Let My People Think

I recently finished a thought-provoking volume by Ravi Zacharias entitled “Deliver Us From Evil.” It blessed me and challenged me in a way that I did not expect, and so I have written a brief synopsis below, composed entirely of quotes from the book itself.

Questions we must answer:
"Can an individual or a society live with complete disregard for a moral and spiritual center and not suffer from the wounds of wickedness? Can the soul of a people who have lived without restraint be left unravaged? Is there a point at which one must cry a halt to the passions and the whims of unbridled appetite and admit that enough is enough?"

"The ideas we now popularly espouse are reshaping our culture, redefining our destiny, and are at the heart of the rampant evil that we now witness. They are ideas, therefore, that must be seriously questioned or we will find ourselves in some remorse-filled future, wondering how it all happened."


Secularism, Pluralism, and Privatization: the Threats We Face Today

Threat #1: What is Secularism?
"A secular world-view is admittedly and designedly the underlying impetus that presently propels Western culture...[and] secularization assumes that this world--the material world--is all we have. Any view that affirms the supernatural is, by definition, considered irrelevant or irrational. Simply stated, secularism asserts that public life is to be conducted without reference to religion or to any notion of transcendence."

So secularism asserts that religion is not to enter public life, that any voice affirming the supernatural is "irrelevant or irrational," and hence, not worthy of public respect. Why should we care, and how does this affect us?
The shift from the sacred to the secular was undergirded by one fundamental idea that was foisted upon Western culture: The implicit denial of the miraculous or the supernatural to explain human essence or existence...As a result, it is no longer only land that is secularized but life itself. Matter is under the spotlight; the soul is systematically disfigured in the attic of existence.
"...single-minded attack on Christianity in the name of relevance underscores secularism's primary target...relentless attack upon anything that has to do with the supernatural is the imprint of secularist dogmatism...the Bible cannot be the Word of God, for to grant even that theoretical possibility would be an admission of the supernatural."

"...if the goal at the inception of America was to reconcile liberty with law, then [secularism poses] a devastating contradiction. For law cannot merely serve as a random set of rules without any objective point of reference. And for law to be effective, it is equally necessary that a reaction to its violation must go beyond an objective framework to a felt subjective response within the individual to whom the law is making its appeal. In other words, it is not sufficient just to have a law "out there" for people to obey. There must be an inner urge, or hunger, to keep and honor that law because it is good. Secularism cannot accomplish this in the hearts and minds of people, because the mind it has created is a pragmatic one, and pragmatism will always find ways to circumvent and misuse the law rather than to revere it."
"Secularism...has done away with a moral law and destroyed the sensitivity of an individual toward honoring that law. The evil we now witness is from the ash heap of destroyed sensitivities."

If secularism does indeed do away with moral law, what are the natural consequences which follow?
"The difference between criminals who try desperately to cover their faces when they are escorted into court and those who smile remorselessly as they strut in to the courtroom is civilizations apart. The ones covering their faces or shedding a tear have at least a vestige of reachability. There is at least the hint of the possibility of change, because there is a point of reference for wrong, some shared meanings between the wrongdoer and society. For any corrective in behavior or for punitive measures to be effective, there must be some point of hurt or undesired feeling within the one who has done wrong. Shame or remorse or society's disapproval is powerless today to induce a desire to change, because the ideas that shape our culture make shame a hangover of an antiquated religious world-view."
"The loss of shame in a society is ultimately an attack upon all of civilization. Why is that so? Put succintly, it is this. The man who molests a child and feels a sense of shame expresses that shame because he has denuded and defaced that one person. The person who commits this same act and feels no shame in effect denudes and defaces the whole world, because he is thereby telling us that our self-respect and the sacredness of physical privacy are worthless. His loss of shame is an attack upon all of humanity, because shame was given to us as a guardian, not only of ourselves, but of our fellow human being...the loss of belief in the supernatural, which secularism implies, has led to an eradication of the sense of shame, which secularism cannot deal with."

The soil of shamelessness gives root to evil in its most violent forms. The unbearable reality of secularism's consequential loss of shame is that the ones we victimize by evil can even be the ones we claim to love...The evils we foist upon children at the hands of responsible adults are not crimes born of hate. They are passions unleashed and justified by a conscience bereft of shame or remorse...Shame is meant to protect the very ones we love. But our culture has killed it. With the name of God now unhallowed and His kingdom not welcome, does it make any sense to cry, "Deliver us from evil"?

Threat #2: What is Pluralism?
"Very simply, pluralism is defined as the existence and availability of a number of world-views, each vying for the allegiance of individuals, with no single world-view dominant...Pluralism became a vital force in the West because it came at a time when weariness with mainstream religion provided justification for many to dabble in other ways of thinking."

How does pluralism affect us?
"The danger for the Christian is not that pluralism exists on the outside; rather, it is the deadly effect of relativism that has taken hold of the Christian mind. The life of one who follows Christ must have the clear ring of truth to it rather than conveying a surrender in the name of pluralism to the relativism of the age...As Christians, we know that in this world we have no continuing city, that crowns roll in the dust, and that every earthly kingdom must sometime flounder. We acknowledge a King men did not crown and cannot dethrone, and we are citizens of a city of God they did not build and cannot destroy."
"Pluralization offers much in the way of variety, and the enrichment we bring to one another is incalculable. But when pluralism breeds a doctrine of relativism the cost has been too great. The abandonment of some necessary transcultural parameters has given way to the absence of reason in the contemplation of life's deepest questions. The end result is a cultural amalgam that will be unstable in its journey. That instability is now represented in the loss of reason. If the loss of shame was the child of secularization, the loss of reason is the child or pluralization."

