Deluded Slaves

Everyone is religious. Everyone is a worshiper. It’s not whether you bow before a god, it’s just a matter of which god you worship. The modern western secularist pretends they are above worship. They delude themselves (and regrettably not a few Christians) that they are neutral on the religious front. This is strategic gold as it has allowed them to promulgate the lie of separation of religion and politics, thus removing all their other competition from the public sphere and proclaiming their faith as the only permissible faith and the lingua franca of the public realm. Yet the secularist is not neutral. Sure they say they are atheists and they may write ‘non-religious’ on the census form, but they are as much worshippers and adherents of a faith as those primitives who kneel before an unseen deity.

One of the favourite gods of the secularist is the state. It’s no surprise that as the West has entered a period where Christianity seems to be waning and secularism is waxing that Western governments have expanded and grown in their purpose and scope. What we once saw as the domain of God through families and his body on earth the church (education, welfare and health to name a few), the secularist arrogates to the state – their own incarnate god.

While some may have been dimly aware of this growing religious movement of state worship, it has become almost impossible to deny (although too many hapless evangelicals and their leaders are giving it their best shot) in the turbulent times we live through. When things go wrong, man’s gods are always more obvious. In times past, Western societies might have cried out to the one true Creator God in a crisis, but by in large, the average Western man and woman (and interestingly enough, particularly the women) have turned in faith to the state for consolation and hope.

I find the whole process ironic. It reminds me of what feminism has done to women. It was G.K. Chesterton who noted the irony of women rising up against the ‘patriarchy’ and wanting to work outside of the home. He put it this way, “Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.” Similarly, the modern Western secularist believes he has thrown of the ‘shackles’ of the Omnipotent. He will not be told how to live. He wants to be free. But throughout this ‘shamdemic’ he has cried out to his deity the omnipotent state to save him from his troubles and has been crushed under the ever benevolent heavy hand of the state. For his own good of course. The supposed freedom gained in rejecting God is certainly missing. Chesterton in a similar vein once wrote, “If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.” In all of this, the modern secularist has appeared more credulous than the ‘primitives’ he mocks for believing in an unseen God.  

The secularist’s god of state is but a new take on an old theme. Their god is an ancient and demanding deity. The empires of old such as Egypt and Rome saw their states and particularly leaders as embodiments of deity, and their people as so many pawns to be moved, sacrificed and crushed as they chose. Freedom from ‘great’ empires that crushed the millions of ordinary people but enriched the elite only came through the gospel permeating Western culture. When Jesus says “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed,” he was speaking of freedom from slavery to sin, and that freedom ripples out from each redeemed child of God. It won’t just remain a spiritual ‘down in your heart’ freedom. It will produce free cultures. But reject Christ the one whose yoke is easy and burden light, and you will yoke yourself to a demanding deity. This deity will decide how much of your money you need, when you can leave your house or city, whether you can remain employed, what medical products you must have in your body, who your business is allowed to serve, whether you are allowed to see your friends and under what conditions, whether other religious organisations are allowed to function, what condition your property must be in for you to rent it out and countless other benevolent restrictions. Freedom and secularism do not go together.