Amazing Grace Versus Stunning Disgrace

Bowing The Knee to Baal and Molech

The following provides an excerpt from a much longer piece, entitled Something Wicked This Way Comes: The de-Christianization of America and What a Post-Christian America Will Look Like Without Revival written by Larry Taunton.

The entire article is an excellent piece and warrants repeated reading.  The excerpt below gives a sense of the much longer piece.  We have reproduced the excerpt in part because of the arresting insights it gives to former British PM, Tony Blair vs Barack Obama.  Taunton writes:

In the secular European model, as in the Roman Pantheon, all religious “truths” are declared to be equally valid, provided all bend the knee to the ultimate truth, the State. And just as with Rome, Christianity, by its very nature, subverts any government with these ambitions. One finds this rebellious spirit in the Decalogue: “That shalt have no other gods before me.” As I explained in an interview with Fox News’ John Stossel, in the biblical worldview, the state is a temporal institution meant to serve man, an eternal being. In the progressive model, this is reversed: man, a temporal being, serves the eternal state.

Nowhere have I seen these two diametrically opposed worldviews on display more than at the National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) in 2009. It has been my privilege to attend several of these events over the years. Since the first Eisenhower administration, the sitting President of the United States has gathered with ordinary men and women, public figures, heads of state, and various other notables to pray for our country.

Perhaps none was more intriguing than the 57th edition of this event. Joining the newly elected President Obama and First Lady on the dais on this occasion were Vice President Joseph Biden, Congressmen Heath Shuler and Vernon Ehlers, Christian singers Casting Crowns, and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair.

If you think that an eclectic gathering of this kind might be vague when it comes to identifying the entity to whom prayers are directed, your skepticism is not altogether misplaced. The NPB, once an explicitly and unashamedly Christian affair, has become, like America, pluralistic in nature. One may reasonably wonder at the price such harmony is purchased. A unity that affirms no doctrine or creed is shallow and affirms nothing at all but unity for its own sake.

However, Tony Blair’s keynote speech came as no small surprise. Blair began with the usual greetings and well wishes to the new president, but swiftly moved to matters of more significance. He warned of the dangers of radical Islam and the rising tide of “an increasingly aggressive secularism, which derides faith as contrary to reason and defines faith by conflict.” The latter was a clear shot at the militant atheists who are treated like rock stars in Britain. Blair also expressed his doubts about the ability of even a moderate secularism to provide a basis for society: 

"I only say that there are limits to humanism and beyond those limits God and only God can work…. We can perform acts of mercy, but only God can lend them dignity. We can forgive, but only God forgives completely in the full knowledge of our sin. And only through God comes grace; and it is God’s grace that is unique. John Newton, who had been that most obnoxious of things, a slave-trader, wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” “Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear. And Grace, my fears relieved.” It is through faith, by the Grace of God, that we have the courage to live as we should and die as we must."

President Obama followed him with what was supposed to be an account of his own conversion to Christianity, but it was clear that he did not understand Christianity at all, as there was no talk of sin, repentance, or Jesus Christ. Christianity seemed to consist of “God’s call to a higher purpose.” His was a civic religion where God serves as a kind of cosmic cheerleader who accommodates himself to us and our purposes, rather than we to him and his. And where both men quoted from other religious texts, Blair quoted them to make a Christian point while Obama quoted them to make a secular one. The contrast was striking.

Taunton's entire article is definitely worth reading.