Secularism works by means of pluralism. That is, secularism’s promise has always been to foster peace by getting people to treat their religious differences as personal and private, only discussing in public those religious issues upon which they agree. In this way, multiple parties can work as one. This worked well at America’s founding and for as long as Americans were predominately Protestant. For example, Presbyterians kept baptizing infants and Baptists kept waiting until children were older, but all this took place in their respective churches. In political discussions, however, the two groups spoke of their common faith in Jesus Christ and the Bible and how the nation’s laws should be based on the ethics found in them. That’s how the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights got written (God in America’s Founding Documents). Thus pluralism looks for the common denominator. For this reason, secularism worked less well when Catholics are added to the Protestants because the supremacy of the Bible as the word of God was removed from the common view. Then when the country began to describe itself as Judeo-Christian, even more was lost because Jesus Christ had to be removed from the equation. That leaves you with just the Old Testament to agree on. Yet another step is taken into confusion when monotheism is viewed as the uniting factor because that incorporates Muslims whose ideas can run very counter to both testaments of the Bible and therefore leaves less common ground in worldview for citizens to find. The last step into chaos was taken when agnostics and atheists had to be included in the pluralism. With their addition to the pluralistic mix, the lowest common denominator became human rights because if you keep including God’s rights the agnostics and atheists will complain that they’re being excluded. At this stage of things, secularism means simply “leaving God out of it.” This is therefore godless secularism, and it’s what we have now in America. And we are looking aghast at the fruit it is producing. But when you ask people to consider the decadence and depravity invited by godless secularism, all they can think of as an alternative is theocracy – such as portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale and other dystopian novels. It’s as if they’ve completely forgotten American history.
For most of its history, America remained what it had been in its beginning: a Protestant Christian nation. Being more specific, that period was from 1776 to about 1950. One way to verify that it lasted this long is to scan the speeches and press releases of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, whose combined terms in office cover two decades (1933-1952). Those records are sprinkled throughout with positive references to Jesus Christ and the Bible. With Eisenhower in the 1950’s, however, you can see signs that Protestant pluralism had given way to Christian, Judeo-Christian, and even monotheistic pluralism. Such signs include adding “under God ” to the Pledge of Allegiance and adding “In God We Trust” to our currency. Christ was being dropped from public pronouncements and, by the end of that decade, prayer and the Bible would be removed from public schools. By 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama could say without fear of damaging his chances of being elected president, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation – at least, not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.” This expansion of pluralism meant that the lowest common denominator of America’s secularism had become the fellow who didn’t want to hear about God at all. To include him in the pluralism meant public discourse had to be godless – that is, without God’s name being brought to bear. Thus the transition of America from Protestant secularism to godless secularism only took about 55 years. Only half a century was required to so alter the definition of secularism that its effect became to squelch godliness rather than promote it. The wheels have been falling off our institutions ever since – and at an increasing rate. Nowadays our form of secularism allows drag queens to tell their stories in public libraries and schools while we’re told it’s “a blessing of liberty.” Meanwhile, religious people – and especially preachers of the gospel – have to keep their mouths shut in public places. Anyone who asks for America to return to its Protestant Christian orientation, last visible in World War II, is shouted down as a lover of “theocracy,” because practically the entire population these days was born after 1950 and can’t be bothered by history.
What I’ve described above is how pluralism broke down and secularism turned toxic in America. It’s how “freedom of religion” came to eventually mean “freedom from religion.” It happened slowly at first…and then all at once. The first phase (Protestant secularism) lasted about 175 years; all the remaining phases have occurred in the last 75 years. Let’s review the progression: The pluralism and secularism that was designed for Protestantism was expanded to be Christian (that is, incorporating Catholics and Orthodox), then Judeo-Christian (incorporating Jews), then monotheistic (incorporating Muslims), then what could be called theistic or religious (that is, incorporating any religion), and finally incorporating agnostics and atheists (who, by definition, are non-religious). That last step was, of course, irrational. I say that because a society cannot simultaneously agree to be religious and irreligious at the same time. It can only be one or the other. Since no one can serve two masters, we were forced to tilt one direction or the other. We just kept going in the same direction we had been going. That is to say, to incorporate the last group to be brought in, following the lowest common denominator process, Americans essentially agreed to live their public lives as atheists do. If you have trouble digesting this reality, just ask yourself, “What is the only group of people I have named above who do not have to curb their speech in order to comply with modern America’s view of secularism?” And this is how secularism, a concept that was originally designed and employed to help Bible-believers collectively form and successfully operate a national government, has been stretched over the last 75 years to the point that it now serves the purposes of people who oppose Bible-believers! No word’s meaning can be considered more elastic than one that comes to mean its opposite.
Consider now how opponents of Christ use the elasticity of words like secularism and pluralism to pull a “bait and switch” (nowadays called by some in a case like this a “motte and bailey fallacy”) on the unsuspecting. That is, our opponents argue for their position by describing secularism as “separation of church and state” – a definition with which no reasonable person can disagree. But then in practice they impose on us a secularism that amounts to a separation of God and state – something vastly different from separation of church and state, and infinitely less desirable. That is, they bait us with the word secularism as it was originally defined but then enforce that same word according to their definition. If secularism and pluralism have to be made safe for agnostics and atheists, then all religious people – including Protestants – are ipso facto reduced to a second-class status. The only intent of the secularism that prevailed at America’s founding was that there would not be a “Church of America” as there was a “Church of England.” That’s it. Let us recognize when the meaning of words is being stretched so far as to negate their original meaning. That is excessively elastic!
The Duty of a Man 