We are witnessing the collapse of Western Christianity as a culture-creating force. The beliefs and principles upon which the West was built and which it exported to the inestimable advantage of the remainder of the world are disappearing in the world through which they took hold to biggest effect. The way forward for Christianity lies in Africa and Asia, whilst within the West, Europe and the English-speaking nations the Church is fast disappearing.
There is an argument that only the mainstream churches are losing members whilst those that hold to conservative evangelical beliefs are prospering. We have to be realistic: aside from a couple of brilliant spots on the horizon, most evangelical churches are doing little higher than holding their very own and far of their growth comes from recycled Christians departing the failing mainstream churches.
A Substitute Religion
The big query just isn’t is that this happening, but why is it happening. We normally turn to answers equivalent to the influence of varied liberal versions of theology or the impact of secular philosophies equivalent to post-modernism and secular scientism.
However, these are only the surface causes; there must be a reason why the Church has left the door open in order that these ideologies are capable of impact on it. The reason why the Church has succumbed to the influence of those philosophies is that it has been colonised by a wholly different and pagan religion, Moral Therapeutic Deism.
What may be mistaken with teaching morality, helping people to be ok with themselves and referring all of it to God? Its danger lies within the proven fact that the morality it teaches is that which makes people feel good, and other people feel good after they are told that it’s all right to do what they wish to do anyway and that God approves it. By specializing in making people feel good, the practitioners of Moral Therapeutic Deism usurp the role of God and replace Him with humanity. The god of the Moral Therapeutic Deism taught in lots of churches today just isn’t the God of the Bible. In many churches the religion ‘once delivered to the saints’ has grow to be little greater than an antiquarian curio.
Bland Niceness
Moral Therapeutic Deism teaches that there’s a god who created and watches over the earth and its people. This god wants people to be nice to one another, as taught by the religions of the world. Assertions of strong theological conviction are shunned as harmful and judgemental resulting in a supposed equality amongst all religions. There isn’t any repentance for sin, keeping of God’s law, becoming a servant of Christ, or devotion in prayer and Scripture reading. The teaching of Moral Therapeutic Deism leaves people pondering that the predominant goal of life, and what god wants for us, is that we be kind to others and be ok with ourselves. This god never judges, and good people inevitably go to heaven after they die. Subjective wellbeing has replaced revealed truth because the guide for Christians.
Thus we’ve got congregations where people do have a type of belief but shouldn’t have any understanding of their very own religious traditions and what they’re imagined to imagine to be Christians. If they do understand their traditions they simply don’t care to imagine them and substitute whatever makes them feel good. Nobody have to be made to do or to be something which makes them feel uncomfortable, is difficult, or goes against their very own desires.
Individual is on the centre of the Moral Therapeutic Deism world resulting in a reflexive non-judgementalism which is reluctant to say that anyone may be mistaken in what they imagine or do, except in the event that they hold to the teaching of the Bible, especially in matters of sex.
This results in an unbelieving church merely reflecting the mores of the time, normally after a panting struggle to maintain up with the world’s cause du jour. It is often a couple of years tardy in triumphantly arriving at the most recent trendy belief; meanwhile the world has normally moved on to a latest cause. As a result the church finally ends up looking pathetic within the eyes of the world which asks, ‘What took you so long?’
The Challenge
Moral Therapeutic Deism in its various forms is an everlasting challenge to the church. We have been warned about this because the starting: ‘For the time is coming when people won’t endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they’ll accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their very own passions’ (2 Timothy 4:3). Nearly 400 hundred years ago John Calvin spoke of people that ‘wish nothing to be lawful for God beyond that which their very own reason prescribes for themselves’. We have reached a stage where the church sits in judgement on God and decides what He may and should not say.
You cannot keep God at a snug distance. People who speak of truth as something that ‘works for me’ are following a false god, a latest paganism. ‘Christianity is true for me, but in case your truth leads you to Islam or Hinduism, or to paganism, then it’s just as valid,’ is superficial tolerance. Their commitment, sincere because it may be, is simply to something that makes them feel good and acceptable to themselves and the world around them; it just isn’t Christianity.
We must ask ourselves if we’re accepting, living with and practising what Francis Schaeffer described as true Truth: the reality of God Incarnate who reveals Himself in Scripture. Only those that are honest before God themselves have the appropriate to ask others, ‘Do you wish God, do you wish Truth, or are you going to be satisfied with something that only looks like God and Truth?’
Then we’ve got to set about evangelising a those who largely considers itself Christian, overwhelmingly believes in some type of deity, considers itself ‘spiritual but not religious’, but has only a tangential connection to historic Christianity.
Moral Therapeutic Deism is a parasite which has latched on to its host and is sucking the life out of it, leaving nothing but an empty, desiccated husk. Our challenge is to rebuild.
Campbell Campbell-Jack is a retired Church of Scotland minister. He blogs at A Grain of Sand.
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