The great challenge for the Western World in the 21st century is the protection of personal and individual freedoms. Never has the threat been so great and so deceptively subtle. Never have so many been so vulnerable. And perhaps never have aspirations and moves for power been as unhindered as these today which play humble and hide behind the smiles of those who believe they somehow know what’s best for others.
It’s that elitist perspective, in particular, driven in some by naivete, and in others by malevolent ambition, that represents the greatest danger.
In a bygone era religion played a significant role in our culture. The end of the 20th century, however, saw the banishment of faith from the public square, along with a broad declaration of its illegitimacy for any public discourse or decision. Common culture has cheered and celebrated that process, actually believing that the ridicule and removal of religious life from the heart of our public discourse has marked the removal of subjectivity entirely. Now supposedly exists a world free to be shaped by ‘real facts’ and science and without the intervention of nasty religious impulses and beliefs. This is the popular level narrative sold today on our streets: subjective religious believers have been replaced by objective people of fact; decisions based on beliefs have been replaced by decisions based on something theoretically better.
That, of course, is the great lie.
The truth is that the public square will always be ruled by beliefs. Beliefs about God, about science, about the world and right and wrong and good and bad. It doesn’t matter what the content of those beliefs are, the great truth is that every move to power in the public square is based on one set of beliefs or another. An atheist, for example, is a person with a clearly defined set of beliefs about God – he believes there is no God. Just because the content of his belief is atheism does not mean he is less motivated by his beliefs. He may object that his opinion is built upon a certain argument built up of facts he trusts. But humans never traffic in facts, they can only ever traffic in the collection and arrangement of the facts which they like or prefer or need. What they traffic in – whatever the details of what they think or contend for – is never anything more that opinions about the facts as they see them. The most hardened scientist can never escape the truth that she is nothing more than a person who has an opinion. In other words, she is a person who believes something about something. The most articulate journalists can never research away the fact of their belief. They are always people who believe something.
That puts us all – every person in every corner of this earth – on equal footing. We all come to the public square equally as carriers of beliefs. It is this foundational reality which demands a bias towards political libertarianism. To say it another way, we must approach each other in the public square with humility, kindness, and a deference to the right of others to disagree and be free to act accordingly.
Some Christians fear that this kind of perspective will undermine confidence in objective truth. Let me say that I do believe in objective truth. But I also think Christians must put their faith not in humans as fine or reliable articulators of truth, but rather in the Spirit of God who can alone awaken the human heart and reveal truth. Truth, in this world, is always received in the context of human experiences, and the creation and use of those experiences has always been a work of God Himself. His direct revelation to the human spirit by his own divine hand is the only means by which real objective truth can be known. And so let me say to the Christian reader that the social and political crises we face are not due to some loss of objective truth – to the contrary – the great crisis we face is that some in our society don’t think they’ve lost it at all.
Some claim objectivity remains because of simple ignorance. Those, for example, who have bought into the cult of scientific consensus: they believe lining up a number of others who share their beliefs constitutes factuality. Or consider instead the politician or school principal who thinks that the removal of references to religion will somehow create a neutral belief-free environment. The radical anti-religious bias of our culture has terrorized civil servants into the worst and most petty feats of social stupidity in centuries. But neither fear of others with beliefs, nor the desire to be neutral guarantees objectivity. All these produce is the rise of another kind of belief based on self-preservation and professional convenience: the belief that not talking about other peoples beliefs whatsoever is somehow preferable. To their dismay, there is no escape from beliefs any more than from heartbeats or hormones – and investing in that project betrays an appalling absence of insight.
With such ignorance observed, yet the crisis in our culture arises from something more sinister, for there are some in the Western world who know that they have nothing more than opinion to offer, but in an effort to control what happens in the public square they act otherwise. Cynically thinking that no truth can ever really be expressed, they create and inject perspective into our discourse not as an expression of what they actually think they see, but as a power grab for what they want. Under the weight of exactly this kind of shift, the academy of the 21st century has collapsed under the crazed hegemony of those who choose to believe in whatever will effect the most political influence, win the most publicity or power, relieve the pressure to publish, or win the greatest government grant. It is a power hungry and money hungry sham pitting itself against the mythological evils of those who deny their fits of truth-spinning and resist their efforts to remake society according to their own ideological whims. Please understand, these are not true believers in anything but their own power; they are believers of convenience. They mask their opinions as facts if that works; but they are never more than activist liars. They strategize progressive changes in society while hiding their real goals all the while. They surround themselves with true believers in their causes when they can find them, or else create the faithful by seducing undergraduates with grandiosities, and by moving the heart of the public with mockumentaries and Hollywood starlets.
The crisis we face in the West today is at a critical stage because those with a hunger for power have seduced so many. They have engendered a caste of elitists who by ignorance or agenda are determined to take hold of the public square and dictate their terms. So enamoured are they by their own positions that they are willing to restrict the freedoms of others. By loss of memory or by lie they declare their perspective on the world ‘fact’ and name all who oppose as ‘in denial’ – and they do this so they can advance a different kind of governing order. The mantra, for example, of making political decisions ‘not based on ideology, but on science’ is by definition a lie, for no science exists apart from human perspectives on it. No scientific fact – indeed, no type of fact whatsoever – has ever been expressed apart from human opinion, perspective, and belief.
Some have made a career by way of this slight of hand. Al Gore. David Susuki. Neither have ever presented you with scientific facts. They only ever present their beliefs. In politics the situation is critical to the point of life and death. Take Barak Obama and stem cells. Obama’s claim was that policies needed to be based on science and not ideology. What deceit! He has not established a policy about stem cells based on science. He is simply advancing his own ideology. It’s fine, of course, for people like these to believe as they do. What is not fine is the suggestion that their beliefs are really factual truths which must be accepted and obeyed by all. That demand is the mark of evil.
Under the influence of this kind of charlatanism, our public square is no longer naked, but instead is garbed with new dogma and the consequent restrictions and policies which suggest a dark future for the West. It is against this impending cloud of political control and dogma that we must rise, because the practical effect of any belief system at the helm of power is the marginalization and destruction of the unbeliever. Over the past half millennium the church in the West has learned this lesson. First among Anabaptists in the 16th century, and then among dissenters, congregationalists and English Baptists through the 17th century, much of western Christianity began to reject the notion that the state should have any authority over the church or an individual’s beliefs or the right to act on them – whether to restrict or demand. Christianity has called this great lesson the separation of Church and state. This lesson is not the secular media myth that society or government should be freed from religious influence, but rather that the state must be restricted in the degree to which it can exercise power over the church or individual practitioners of faith.
Now it’s time for liberal elitists and secular activists to learn that lesson too.
The state is not a stick which you may wield in order to force your ideology upon others. Not in education. Not for the environment. Not so that you cut down on the number of infirm or disabled. Not so that you can create the kind of society you want. Not under any circumstances. Not ever. You may advance your agenda freely by taking it to the people directly to see if they’ll voluntarily give you their hearts. If they refuse you, you must accept their free choice. The state is not a back-up plan for those who disagree with you; it is not a means of forcing change because you believe really badly that what you want has to happen fast. The state is an agency available for one purpose alone: to prevent the control of some by others and so to guard individual freedoms without bias towards any set of beliefs.
If the state should abandon that task, it abandons any righteousness in its rule. It if gives in to those who would misuse her, it abandons the moral right to rule altogether.