The April 1966 edition of Time magazine was famously titled “Is God Dead?” The article highlighted the counter-cultural, political, and intellectual movements of the 1960s. The increased secularization of society had led to some having the idea that God was no longer needed. Many had the idea that human civilization had “progressed” past the point of needing God. We had reached the next step of human evolution. We were now in the new age of secularism.
Secularism has become a common term today, with many shades of meaning, but we can define it simply as the indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations. The goal was to have a society free from religion, and that religion was typically Christianity. For centuries, Christianity had determined the social and moral norms, and many viewed Christianity as oppressive to human liberation.[1] Karl Marx even called religion the opioid of the masses. He believed religion kept people enslaved to capitalism and prevented them from seeing their oppression and rising up in a revolutionary revolt.
1. See Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 171.
In the 1960s, that same spirit of revolution was well awake with the feminist movement, black liberation movement, and the sexual revolution. This meant Christianity had to go with its “oppressive” beliefs regarding sex, marriage, and gender roles. Christianity stood in the way, and for people to be “liberated” and truly be themselves, they had to be free from religion. Has secularism delivered on its promises? We will examine the effect secularism has had on our society and how some who once argued for secularism have discovered that Christianity is an important component to maintaining the values of Western civilization.
Christianity: Friend Not Foe
Let’s fast forward six decades and see what the results are. Over the decades, religious beliefs and weekly church attendance have been in sharp decline. Meanwhile, the atheism, agnosticism, and spiritual-but-not-religious camps have grown. We now live in a post-Christian era, meaning Christianity no longer sets the cultural and moral standards for society. Sex outside of marriage is considered the norm; we have a high number of single parent homes; over half of marriages end in “no fault” divorce; we are now highly medicated; depression and anxiety levels are at an all-time high; people have lost a sense of identity and feel they don’t belong; we have men who are so relationship deprived they’ve given up on women; we have mass shootings and school shootings; suicides are high; and to top it off we can no longer define what a woman is.
I recall in the early 2000s Christians were fighting what was called the “New Atheism” put forward by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. The New Atheism was very aggressive towards Christianity and pushed for anyone holding to those ideas to be ridiculed as unintelligent and shunned from society. They believed Christianity was the biggest threat to liberal democracy and a free society.
Incredibly, many of those same atheists are now co-belligerents with Evangelical Christians because society has lost almost every sense of rationality or rational argument. What many have come to realize is that our classical liberal society doesn’t work without the Judeo-Christian moral framework on which America was built.[2] John Adams, one of the founding fathers, said “Our constitution is written for a moral and religious people.” The founders understood that a free society must be constrained by moral convictions. If you remove the moral framework you end up with debauchery and chaos. The atheists and progressives thought that by removing Christianity there would be a void that reason and science would fill. They believed there would be no moral or religious authority. But they were very wrong.
2. See Mark David Hall, Did America Have a Christian Founding? Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2019).
Not only are things such as reason and science under attack today, but secularism simply led to the religious and moral authority of secular progressivism itself. That is, a new moral and religious authority simply took Christianity’s place. That religion goes by “wokeness,” or by its more technical names of critical theory, anti-racism, and intersectionality. Without getting into the historical and philosophical beliefs of “wokeness.” I will simply define it as a set of presuppositional beliefs or a lens of seeing the world through power structures and determining some groups to be oppressed or oppressors based on various characteristics such as race and gender. These oppressed groups must be affirmed and advocated for and the oppressor groups must be “divested of their privileged position” in order to bring about inclusion and “equity” amongst the various groups. John McWhorter is an intellectual, writer, and self-professed atheist who has convincingly shown that wokeness is a religion. In a 2021 article he writes:
“One is to accept that beyond a certain point—and one arrives at the point quite quickly—one is to treat logic as optional and simply have faith. The Antiracism religion, then, has clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin. Note the current idea that the enlightened white person is to, I assume regularly (ritually?), “acknowledge” that they possess White Privilege… The proper response to original sin is to embrace the teachings of Jesus, although one will remain always a sinner nevertheless. The proper response to White Privilege is to embrace the teachings of—well, you can fill in the name or substitute others—with the understanding that you will always harbor the Privilege nevertheless. Note that many embrace the idea of inculcating white kids with their responsibility to acknowledge Privilege from as early an age as possible, in sessions starting as early as elementary school. This, in the Nacireman [American culture] sense, is Sunday school.”
McWhorter is clearly not promoting a belief in Christianity. However, what he does a good job of is pointing out the religious framework and workings of wokeness. This new religion tells us what we must affirm as good and what we must deny as evil and hateful. It tells us what words are acceptable and which are not—and anyone found holding the wrong beliefs are canceled or ridiculed. This new religion is antithetical not only to Christianity, but to classical liberalism. The new religion calls for tearing down the current system by labeling it terms such as “systemically racist,” “misogynistic,” and “sexist.” Douglas Murray, another self-professed atheist and an openly gay man, had this to say about the new religion and its opposition to Christianity.
