By
ith the holy Christian celebration of Easter immediately behind us, it would seem an appropriate time to take a brief look at the state of Christianity in our increasingly secularized and irreligious society. Speaking of this nation’s religious foundations, in the past I have frequently pointed to the Founding Fathers' clear and overwhelming agreement that they were establishing a Christian nation on whose moral authority their law relied. Inevitably, someone not wanting to acknowledge this easily provable historical fact will dredge up the few deists or 'free thinkers' among the founders like Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin, and our own Thomas Jefferson, in their attempt to disprove the assertion. The exceptions do not disprove the widespread and prevailing opinions of the time however. The great majority of the founders believed in both the inerrancy of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus. This fact suggest that were they alive today, they would be branded as 'fundamentalists,' 'right-wing extremists,' and worse, by the dominant anti-Christian cultural mouthpieces so commonly given prominent media attention today.
History teaches us that America’s early consensus on the two key tenets of Christian orthodoxy mentioned above was short-lived. We must remember that just two years after the writing of our Constitution, France erupted into Revolution with its cry of "liberty, equality and fraternity." A false, anti-biblical doctrine enthroning the speculations and ideas of man regarding 'human rights' found fertile soil and began to take root in New England. Skepticism arose regarding the inerrancy of the Bible and the virgin birth, divinity, and resurrection of Jesus. What emerged as the predominant 'faith' in the North, which was carried over into their political philosophy came to be called transcendentalism. According to the Reverend Ron Rumberg this religious/socio-political theory basically transfers the sovereignty of God to man and in so doing rejects "divine revelation in favor of human legislation." These ideas, and this heresy, however, did not make significant or long lasting inroads among the Southern people. Famed twentieth century Southern writer Richard Weaver would say, "It is highly significant that neither the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, nor the scientific materialism of the century which followed, was able to draw him (Southerners) from the view that man holds a central position in the universe under divine guidance. The religious Solid South expressed itself in a determination to preserve for religion the character of divine revelation."
This question of Biblical inerrancy and divine revelation seems to be at the root of what might be called real or orthodox Christianity and that practiced today by countless millions who embrace those parts of the Bible that don’t conflict with the secular humanistic philosophy of 'man’s rights,' but wholly reject those 'other' parts that don’t conform to our egalitarian age. Dr. Robert Lewis Dabney, one of the most gifted intellectual Southern Christian clergymen of the 19th century wrote an article in 1888 entitled Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights. He juxtaposed the plain teachings of scripture against the new radical social theory that asserted that each individual is inalienably entitled to all the same franchises and functions in society and that it is a natural iniquity to withhold from any adult person by law any prerogative, which is legally conferred on any other member of society. This humanitarian theology, he noted, ignores the plain teachings of God’s Holy Word, which are not egalitarian at all, but rather hierarchical. The fact that God’s preference for civil society is constituted among superiors, inferiors and equals flies in the face of what nearly every person, even Christians, profess to believe today. This truth, when faced by thoughtful Christians today, raises the question of whether or not they will surrender the inspiration of the Scriptures to the inevitable assaults by our rationalistic social scientists. I am left wondering if one can truly call themselves a Christian if either the divinity of Jesus, or the inspiration of the Bible is denied. Dabney offers a challenge to those that profess to want to walk in truth, and who profess to accept the Bible as God’s inspired word. He says, "Since the opinions and practices hostile to the Scriptures are so protean, so subtle, and so widely diffused, there is no chance for a successful defense of the truth except in uncompromising resistance to the beginnings of error; to parley is to be defeated. The steps in the ‘down-grade’ progress are gentle, and slide easily one into the other, but the sure end of the descent is nonetheless fatal. He who yields the first step so complicates his subsequent resistance as to insure defeat. There is but one safe position for the sacramental host: to stand on the whole Scripture, and refuse to concede a single point. Let us premise first, that whatever is expressly set down in Scripture, and whatever follows therefrom by good and necessary consequence, are binding on the Christian conscience."
As to how much the South still clings to its old Christian orthodoxy, I think we’d profit from the words of Richard Weaver who wrote in The Older Religiousness in the South, "So the Southern people reached the eve of the Civil War [sic] one of the few religious peoples left in the Western World. Into the strange personnel of the Confederate Army poured fighting bishops and prayer-holding generals, and through it swept waves of intense religious enthusiasm long lost to history. It is on record that there were more than fifteen thousand conversions in the Army of Northern Virginia alone. And when that army went down in defeat, the last barrier to the secular spirit of science, materialism, and pragmatism was swept away." So we see today, in the generic brand of what usually passes for Christianity in 2001, what more than a century of that secular spirit of skepticism and adaptation has wrought, even upon our own Southland. For many that sense our slow descent into the chaos of a nation ruined by a never ending series of demands for expanded rights and entitlements, without a thought for our responsibilities and duties to God, we’ve come to realize that there is little hope left for a people still partying away on the deck of the Titanic, oblivious to the iceberg dead ahead, sure that nothing will spoil their decadent fun. History is replete with examples of what happens to people when they turn their back on God. It’s all right there beginning with the book of Genesis for anyone that cares to look and believe.
Deo Vindice