By Jim Mettenbrink
Each generation grows up thinking everything is normal, that is, it has always been like this. Such is the failure to read unrevised history. Currently, we live in an increasingly anti-God culture. Or has it always been this way? The scattered churches across the countryside, in the USA testify otherwise. But how did this transformation happen?
For over a year we have considered the impact of Secular Humanism, a religion of naturalism that convinced man he is his own god and that there is no supernatural God. Many who believe in the Supreme deity live as if there is no accountability to God. Within 20-50 years of the slow but deliberate introduction of Humanism into the culture, the Evanston conference (1947) convened to consider its influence. Something was noticeably wrong.
Following the conference, Loemaker opened in“The Nature of Secularism,” stating “Secularism is no longer as it was a hundred years ago, an intellectual revolt against theological domination. It has become the supporting atmosphere of our culture…. Secularism is practical atheism.”
He continued citing a British atheist forerunner of today’s Secular Humanism, G. J. Holyoake (1845), that the doctrine of morality “should be based solely in regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from a belief in God or in future life.” In other words, secularism refined morality as void of any standard except what man wants at the moment. At the time of the Evanston conference, conferees identified the secularism of the day (1940s) as not being anti-God but indifferent to God. God and His word were ignored. They traced the historical changes which transformed into the current societal religion of Humanism. Ironically this began with the rise of science, which had its origin in Christendom to discover the details and workings of all God had created. Today, the ruse is that religion (meaning supernatural theism) and science (naturalism) are not only incompatible but enemies. God has been jettisoned from the scene.
The Evanston conference report written 70 years ago was a warning of where our society is today, floundering as to our origin, and who is the real sovereign of our lives. That 51% of evangelicals in Christendom believe the Holy Spirit is a force and not a person, necessitate that we explore the Bible to find out “Who and what is God?”