A people to be pitied. Can liberty survive?

Inasmuch as Biblical Christianity in America has been deceitfully misrepresented over the last 100 years as the obstacle to peaceful coexistence in culture, it would have been to no one’s surprise that the radicalized secular Warren Supreme Court [1953-1969] banished prayer to Jehovah from public education in 1962, and the Bible from public education in 1963.

Human nature and historical events repeat themselves, Solomon observed in Ecclesiastes 1:9. And, like Jesus’ disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane [Matthew 26:45; Mark 14:41], the contemporary Church slept on as secularism plundered the Judeo-Christian heritage and Bible-based culture established by the American Founders.¹

American Christendom today does not possess the same mettle as those who fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived on the Eastern Shore in the early 17th century. Dynamis - δύναμις - the inherent, active power of God, was demonstrated as they planted the seeds that launched one of the most meteorical national rises in human history.

From those first vulnerable settlers in the early 1600s came a civilization unlike anything the world had ever witnessed: a people animated by faith, ordered by Biblical covenant, restrained by Judeo-Christian morality, and energized by the conviction that Liberty is not man’s invention, but God’s endowment.

Then, over the next 300 years, that spiritual power ignited a historical ascent - from wilderness outposts to constitutional self-government; from scattered colonies to a Republic; from persecuted believers seeking refuge to a nation founded “for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith.”

All upon the premise that rights come not from Caesar, but from their Creator.

Over the last 4 or 5 generations, the nation has become a people to be pitied most for surrendering the public square to godless secularism, and for disobeying Jesus’ ekklesia Kingdom assignment found in Matthew 16:18.

Consider the contrast. The American Founders used Proverbs 1:7 as the cornerstone of public education: “The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge.” In Hebrew it carries the weight of “first principle” - the principal thing in attaining knowledge being “the fear of the Lord.”

Secularism, by contrast, begins with man - autonomous, self-defining, self-governing, and accountable to no higher authority than himself.

It would be good to keep in mind the old adage: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

The notion advanced by secularists that contemporary education is ‘values neutral’ is delusive and brazenly ludicrous. There is no such thing as neutrality in education. Somebody’s philosophy will frame the curriculum. Somebody’s morality will govern the classroom. Somebody’s vision of man, God, truth, sin, virtue, liberty, authority will shape the souls and character of the nation’s children.

The claim that public education is ‘neutral’ - an honest broker - is merely a stick swung by secularists who refuse to embrace and worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Yet, over the last 100 years, godless secularists have been entrusted and empowered to ride herd over the spiritual, intellectual, educational, economic, and vocational levers of cultural power, while Evangelicals hide behind the heresy that you don’t polish brass on a sinking ship.

Letting the nation’s culture go down the drain certainly doesn’t match the eschatology of the American Founders. They distinctly established nearly all of the first 123 colleges and universities in the United States with Christian aim and purpose.² Their éschatos [ultimate destiny] was to bring the Kingdom of God to bear on earth.

They would not recognize present-day American Christendom.

Which brings us to Marcello Pera, born January 28, 1943, the Italian philosopher, professor, statesman, and one of Europe’s most prominent defenders of the Christian roots of Western civilization. Pera served in the Italian Senate from 1996 to 2013 and as President of the Italian Senate from 2001 to 2006.

In his classic Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians: The Religious Roots of Free Societies, Pera asks the right question: Can liberty survive once the West abandons the Biblical and Christian moral order that gave it birth?

The answer is a resounding NO - not a chance with the anemic arsenal of the present-day Church, whose impotent model measures successful ministry merely by attendance, holdings, and portfolios.

Much like what the Nazis did to pre-World War II German culture through ‘Gleichschaltung’* - bringing every institution into line until education, media, law, church, culture, and civic life all marched to the same ideological drumbeat - secularism has done to America’s once Biblically based culture.

R. Dennis Cole, the Old Testament scholar best known for his major commentary on the Book of Numbers, offers insight into the type of prophetic leadership that provides a strong Biblical framework for pastors and spiritual leaders: the true leader must walk closely with God, know His Word thoroughly, understand His full nature, and then speak faithfully in the moment, whether the required message is forgiveness and love, or judgment and justice.

Jesus did not say in Matthew 16:18, “I will build My religious institution.”

He did not say, “I will build My weekly meeting.”

He did not say, “I will build My sanctuary-centered program.”

He said, “I will build My ekklesia, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”

The modern American church must recover its voice if we are to bequeath freedom and liberty to our children, and to theirs.

Marcello Pera will have the last word:

“Today, politically speaking, liberals have won for the most part. The West 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.”

There it is.

The issue before us is not merely education, politics, or whether prayer and the Bible may be mentioned in the classroom.

The issue is sovereignty.

Will the Living God be acknowledged as the source of truth, liberty, justice, virtue, and ordered freedom? Or will the secular State continue to pose as god, training the next generation to swear allegiance to narcissism, hedonism, pharmaceuticals, and technocratic power?

Somebody’s values are going to reign supreme in the public square.

The only question is whose.

Thankfully, after a long absence, Gideons and Rahabs are returning to the public square.

David Lane

American Renewal Project

1. The phrase “sleep on” appears in Matthew 26:45 and Mark 14:41, where it is spoken by Jesus to His disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane.

2. David R. Reagan, America’s Suicide; Lamb & Lion Ministries, 2021.

* German compound word composed of gleich - same, identical - and Schaltung - circuit, wiring scheme. The word was derived from an electrical engineering term meaning that all switches are put on the same circuit allowing them all to be simultaneously activated with a master switch.