"What we laugh at and what we weep for has much to say about our rationality. One look at the current fare from our entertainment world ought to give us pause about where our reason has one. What is more, when academia joins in and belittles reason itself and tells us that the laws of logic no longer apply to reality, then we are doubly denuded, for there is no one to rescue us."

Threat #3: What is Privatization?
"Privatization may be defined as the socially required and legally enforced separation of our private lives and our public personas; in effect, privatization mandates that issues of ultimate meaning be relegated to our private spheres."

"While secularization has cleansed the public arena of religious ideas, privatization insists that though one may choose to believe whatever one wants to, it must be kept private. This is the social phenomenon of privatization that magnanimously gives with one hand and militantly takes away with the other--and is then mystified that this benevolence is not appreciated."

"Commitment to God most certainly has its private expression, but it implicitly directs all of life. Spiritual reality is not just a sentinel from 5:00 to 11:00 p.m. behind closed doors. Privatization with disregard for coherence forces this dichotomy. In the name of nonoffensiveness, religion is privatized and relegated to the home, while in the name of freedom, all kinds of indecencies and abandonments are made public. How ironic that sexuality and nudity, which are meant to be private, are now fare for public consumption, while spiritual convictions, which are meant to strengthen public polity, are now for private expression only."
"We know that the premise of privatization is flawed because who we are in public is determined by what we have learned and cherished in private."

What is the final result when secularization is coupled with pluralization to produce privatization?
"Secularization left society without shame and with no point of reference for decency, and pluralization left society without reason and with no point of reference for rationality. Privatization--born from the union of the other two--has left people without meaning and with no point of reference for life's coherence. The greatest victim of evil so engendered is the self. We no longer know who we are as people."

"Evil does not come only in the garb of a masked murderer. In its most cunning and destructive form, it comes as an idea dressed in sophisticated attire, rationalized by [the] prophets of the wind."
"A society without a point of reference for shame, reason, and meaning has very little to offer a generation in search of strength with which to live, goodness by which to live, and freedom in which to live. These were the very failures that felled the Greco-Roman world."

What lifeline of hope do we have to offer a society drowning in their own confusion?
"To the rugged materialist, we just happen to be here, clothed apes, a blip on the radar screen of time, a cosmic accident. But to the Christian, our existence is by the designed will of our heavenly Father who is ever in control of the universal scene."

We must remember that:
"...any nation at any time--however spiritually alive--is always potentially only a generation away from paganism and mind-defying evil. One can never sit back on past successes and assume a sustained strength for the future. Ever generation must win its own victory."

"If truth be not diffused, error will be; if God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency; if the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will; if the power of the Gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end."

"Indeed, the Bible is not just the trust of monarchs, nor is it just the standard for a nation's conscience. It is the definitive reality of life's purpose, from God's mind to ours. The "Book of the Law" mirrors the soul as it was intended to be. It reveals the sacredness of our words to each other--engendering trust. It holds us to the sanctity of our marital vows--enriching the splendor of love. It preserves the essential dignity of every human being--elevating the beauty of relationships. It bequeaths to us the sacredness of time--enjoining the sanctity of both work and rest. It commands us to respect the property of others--breaking the stranglehold of fear. It guards our essential purpose--energizing us by the coalescence of worship. It is the Mind of God. It is the Law of God. This is not a bondage to rules; this spells deliverance from evil. This was not meant for us to hate; this was made for us to love. For this we were made: that we might know the mind of God and let that mind dwell in us. This is the Word that calls us to reason together with God so that the evil within us may stir us more than the evil around us. It is only in that sequence that the soul of an individual and the soul of a nation can be recovered."

Once a nation has turned down the path of secularism, is there a way out?
"What [is] it that [makes] it possible for a people to turn their backs upon a culture immersed in evil and make a heartfelt change for the good? It [is] the belief that God [has] spoken, and that life is at its core sacred. Without those two beliefs, no society can stem the tide of evil. The place to begin, therefore, is in the individual life. The soul of a nation is changed one person at a time."

"G.K. Chesteron said the problem with Christianity is not that is has been tried and found wanting, but that is has been found difficult and left untried...the change the Word brings is not just a psychological one. The change is that of the mind as it grasps the truth and is not swayed by a mere feeling but by the deliverance deep within."
"We cannot rename wickedness and consider it solved. There is an irrepressible voice, and it is the voice of the soul, which says evil cannot be trivialized. This is what the gospel message is about. This is what the cross is all about. Failing to recognize this has disfigured the soul of America."

"The grandeur of the gospel strikes deep into the soul of wickedness because it offers not merely an analysis of the condition nor just the strength to do what is right; it goes to our innermost being, where the work of God changes what we want to do...This transformation can only take place when evil is fully faced for what it truly is and the soul is bought back from under its control."
"Today our alabaster cities have become tarnished, and with eyes dimmed by tears we cry, 'Deliver us from evil.' But that deliverance can come only if we respond to the Creator's loving invitation: 'Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.' (Matt 11:28-29)"