US Pays Price for Generations of Secularism

On Christmas Eve, 1956, in New York City, antagonistic secularism had not yet seized the spiritual, intellectual, educational, economic and vocational mountains of influence in America, but that was about to change.

Three years earlier, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred Vinson had died from a heart attack at the age of 63, and President Dwight Eisenhower had nominated California Governor Earl Warren (1891-1974) through a recess appointment just in time for the 1953 October term. Chief Justice Warren was confirmed by the Senate by a voice vote on March 1,1954.

Secularism’s baleful run on America began in the late 18th century. With its motto “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” (liberty, equality, fraternity) stemming from the blood-soaked French Revolution of 1789, the so-called Age of Enlightenment began infiltrating America’s halls of higher learning. The newly minted secular religion introduced a forbidding school of thought devoid of God and commenced the call for “hope and change” as well as undermining the biblical foundation the Founding Fathers laid down to secure sustainable freedom.

President Eisenhower’s capital mistake of deeming Warren a fellow moderate Republican led to the infamous Warren Court, whose reign of 15-plus disastrous years between early October 1953 and late June 1969 would become known as “the most liberal court in U.S. history.”

Evidently dissatisfied with the Christian moorings put in place by America’s founders over the 17th and 18th centuries, the Warren Court eliminated prayer in 1962 from public education and the Bible in 1963. By that, it essentially raised unholy carnal man to a level bordering on sanctity.

Lone dissenting Justice Potter Stewart (1915-1985) condemned the 8-1 Abington v. Schempp decision as “not leading to true neutrality with respect to religion, but to the establishment of a religion of secularism.” The Wall Street Journal added that secular atheism was now “the one belief to which the state’s power will extend its protection.”

It has resulted in the sheer impossible task of trying to explain to modernized America’s largely biblically illiterate population that distancing the culture from God will have dire implications. With three to four generations of young Americans now having been wholly and exclusively exposed to secular propaganda and inculcation, the ungodly consequences are on open display in the perverted culture of today’s America.

All this was undertaken with full knowledge and deliberation, as willful neglect and disregard frittered away the precious endowment bequeathed by the American founders. Consider for a moment just how far this has gone with the burning and looting of America’s cities; the grand-scale Gibeonite-style COVID deception and government overreach by secular zealots such as disconsolate armchair physician Dr. Anthony Fauci and peremptory Govs. Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer and Janet Mills; the murder of 60 million preborn babies; the increase of suicide, hopelessness and domestic violence; and the exaltation and normalization of homosexual iniquity. All show the signs of irrationality and enmity for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Trying to speak with secularists about communion with God, the sense of pardon, the lively expectation of heaven, the witness of the Holy Spirit or the struggle and rigor of the spiritual life will be like reasoning with “a blind man about colours, or with one deaf about musical harmony,” Rev. Dr. John Morison (1791-1859) said.

The point may be made that both government-run educators and Christians look upon education as a way to instill knowledge. While they may call it by the same name, secularists neither comprehend true knowledge nor its riches, for true wisdom and knowledge are derivatives of a spiritual component: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning [Hebrew, principal part] of knowledge,” and “wisdom,” as it says in Proverbs 1:7 and Proverbs 9:10, respectively.

Dr. Bruce K. Waltke, the foremost living authority on wisdom literature in the Old Testament, clarifies that “what the alphabet is to reading, notes to reading music and numerals to mathematics, the fear of the Lord is to attaining the revealed knowledge of [Scripture].”

Jewish Hebrew scholar Michael V. Fox puts it thus: “The fear of God [in other words, religious illumination] is the starting point of the educational process, not a substitute for it.” And in the words of Scottish biblical scholar William McKane (1921-2004): “Without this basic reverence for Yahweh and submission to him, there can be no acquisition of wisdom.”

Which brings us to Cardinal Robert Sarah, born in 1945 to parents who had embraced Christ after turning away from animism in rural French Guinea. Cardinal Sarah’s prominence today in the College of Cardinals and the Roman Curia has come, in part, from his vigorous defense of traditional Catholic teachings on sexual morality, the right to life and the denunciation of Islamic radical extremism.

Sarah singles out 1) gender ideology and 2) ISIS as the two “radicalizations” threatening humanity; the former through divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion, and the latter through false ideology. In plain language, the cardinal leaves no room for uncertainty for those pushing an agenda in rebellion against the living God and His unending order. Essential faith decisions and rejoinders, after all, are not open for discussion with Jehovah God.

Although Sarah would make a wonderful pope, he has been sidelined to a large extent by Pope Francis’ ultra-liberal, social justice agenda. According to Sarah, “the West no longer knows what it is, because it does not know and does not want to know what shaped it, what constituted it, what it was and what it is. … This self-asphyxiation leads naturally to a decadence that opens the way to new barbaric civilizations.”

Marcello Pera (born 1943), a Catholic and former president of the Italian Senate from 2001 to 2006, addresses the issue of “self-asphyxiation” in his phenomenal publication, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians: The Religious Roots of Free Societies, bringing into sight the spiritual enemy facing America:

“Today, politically speaking, liberals have won for the most part. The West [read America] has liberal constitutions, liberal institutions, liberal economies and liberal systems of education. But we are so far from ‘the end of history’ that the same breach between liberalism and Christianity that shook our civilization a few generations ago is now presenting itself in a new form. Not in the violent forms of Nazism or communism, but in the form of liberal secularism. For the destinies of Europe and the West, this ideology is no less dangerous; it is rather more insidious. It does not wear the brutal face of violence, but the alluring smile of culture. With its words, liberal secularism preaches freedom, tolerance and democracy, but with its deeds, it attacks precisely that Christian religion that prevents freedom from deteriorating into license, tolerance into indifference, democracy into anarchy.”

The Right Rev. Robert Mossom, D.D., M.A., (1617-1679), and bishop of Derry from 1666 to 1679, accurately explains the dilemma in the following words: “There are the ‘ways’ of men, and the ‘ways’ of God; the ‘paths’ of sin, and the ‘paths’ of righteousness: there are ‘Thy ways’ and there are my ways; Thine the ways of truth, mine the ways of error; Thine that are good in Thine eyes, and mine that are good in mine eyes; Thine that lead to heaven, mine that lead to hell.”

The American Renewal Project’s social media virtuoso, John Murphy, issues the ekklesia challenge that “every church in America should have at least one pastor, ministry leader or congregant that holds an elected public office.” Amen to that.

We call upon all Gideons and Rahabs to engage the public square, so that the nation can hold out. {eoa}

David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.