The editors of the December/January 2006 issue of Mother Jones magazine are on the war path. They have put together an issue that takes aim at some of America’s most impacting Christian ministries, American Vision included. Their beef is with the Christian religion and government. They want a completely secularized (atheistic) government, something similar to the Communist regimes of the former Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, and the former Soviet satellites. Of course, they do not position their worldview this way. They want “religious neutrality”—the impossible dream. They believe that enlightened minds will lead us into the dream-land world of utopian secular bliss. We’ve seen this before when the French rationalist philosophers gave us a revolution and a new god—reason—enforced by the sharp blade of the Guillotine.

The people at Mother Jones are running scared. They don’t know how bad off they really are. The ministries they mention are the tip of a very large iceberg. Hundreds of Christian ministries, legal defense organizations, websites, organizations, publishing houses, magazines, homeschool conventions, and worldview conferences are operating worldwide. It won’t be long before there is a worldview tipping point. While Christians are having large families, there is a birth dearth among the secularists. Homosexuality and abortion discount the future leaving it to the “dominionists,” the favorite word at Mother Jones that defines any Christian who believes the Bible applies to all of life. In time the Christian worldview will ripple through America, and Mother Jones will be what Indiana calls his mother.

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once the darling of the secular media before he said, “Man has forgotten God,” the intelligentsia dismissed his critique as “simplistic.”[1] But Solzhenitsyn was not the first to make such a “simplistic” pronouncement. Arthur Koestler “casually remarked in his autobiography Arrow In The Blue that the place of God has been vacant in the West since the end of the eighteenth century.”[2] The remarkable thing about Koestler’s statement is that he spent his entire life disdaining all traditional religion.[3]

When the God of the Bible is rejected as the sovereign ruler over the affairs of men, a substitute God fills the void, usually some man-made ideology.[4] Jesse T. Peck, author of The History of the Great Republic, writes that “nations are like their gods. The ideas which a people entertain of the Supreme Power will mould their opinions and control their actions. In other words, the religion of a government will determine its character, and settle the question of its duration.”[5] Even the skeptical philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau admitted, “Never was a state founded that did not have religion for its basis.”[6]

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We are experiencing the fall-out of two rival faiths—Christianity, a worldview teaching that God is sovereign over all He has created, and secularism, a worldview teaching that man is sovereign over all that has evolved up to this moment in time.

The issue is God or Man as the people at Mother Jones have made clear. According to humanism/secularism, man should control history. Humanism wants every vestige of Christianity expunged from every nook and cranny of life, even from the pages of history. The humanists want freedom. There is a price to pay for the denial of God, a point that the secularists at Mother Jones refuse to admit to their naive readership.

Endnotes:

[1] Lloyd Billingsley, The Generation that Knew Not Josef: A Critique of Marxism and the Religious Left (Portland, OR: Multnomah Press, 1985), 24. [2] Billingsley, The Generation that Knew Not Josef, 24. [3] Arthur Koestler in Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God that Failed (Chicago, IL: Regnery Gateway, [1949] 1981), 15-75. [4] Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, [1983] 1993).
[5] Jesse T. Peck, The History of the Great Republic: Considered from a Christian-Standpoint(New York: Broughton and Wymam 1868), 320.
[6] Quoted in Charles B. Galloway, Christianity and the American Commonwealth; or, The Influence of Christianity in Making This Nation (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1898), 20. This book has been reprinted by American Vision in 2005.