Crucially, this new religion constitutes something to do. With all other grand narratives collapsed, the religion of anti-racism fills people with purpose and a sense of meaning. It gives them drive and allows them to imagine a perfectible upland towards which they and everyone else on Earth might strive. It imbues them with confidence and consolation, dividing the society they are in between saints and sinners in a way that gives them the illusion of great perception . . . Perhaps most crucially, it also allows them to make war on what were their own origins. The appeal of this should not be underestimated. The instinct to destroy, to burn and to spit on everything that has produced you is a very deep-seated one . . . Most remarkably of all, the new religion believes not just that it owes nothing to its origins but that those origins are in fact part of the problem. This even though traditions of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and anti-slavery are to be found within the Christian heritage.
The fight over truth further divides those who hold to the new religion versus those who hold to the old religion of classical liberalism. In the new religion of wokeness, we’re told experiences and feelings are what determine truth, so oppressed groups must bring “their truth” to the table. As the National Museum of African American History and Culture put out in 2020, objective linear thinking and the scientific method are products of “whiteness.”
I even heard one prominent Christian pastor who has been influenced by this new religion make the argument that different cultures have different ways of discovering truth, so we need to be open to that. In the new religion, truth is simply cultural and relative. It is a postmodern view of truth. In contrast, the New Atheist movement leaned heavily on objective truth and science and now sees this new religion as the biggest threat to society, and Christianity is seen as a partner in this fight against wokeness. The previous disagreements atheists had with Christians weren’t about whether objective truth existed, but over how do we discover it and what is the authority. They believed only in the scientific method while Christians argued for a doctrine of creation that gave rise to science.
For example, biology affirms what God’s word stated in Genesis, “He created them male and female.” But this new religion completely rejects objective truth and science for feelings and experiences. If a man feels he’s a woman, then that feeling must be affirmed as true. If a minority feels an experience was racist, then we must affirm that feeling as true. This is how we got to the point of saying men can get pregnant. Biology, science, and God’s word go out the window. To not affirm those feelings as true is a cardinal sin in the new religion.[3]
3. For more on this turn to the scientific, psychological, and therapeutic, see Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 234–352.
The Future of Secularism
So, is secularism, which arose in the 1960s and metastasized throughout the culture, dead? I hope that is the case, because we have seen where it leads us. Unfortunately, as long as we inhabit a fallen world, secularism’s poisonous fruits will be excused and then retried when enough people forget what happened last time.
Yet, for Christians we must remember that secularism doesn’t lead to some free and easy utopia of reason and science. Rather, it leads to an even more oppressive religion with its own set of moral values, and this new religion is not compatible with the principles and values of the old. In fact, they are the exact opposite. This is what many atheists and classical liberals are beginning to understand. Whether they believe in it or not, Christianity is needed for a free society. Indeed, without such morality underwritten by Christianity, there are no guardrails to human depravity. There is no moral argument as to why kids shouldn’t attend drag shows or be given puberty blockers and genital mutilation surgeries, or why we shouldn’t assist people with self-murder, or why late-term abortions (or abortion in general) are wrong, or why a “high value” man cheating on his wife isn’t just “exercising his options.” Once the center has lost it gravitational pull, everything begins flying out into the void.
I listen to liberals talk about what’s wrong with our society today, and ironically the number one thing I hear advocated for is marriage and family. Mary Harrington recently wrote a book titled, Feminism Against Progress. In it, she details how progressive feminism has failed women by feeding them false promises that ultimately destroyed families, and this has had a major negative impact on society. Her solution is that women must re-embrace covenantal marriage again and a true feminism of care. Incredibly, this “reactionary feminist” is beginning to sound a lot like the old “oppressive” Christian moralism!
Secularism has been a failed experiment because it failed on its promises to deliver a reasonable society without religion, and people are seeing the need to turn back to the values that made our society flourish in the first place. This is a good thing—but we can’t simply inject the values without injecting God. That was the fallacy of secularists to begin with. They thought we could maintain the foundational ideas and principles without the foundation itself: God.
Recently, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a renowned atheist and former Muslim announced that she is now a Christian. Part of the reasoning behind her conversion was that atheism and secularism are insufficient to overcome the threats we face to our civilization. She writes,
But we can’t fight off these formidable forces [of authoritarianism, China, Russia, global Islamism, and woke ideology] unless we can answer the question: What is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order.” The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Ayaan understands that the Christian worldview is necessary for western civilization to survive. This is why we need Christians to be bolder and more open in the public square in their beliefs. We need churches that courageously speak the truth in love by proclaiming God’s word from the pulpit and that are eager to evangelize and disciple outside their walls. In other words, we need a revival—not a revolution. We need a nation of people who understand once again that there is an ultimate authority and Lawgiver above the self. The thought of this makes many secularists cringe, but there is no other hope. We can have Christ, or we can have Marx. But we can’t have nothingness.
The choice is ours.
