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A number of articles have been published about the demise of the church in America. Newsweek, copying the cover design of the April 12, 1966 of Time magazine’s “Is God Dead?” cover, carried an article on The Decline and Fall of Christian America in its April 13, 2009 issue. Then there were the statements by President Obama that America is no longer a Christian nation. Former president Clinton has added to the argument with the claim that the United States is no longer “dominated by Christians and a powerful Jewish minority” since there is now a “growing numbers of Muslims, Hindus and other religious groups here.”[1] People like Obama and Clinton think this is a good thing. I disagree.
Multiculturalism is a type of ethical polytheism: many moral law-orders based on many gods.
Polytheism (all gods are equal) leads to relativism (all moral codes are equal); relativism leads to humanism (man makes his own laws); and humanism leads to statism (the State best represents mankind as the pinnacle of power). As Rushdoony remarks,[2] “because an absolute law is denied, it means that the only universal law possible is an imperialistic law, a law imposed by force and having no validity other than the coercive imposition.”[3]
We are being driven back to the Tower of Babel on the theological bus of multi-religionism in the name of multiculturalism. The multiculturalists are forcing the position, and the word is forcing, that all cultures are inherently equal, except, of course, Western culture which does not accept the view that all cultures are ethically equal. Biblical Christianity is their ultimate target.
The menace of multiculturalism is not new. God warned the Israelites from mixing with the surrounding nations because of the potential for ethical, not ethnic, pollution. Their separation from the nations was not, as Hal Lindsey suggests, based on racial patterns. “If the Law of Moses were still in force today,” Lindsey writes, “there would be no Church, since racial segregation of Israelites from the Gentiles was an essential part of the covenant.”[4] There were no racial barriers in Israel. The Edomites, for example, had the same ancestry as Israel. Jacob and Esau (Edom) were brothers. They were of the same “race.” The Bible tells us that God “made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26; cf. Gen. 3:20). There can be no racial superiority if one truly believes the Bible.
The separateness in Israel was over religious and ethical differences. Israelites were to steer clear of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Edomites, and Jebusites because of their religious and ethical practices, not because they were different ethnically or racially. A non-Israelite could become a part of the covenant community through circumcision and adherence to the covenant requirements. This would mean denouncing the worldview of paganism. A family could be incorporated into Israel by faith, as was Rahab’s family (Joshua 2:8-14).
Rahab was, from the viewpoint of the Israelites, a foreigner. She did not belong to the chosen people; but through faith she was accepted into their company and enjoyed the privileges and blessings from which formerly she had been excluded. In this she was an exemplification of the truth of the covenant promise that in the seed of Abraham all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 22:18; Gal 3:8f.). Especially interesting is the fact that, once incorporated into the people of God, she even won an honored place in the line that led to the fulfillment of the divine promises in the birth of Christ. Thus, according to the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, Rahab married Salmon and became the mother of Boaz, who in turn also married an alien woman, Ruth the Moabitess, who became the mother of Obed, David’s grandfather (Mt. 1:5f.).[5]
Rahab, a foreigner (Heb. 11:31; James 2:25), and Abraham, an Israelite (Rom. 4:9; James 2:23), are used as examples of Old Testament faith. Rahab abandoned her pagan religion and the ethical system that was inextricably tied to it. Israel was warned “not to follow the customs of the nation which I shall drive out before you,” God told them, “for they did all these things, and therefore I have abhorred them” (Leviticus 20:23). They were “abhorred” because of their deeds, not because they were of a certain race or nationality.
The New Testament sets up similar religious/ethical barriers. God is not the God of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles (Rom. 3:29; Rev. 15:3). But the Gentiles did not know God (1 Thess. 4:5). They were led astray to idols (1 Cor. 12:2). This resulted in them not knowing or keeping the law of God (Gal. 2:15). As a consequence, they lived in the futility of their minds (Acts 14:16; Eph. 4:17). These results are still in effect for those who reject the renewing gospel of Jesus and the ethical requirements of His commandments. Religion has consequences.
As Christians, we are not to be “bound together with unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:14). Why? “For what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols?” (vv. 14b–16). There is a correlation between worship (Christ vs. Belial) and ethics (righteousness vs. lawlessness). The multiculturalists insist that Belial is as good as Christ, therefore, righteousness and lawlessness are subjective categories that only have validity within the context of one’s accepted belief system. Since we live in what is now a pluralistic society (another name for multiculturalism), claims of right and wrong are only legitimate within the limited parameters of one’s worldview. These narrow values have no place in the melting pot of multiculturalism since they would assert that other systems of morality are inherently wrong.
Endnotes
[1] Christine Simmons, “Bill Clinton: United States growing more diverse” (June 14, 2009)
[2] Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (The Craig Press, 1973), 17.
[3] Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), 158.
[4] Hal Lindsey, The Road to Holocaust (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 265.
[5] Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 504
Article posted June 16,2009