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EDITORIAL
8/02/2006
Editorial: A House Divided
By Bob Ellis Editor One of the most destructive myths embraced by today's Christian community is the idea that faith should be compartmentalized. Probably the simplest and most common way in which Christians compartmentalize their faith is in the way we often pay homage to Christian values and ideals on Sunday morning, yet we make no effort to live them out in our everyday lives once the pew gets cold. The notion that our faith is separate from the "real world" is also found in our society's embrace of the claim that religion and science are mutually exclusive. How often have you heard people talk of the "war between science and religion" and the like? So what does that mean? If you are a person of faith, you have to reject science? If you are a person of science, you have to reject faith? God forbid! If God created the universe, He is God of everything in that universe, is He not? That would include the science that governs His universe. God created the laws of physics, so why should they be anathema to Him? Many scientists interpret scientific facts as seeming to support their bias that there is no God, that all things came into existence through naturalistic causes, but that is only one interpretation. There is a host of scientific evidence which supports—indeed points to—only one conclusion: that God created all things. The idea of "divided living" is also found in our public square, where it is perhaps the most devastating threat to our representative democracy. How often do we hear the term "separation of church and state" thrown about? Just today, a search of Google News reveals 1,700 news stories dealing with the issue. A search of the internet in general finds 11,900,000 references to the issue. The idea that faith should have nothing to do with our government or public life, that religion has no place whatsoever in public discourse, is flatly accepted by the dominant thread of our culture. Yet it has no foundation whatsoever in reality. We also hear it thrown about that we shouldn’t “force our values on others,” or “we can’t legislate morality,” or we hear politicians say they’re personally against something but “I won’t let my personal beliefs interfere with doing my job.” How did we come to this place where a nation founded by Christians and for Christians (see John Quincy Adams quote below) has embraced the idea that Christians no longer have anything to contribute to our nation? Well, we can't really blame unbelievers; we were the ones who abandoned the truth, not them. Christians surrendered their positions a long time ago, and pretty much without a fight. Just as Adam exchanged truth for a lie back in the Garden, so the sons of Adam exchanged the truth of Jesus Christ for the Faustian deal offered by secularists. Nancy Pearcey examines this divide of two-tiered living in her book "Total Truth." Pearcey says that in the 1800s, during the rise of Darwinism and other secular intellectual movements, the idea surfaced that we could maintain our religious and moral beliefs which gave us comfort and order, yet embrace a completely separate and secular set of beliefs about the "real world" that had no religious foundation. Pearcey calls this the "two-story truth." Pearcey's analogy is that of a two-story house where the lofty, idealistic things such as religion, faith, ethics philosophy (the "pie in the sky" stuff) was segregated from everything else and put in the upper story of the house of our lives. The rest of life (science, practicality, etc.) was put in the lower story of "real life. "The idea was that that religious stuff was supposed to be happy upstairs and the science/real world stuff was to be happy downstairs, and "never the twain shall meet. "As Pearcey put it:
The book goes on to tell of how universities such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale, founded as Christian schools, began to marginalize theology instead of "allowing it to permeate the curriculum as a whole. "Religion was soon replaced by the humanities, and the humanities came to assume what Pearcey calls the "fact/value split: Science is universally true, but the humanities are a matter of preferences, traditions and faith. "In other words, they are not universally true, just a matter of preference. And preference is something that can be accepted or disregarded without real consequence. Despite this division adopted in the 19th Century, authentic Judeo-Christian teaching tells us that and the "real world" are inseparable. For instance, Deuteronomy 6 illustrates that living according to God's plan generally means "long life" and "that it may go well with you. "tells people that their faith is not just for Sunday morning, but "to be upon your hearts," to be taught to our children, be talked about "when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. "In other words, we are to carry our beliefs out into the "real world" and into every nook and cranny of our lives. If the men who built this country had meant for us to keep our Christianity in a little sock in our dresser drawer and only take it out on Sunday morning, they could have easily crafted the First Amendment to say something like, "Religion shall have no place in government or public institutions," instead of guaranteeing that Congress—our lawmaking body—would make no laws prohibiting it's free exercise. Instead of calling for two-tiered living, the Founders recognized that if we were to have good government—one that recognized and respected the people it served—then it must be inseparably mixed with religious values. One of the most compelling examples of this is a statement by John Quincy Adams: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. "If faith is to have no public expression in our society, then why was our Constitution, the highest law of our land, designed for a people of faith? He also said, "Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer's mission upon earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity?" Thomas Jefferson also realized the fallacy of two-tiered living: "And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God?" One of the most powerful proofs that this nation was not designed by men living in "two-story houses" is from the farewell address of President George Washington:
This dangerous lie of two-tiered living has not only placed the welfare and future of our nation in jeopardy, it has wrecked the credibility of Christianity in the eyes of the world. When Christians accept this lie, they undermine the effectiveness of their own religion. You don't believe me? Then tell me this: if our religion is worthless in the "real world," then why should we expect unbelievers to come to Jesus Christ? If your faith cannot be reconciled to reality (in other words, if our beliefs really have no correlation to scientific facts), then why do we expect people to abandon their brains and embrace the ideas of idiots? If Christianity can provide no answers or solutions to the problems of our day, why should people waste their time believing in it? And if all this is the case, and Christianity has no ties to "real life," has no bearing on reality, has no connection to scientific fact, and has no answers to our problems why should they trust a belief system with their eternal soul??? If they can't trust it to provide anything beneficial in this temporary existence, why should they trust it to meet their needs for the rest of eternity? So, while it is the duty of the Christ-follower to shine the light of truth into the darkness pervading the world, we can hardly be surprised when the children of the world embrace two-tiered living; after all, it's far more comfortable for them to keep all that confusing and burdensome "religious stuff" up in the attic where it won't bother anybody. But to borrow a term from the military, it is dereliction of duty for the Christian to adopt two-tiered living. In doing so, he undermines the supports of the country which protects his freedom from the barbarism of a secular world; he also subverts his own obedience to his God who calls him to honor Him in every area of his life; and perhaps most importantly, he brings discredit upon the truth of God and the God of Truth. If those of us who call ourselves Christians want to be taken seriously, it’s time to abandon two-tiered living. If we who call ourselves Christians take seriously our mandate to affect positive change in this world—and for the next--, we’ll abandon two-tiered living. If we’re serious about loving the One who gave everything for us, we’ll give Him access to our whole house. If we can trust God with our eternal souls, can’t we trust him with “real life?”
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