The western Church: in the wilderness
For at least the last 100 years the Church has been under constant attack by a philosophic movement and surrogate liberal-progressive religion that denies the existence of God and assumes, with scant evidence, that the physical world and human reason is all there is. The Church’s failure to respond with an effective counter to this assault on faith and truth has had the de facto effect of heralding an unopposed atheistic liberal victory. The Church trekked into a new wilderness of its own making. God never wants to see his people in the desert. He wants them across the Jordan facing his enemies. Has the Church been afraid to face them, or did it just misunderstand the times? Both apply. When confronted with a full blown liberal attack on western values, beginning in earnest in the 1960s, the Church was ill-prepared and overwhelmed by the twin evolutionary and liberal-Marxist attacks on its foundations. Metaphorically speaking it staggered out of its ‘promised land place’ in western societies, retreating before its enemies to wade back over the Jordan.
The times in which we now live cries out for a Christian renaissance to cut a swath through the dogmatic liberal-progressive and corporatist practices that are destroying lives, reducing western civilisation to pagan materialism, inoculating people against God and leaving humanity exposed to future mayhem. If the western world collapses there is nothing left in the world to model the Judeo-Christian values underpinning true faith, justice, human rights and progress. Under the forces working against the Christian consensus people are no longer God’s made-in-his-image creation. They are just another specie of animal evolved into workers and consumers under a new feudal-Marxist order.
The majority of Christians hide behind an inward-focused piety and refuse to face the giant of atheistic liberal dogma laying waste to western nations. The Church has embraced ’social service’ (the bottom of the metaphoric cliff) but neglected “social action” – the business of prevention: opposing policies that push people towards the cliff of poor decision making, addictions, dependence, family collapse, moral decline and apathetic surrender to everything and anything. The West is intoxicated with violating God’s commands, (“Keeping God’s commands is what counts.” 1 Cor 7:19b). It is exulting in everything God hates, raping his principles and flensing vast numbers of individuals of what it means to be made in his image. Meantime the potential latent in the great commands to love our neighbour and promulgate the gospel languish behind the busyness of church life and a narrow band of approved activity. Even non-Christians can see it more clearly than church-goers:
“Where the hell do you think we got our human rights from? They came from the embers of Christian thought. We are all Christians [adhere to Christian principles - author] whether we like it or not.” Douglas Murray [1]
Contemporary Christians would do well to heed this warning, issued by C.H. Spurgeon over a century ago: “Unless the church is herself rich in the things of God and strong with divine energy, she will generously cease to be aggressive, and will content herself with going on with the regular routine of Christian work, crying ‘Peace, peace,’ where peace cannot exist. She will not dare to defy the world… when her own condition is pitiably weak.” [2]
Twisted like a symbiotic snake around the political and academic liberalism wrecking so much havoc across the western world is a rampant global corporatism. It is bent on plutocratic control of governments, natural resources and national economies, without reference to biblical principles, common humanity or human rights. A more complete recipe for a potential hell on earth is hard to imagine. Meantime the Church’s forays from the wilderness continue to be as ineffective and weak, by Spurgeon’s prophetic standard, as they have been for the last 40 years. Christians have a duty, born of obedience to God to defend both truth and faith. If this neglect continues, the Church will condemn Western Civilisation to darkness, leaving a dangerous spiritual, moral and practical vacuum across the globe. What might fill it does not bear contemplating. If Christians fail to turn and head off this challenge they will have missed their calling to contend for the faith and the eternal souls of vast numbers. They will arouse God’s anger for wilfully ignoring the import of the parables of the minas and talents, choosing to put narrow limits on his instruction to combine faith with the right works.
This book is polemical and it deliberately makes prophetic demands of the Church. I am not going to prove every point. For detailed evidential support the reader should invest time in reading my other books available as free PDFs on my Last Post (www.lastpost.info.net) website, access the footnoted work of others, or lay hands on the books listed in the appendix. This book is designed to be the complementary text for a one day next generation workshop, also available on the Last Post web site.
[1] Paraphrased from a 2017 You Tube discussion: Mark Steyn Show with Douglas Murray. What Murray means is that we all live off the legacy of Christian values. He has become a popular defender of secularised western values in the UK and on the internet, recently publishing what is likely to be a very influential book: The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017).
[2] Backhouse, R. (1996) Spurgeon on Revival, p.17. Kingsway Publications, Eastbourne.