By Jim Mettenbrink
Although God has planted a sense of His presence in the spirit of each person, man in his rebellious selfishness wants to deny that so he can be his own god, i.e., do what he wants to do without impunity – no accountability to anyone – let alone to stand before God. This the #1 weakness in each of us.
In his 1830 analysis (Democracy in America) of the USA, Tocqueville wrote, “America is still the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over mens souls….” That was nearly 200 years ago. For over a century we have slowly supplanted Christianity and God Himself by making man his own god and this new religion is aptly called Secular Humanism. The problem is man always chooses the path of evil and then calls it good, to salve his selfish conscience. This foolish attitude is not new.
Some 2700 years ago, Isaiah declared God’s judgment to apostate nation of Israel, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Is 5:20). And that is what we as a nation have been openly doing more and more for a century.
Constitutional scholar, John Whitehead wrote, “Secular Humanism poses a serious constitutional quandary because its purpose is to eliminate traditional theism as a significant aspect of reality by forcing traditional theism from the arena of public discourse and American institutional life” (1978). How did this happen in a nation that was founded with a deep reverence for God and the Bible?
In that same decade, Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood wrote remorsefully about the pagan misstep of the world, “Only by terrific moral recovery are we going to keep the world from becoming a dark age” (1974). Better stated, the moral recovery would necessarily mean a return to God and His word as the first step of restoring the correct morality.
However, by the late 1940s, this progressive replacement of God with and by man became evident and of great concern. The conclusion following the Evanston Conference (1947) was published in The Christian Faith and Secularism (1948). The introduction states the stages of secularism’s takeover of a people. Essentially it is “the repudiation of God as the source of such spiritual unity and power. In other words man is the source. More from this conference’s conclusions next.