Secularism is simply a temporary, transitional intellectual and cultural phase between the Christian Faith and neo-paganism, as Peter Jones has demonstrated. All of us are created in God’s image and therefore are at root religious beings. When we turn away from the triune God, we do not become irreligious; we eventually adopt another religion, even if under the guise of irreligion. There are no honest atheists. All of them embrace a covert, and apostate, religion.

 

The sheen of Enlightenment rationalism had already begun wearing off with the Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Romanticism in art, literature, and music championed the religious spirit in man without returning to a biblical faith. Even by then, secularism was no longer uncontested. Romanticism was, and is, a testimony that man cannot live without faith of some sort.

 

In the 20th century, the spectacular successes of science and technology (based originally, by the way, on Christian presuppositions) led many to believe that the brave new utopia would be a wonderland of secular science. The successes are real, but the prediction of a secular scientific utopia has been shown a cruel illusion. Science as a methodology is a success; science as a faith is a failure.

 

Religion, the heart-deep, basic impulse of humanity, always gets its revenge. Just as the ancient pagans turned away from the triune Creator God, so modern sophisticated secularists turn increasingly to neo-pagan spirituality, the New Age, and sex-god worship. They must have their faith.

 

The contest is never between faith and reason, but between rival faiths: those that worship and serve the Creator, and those that worship and serve the creation.

 

It’s Romans chapter 1 for 2017.

 

The solution to this conflict is not a return to the universal secular standards of Enlightenment reason; nor to a natural law that specifically excludes Jesus Christ under the naive hope that modern pagans will go along; nor a pre-60s restoration of conservative communities growing local fruits and vegetables, void of computers and iPhones, anathematizing technological progress.

 

The solution is what it always was: a return to the triune God.

 

If we are to be Christians, let us be Christians, and let us assert as clearly as possible that Jesus Christ is not merely the only way to heaven; he is also the only way to a peaceful, harmonious, law-abiding (though never sinless or problem-free) society.

 

Let us not be beguiled by the siren song of multiculturalism and assume that a mixture of (1) timid Christianity, slightly embarrassed by Jesus and God’s Word but indignant at the depravities of secularists and neo-pagans, and (2) 50s conservatism, with its alleged genteel manners and rural slowness, will produce a society safe for our children and grandchildren, all sweetness and light.

 

It will not. Jesus Christ is Lord of all things, and he will not bless any place, any culture that spurns his Lordship.

 

Our culture is to be Christian, or it is to be a disaster.

 

Pick one.