Part Two:   How and Why Past Christian Responses to Secularism Have Been Ineffective

Throughout the past hundred-plus years, as the cultural war between the Christian worldview and secularism escalated—and Christian losses mounted—the church has responded unsuccessfully in three ways. We’ll examine two responses in this blog post and the third in next week’s blog.

First Response:  During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many seminaries attempted to accommodate the prevailing intellectual climate that favored naturalistic science and Biblical criticism. They responded by recasting the church into the image of the secular culture—and their efforts failed tragically. Theological liberalism infiltrated most, if not all, mainline denominations, destroying the fundamental beliefs that formerly identified Christians. As a result, many churches today are little more than social clubs. The Bible is no longer considered to be divine revelation. Jesus has been demoted to being just a nice guy who offered good advice on how to live a happy, quasi-spiritual life. He is no longer God incarnate, the loving—yet judging—Lord and Savior. One of my former professors, the late Dr. Harold Lindsell, a Church historian, documented this in his book, The Battle for the Bible.

Second Response:  During the early twentieth century, this liberalization of American churches led to a spiritual civil war. A large segment of Christendom responded by isolating and separating themselves from the liberal churches and secular society as a whole. (Mark A. Noll, in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, and other evangelical scholars have written about this). Many Christians still advocate this second response. They claim that Christians have already lost the cultural war. The only thing we can do now, they say, is “dig in,” put up the razor wire, and withdraw from contact with the “world” to protect ourselves from being seduced by pagan values.

This response also failed. It marginalized conservative Christians into becoming a distinct subculture within the broader secular society and ushered in radical fundamentalism. Many churches became anti-intellectual. They became dogmatic and legalistic in doctrinal beliefs. Christianity came to be identified with strict prohibitions, and the mark of a true Christian was adherence to rigid codes of conduct.

Unfortunately, the fallout from the fundamentalist movement led to conservative Christianity losing much of its voice and influence in American culture. Christians became viewed as an anti-intellectual, ideologically exclusive, radical fringe group out of touch with mainstream America—an image that persists to this day. ©

Next week we’ll examine the third unsuccessful response to the ongoing culture war between the church and the secular world:  “Dualism,” which is Christians compartmentalizing the spiritual and secular components of their lives—a typical behavior among many Christians today.