beginning, the belief in being able to make a quantum leap forward in human progress—and on, and on. The miracles were thus historical literary devices—a kind of cosmic metaphor. Nineteenth century Church leaders were no longer looking over the parapet at an Unbelief as an enemy. Once they had done that and seen Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin as Goliaths to be slain. Now they were running across no-man's land shouting “we are with you!" Goliath had won and Israelites were rushing to become Philistines.

In this terrible period of defalcation and compromise, fighting the cultural war meant defecting and joining with the “other side”. The overwhelming motivation was to gain the respect of Unbelief and unbelievers. “If we show them we can be relevant, they will accept us and listen to what we are saying,” was the pervasive undertone. It was an age of fawning obsequiousness to idolatry. It is still with us, in large part, although less so. It is more difficult to be fawning and obsequious when the wolf has bared its teeth, and they are bloody.

But in those days, the pressing need was to show that the Church cared about those who had thus far missed out on the great economic leap forward of the industrial and mercantile revolutions. Yes the new Age was indeed dawning, but we need to offer a helping hand to oppressed labourers, to the poor, to the sick, and to the indigent. Then the Kingdom's glory will truly come. This, the leaders said, was the essence of Christianity.

J Gresham Machen, true Gospel warrior, captured the essence of how the Church generally had capitulated, and fawningly deserted to Unbelief, in a letter to his mother, written on November 14, 1914, after attending church:

Last Sunday I heard Dr Parkurst on Madison Square. The interior of the church building is characterized by a certain rich magnificent simplicity, and the music seemed to me the finest church music I have ever heard. The whole service was possessed of perfect unity . . . . the sermon was exceedingly stimulating. There was not a touch of Christianity in it . . .
Praasma, p.34. Emphasis, ours

Two years later (March 14, 1916), he wrote:

In the afternoon I heard Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick has great vogue—especially, I believe, among college men. And he is dreadful! Just the pitiful modern stuff about an undogmatic Christianity.
Praasma, p. 35

This, more than anything else, led to a decline in church attendance in the US and right across the West. When idolatry and unbelief began to be preached, churches emptied out. By 1900, in London churchgoing had reduced to just 16 percent of the population. It has not improved. In Germany, on the eve of World War I, just four percent of the population was attending Church on a regular basis. Of course, the percentage of “Christians-on-wheels” was far higher: that is, people who came to church only in a pram, a wedding car, or a hearse. But the reality was that already, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the West had already become post-Christian.

The decline of the Christian faith and the entering into a post-Christian era was not a twentieth century development. It was a nineteenth century malady. That century was the most overtly consistent expression of the rationalistic Enlightenment seen to date. That century made Enlightenment rationalism the established religion of Europe. Everybody, Christians and non-Christians alike all came to sing from its hymnbook.

But the fruits of this new paganism were yet to appear and ripen. Europe entered the twentieth century in a blaze of optimism and self-glorification. The New Model Man was no longer crawling: he was walking. In a few short years, he would no longer be walking, but striding—and then strutting. Then the bloodletting would begin.