The Triumph of Secularism

Wow. DUSTY
[cough]

Been a while - a long while - since I've been back to the old Abbey. Too long. Looks like the Minstrel has been around - though not recently enough to knock down the cobwebs - and been musing mightily about worship. Great stuff. The Abbey should put up a billboard down the mountain in Evangelicalville, to invite tourists up to do a little reading. But I hear the circus is still in town, so there probably wouldn't be much response.

Speaking of circuses. The election is now over, and I thought I might share a thought or two.

First off, though I am not (as this post will make clear) an Obama supporter, I believe the clear biblical mandate is that Christians honor their leaders - even the ones they disagree with. And I think that slogans like, "It's an Obamanation" are not only really lame double-entendres, they're just plain inappropriate. That said...

Sometimes when people are asked who they are voting for, and they don't want to share any specifics, they flash a coy smile and say something like, "I'm voting for the good guys!"

I've always wished I could say that, but honestly never really felt like it was fully truthful. This year, I really felt like I was voting for the not-quite-as-bad guys. Or that I was not so much voting for a candidate, as voting against an ideology. And the ideology against which I voted seems to have prevailed in the General Election, and seems to be prevailing more and more in our culture. It's the ideology of increasing secularism.

It's not that I really expected Sen.Obama to lose. It seemed to most people, myself included - based not only on polls, but also on the prevailing winds - that more people would put their support behind the charismatic, rhetorically polished, liberal secularist this time around. The truly unexpected and disappointing thing was how many professing conservative, Evangelical Christians got caught up in that hype as well. Too many people I know, and am close to, and had assumed were well enough moored to the sufficiency of God's Word for all of faith and life to see straight in the political fog, seem to have lost their moorings, and drifted with the current.

Too many Christians have bought into the liberal position that God's Word is only good for things you do at church. For "religous" things. For "matters of faith", as if matters of faith were limited to what we preach, sing, and teach children in Sunday School. As if "church" and "religion" were just extracurricular activities that we entertain our souls with when we have spare-time from Real Life. Apparently a lot of Christians have lost sight of how God's Truth defines all of life and provides the only sure framework for rightly comprehending issues like human responsibility, the purpose and role of civil governments, the definition of justice, the foundations of righteousness, the proper use of money, the importance of objective, moral law, the objectivity of beauty, the reality of holiness, etc., etc... The idea that God's Truth is only true for those who sign up for it like a high-school elective, is a fundamentally rebellious idea. The proposal that the Truth of Scripture should be limited to the practices of the Church is the credo of man-centered secularism (I know, I know... is there any other kind?)

And it's really, honestly not that I think that Sen. McCain is the exemplar of a Christian worldview in action in the realm of government and politics. Clearly not. God knows he's not my idea of the ideal candidate. But the simple fact is that his ideals and positions come ever so slightly closer to the biblical ideals on morality, social values, the role of government, justice, and Truth than do the President-elect's. And Christians who live in a democratic nation in this world, should cast their vote for the candidate whose positions most closely resemble the values of the world to come.

I'm not so much disappointed that McCain lost, as that Obama won. And I'm not so much disappointed that Obama won, as that his self-avowed secularist agenda prevailed - and did so in large part because to a greater and greater degree, it makes sense to people who call themselves Christians. The failure of the Church to comprehensively anchor Christians' thinking to the whole counsel of God, is the triumph of secularism not only in the world, but most sadly in the Church.