Today’s topic is strangely paradoxical: the less relevant we believe it to be, the more relevant it becomes.
We’ll begin with this: The Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the New Orleans Saints yesterday. This is good news in Pittsburgh, bad news in New Orleans, and not news for the rest of us.
Except that the game was the first ever played in Paris and took place amid some of the most violent public demonstrations in that country’s recent history. The day before the game, more than four hundred thousand people protested across the nation over school funding and soaring living costs. The chaos has been so threatening that President Trump believed the NFL should have postponed the game.
The demonstrations have caused many to cite the French Revolution of 1789, which began when Parisians stormed the Bastille, attacking the medieval prison to seize gunpowder and weapons. The guillotine claimed the lives of King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and thousands of ordinary citizens. Then came the Reign of Terror (September 1793 to July 1794), during which twenty to forty thousand people were executed.
As Dr. Ryan Denison notes, the French Revolution “was, in many ways, an attempt to establish a godless version of American democracy.” In his book Last Call for Liberty, cultural commentator Os Guinness agrees and warns that the French vision of a secular country bereft of religious influence has come to dominate American culture as well.
However, to this point, you’re likely wondering what this has to do with you personally. You probably don’t live in France and probably don’t think you can do much to change secularism in America.
But secularism in America is doing much to change you, for reasons we need to discuss today.
How Machiavelli continues to change the world
In his new book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy, famed Harvard historian Harvey C. Mansfield reports that the “modern” world began with the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), who worked to “liberate” humanity from the medieval and allegedly irrational customs of religion by offering the rational order of human reason.
Christianity indeed embraces clear antinomies, the acceptance of contradictory truths as both true. We believe that God is three and one, Jesus is fully God and fully man, the Lord is sovereign and we are free, and the Bible is divinely inspired and humanly written. In addition, the biblical worldview positions humans as creatures before our Creator, subjects of sovereign ways that we will never fully understand (cf. Isaiah 55:8–9).
Modernity calls us from such “irrationality” into human rationality that is logical and offers us the power to control our world ourselves. We don’t need to pray for God to save us from the weather, for science will protect us from its excesses. Medicine will do for our bodies what God once did when we prayed.
While divine help comes from providence that we cannot understand or control, our reasoned control of ourselves and our world places us in power. We can finally become our own god, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5). As a means to this end, modernity replaces the authorities of Scripture and church teaching with the authority of human law.
Accordingly, America is a secular republic and by design a nation of manmade laws rather than religious dictates. Many of our founders believed that we need God’s help to be the kind of people who can rule ourselves, but such spiritual reliance has faded over the generations as their project has prospered. The secular republic they birthed 250 years ago has become the most powerful nation in human history.
And Machiavelli’s “liberation” of the world from medieval religiosity continues apace.
“Preaching to the choir” today
Here’s where today’s discussion applies to us: While the French response to modernity was explicitly irreligious, ours need not be.
Christians can meld our faith to it transactionally: Go to church on Sunday so God will bless us on Monday and live by the teachings of Scripture when they benefit us. Making God our servant offers far greater power than ignoring him: now we are our own god, but we have his deity at our disposal as well.
Of course, this seems irrelevant to you and to me. I’m up early writing this article to serve God, and you’re reading it for the same reason. I’m not just “preaching to the choir” today—I’m preaching to its soloists.
But here’s the catch: mixing our faith with the self-reliance and materialism of secular modernity is what we are both doing unless we make the explicit daily decision not to. The more we ignore this reality, the more powerful it becomes for us.
Every dimension of life in America today is part of the conspiracy. The advertising that constantly bombards us assures us that the people and products of our society are means to the ends of our happiness and success. The elections dominating the news empower us to vote for the candidates we believe will meet our needs and serve our agendas.
We went to church yesterday to be “fed” spiritually and evaluated the experience accordingly. You’re reading this article for the same purpose today. In every part of our lives, modernity enthrones us as the rulers of our lives. It is so successful at this because the impulse to be our own god spawned it and lies at the very heart of fallen humanity.
“He must increase, but I must decrease”
To reverse the Fall today, we intentionally dethrone ourselves and enthrone the living Lord Jesus. We bow our hearts in humility before our risen Lord and ask his Spirit to take control of every dimension of our lives (Ephesians 5:18). We make John the Baptist’s commitment to Christ our own: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).
A dear friend of mine, one of America’s foremost business leaders, says to God every morning and all through the day, “You lead, I follow.” I am making his prayer mine right now.
Will you join me?
Quote for the day:
“When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.” —Eugene Peterson
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