Making Room for Other Gods

Walking in the Ways of Unfaithful Fathers

In the last half of the nineteenth century, secularism had not just gained a foothold in the West. It was making rapid strides to the fore.  The causes and signs of this overthrow of the First Christendom were numerous.  As is always the case, hindsight shows them up more clearly.

Many of the causes lay with the Church, God's people.  They became unfaithful in numerous ways.  They forgot what their forefathers had taught them.  They forgot that the Kingdom of Christ was and remains a totalitarian kingdom--embracing the totality of all reality throughout the entire created universe.  They accepted a dichotomy between the realms of the sacred and the secular (courtesy of Immanuel Kant) and conceded that in the secular realm, the sacred had little claim and no authority.  God had His "sphere"--invisible, secret, beyond time and history--and the material or secular world had its sphere of autonomy--independent of God, operating under its own rules, truths and authority.  Thus began the long retreat, which cast children out of formerly Christian homes, seduced Christian parents away from Christ and His Church, and gradually turned Christian loyalties more and more toward the secular god--the State.

A generation which conceives of just one sub-atomic particle operating independently of the all encompassing command of the living, infinite, eternal, and unchanging God will be followed by generations which deny God in everything.  And so it has come to pass.  The surrender began in the Church as it tried to make room for the gods of this world.

One form of the capitulation was to elevate the State to a quasi-divine position of  being the means of bringing God's Kingdom upon the earth.