Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
If we decide to send our children to secular institutions, we had better do so with our eyes wide open to the worldview their minds will be filled with on a daily basis. If we send our children to public schools, we must be aware that the bewitching influence of secularism runs swift and strong. Maximally, this is a call for Christians to seriously consider the need for Christian schooling.

Secularism is a religion. Make no mistake about it. Though many seek to advance it as a neutralizing alternative to a religiously structured society, it is, in its own right, a religion. A secular worldview is not content until it has permeated every fabric of society–civics, ethics, media, and education. Just as the Christian worldview is meant to permeate all human activity, so secularism seeks to stand in the gap and block a truly consistent application of Christianity to every aspect of life. There is a bewitching element of secularism to which many–even many Christians–are blind.
Prior to considering one important measure to counter the permeating influence of secularism, a brief history of secularism as an ideological movement is in order. In the chapter, “Atheism and Secularism,” in the Ligonier Field Guide on False Teaching, we read,
“The Enlightenment in France particularly fueled atheism and secularism in the Western world. Baron Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach—an atheist intellectual—taught a form of mechanistic metaphysics that served as a catalyst for the modern atheism movement. D’Holbach devoted two works to the defense and propagation of atheism: Système de la Nature and Le Bon Sens. His contemporary Denis Diderot is believed to have assisted him in the production of the strongly atheistic and materialistic book Système de la Nature. Diderot was the first to give a modern definition of atheism, including it in his Encyclopédie.
With the rise of the scientific revolution, materialistic understandings of the origins of the universe became more widely accepted in the West. Accordingly, the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species in 1859 was seized upon by atheists as providing a scientific justification for their view. Darwin’s work fostered secularist agendas in Western countries, primarily through Karl Marx’s application of Darwin’s principles to his economic and political theories. In Das Kapital, Marx appealed to Darwin’s contributions. Although Darwin was not supportive of Marx’s use of his philosophy for the propagation of political and economic socialism, the rise of secularsm can be directly tied to the influence of Darwin on Marx.
After Marx, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche further advanced anti-theistic philosophy throughout the Western world. On numerous occasions, Nietzsche used the phrase ‘God is dead’ to explain the effects of the Enlightenment in producing an increasing disbelief in God and subsequent secularization in Western society.
In 1927, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell gave a talk at the National Secular Society in London that was later published in 1969 under the title Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. This book had a significant effect on readers in Britain and America, further popularizing atheism and secularism. Russell helped pave the way for the “new atheist” movement—a contemporary form of atheist apologetics popularized by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins’ The God Delusion, released in 2006, was a New York Times best seller and the second-best-selling book on Amazon that year. New atheism distinguishes itself from older forms of atheism in that it does not simply reject belief in God but also is hostile to those who hold religious views.
The term “secularism” was first coined by George Holyoake in the mid-nineteenth century in his work Principles of Secularism. Holyoake defined secularism in this way:
‘Secularism is a series of principles intended for the guidance of those who find theology indefinite, or inadequate, or deem it unreliable. It replaces theology, which mainly regards life as a sinful necessity, as a scene of tribulation through which we pass to a better world.’
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How should Christians respond when LGBT activists demand they compromise the truth of Scripture by endorsing same-sex marriage and transgender identity?
A global gathering of Anglicans just provided an excellent example.
In February, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the head of the Church of England and the “first among equals” in the global Anglican Communion, the third-largest Christian denomination, defended blessings for same-sex couples while insisting that the move did not violate the church’s doctrine that marriage is between one man and one woman for life.
“For the first time, the Church of England will publicly, unreservedly and joyfully welcome same-sex couples in church,” Welby said in a joint statement with Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell at the time.
Leaders at the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) wouldn’t stand for this. On Friday, they signed the Kigali Commitment, condemning Welby’s move as “blasphemy” and declaring that he and the Church of England had abdicated their leadership of the Anglican Communion.
“It grieves the Holy Spirit and us that the leadership of the Church of England is determined to bless sin,” GAFCON leaders wrote in the Kigali Commitment. “Since the Lord does not bless same-sex unions, it is pastorally deceptive and blasphemous to craft prayers that invoke blessing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
GAFCON, which met last week in Kigali, Rwanda, declared Welby’s leadership “entirely indefensible.” The Kigali Commitment declares that the Church of England has “failed to maintain true communion based on the Word of God and shared faith in Christ,” therefore noting that GAFCON’s “communion with them remains broken.” That represents a kind of revolution and excommunication from below, in which the top leaders of Anglican churches—referred to as primates—brush away the historic head of the denomination.
“We consider that those who refuse to repent have abdicated their right to leadership within the Anglican Communion, and we commit ourselves to working with orthodox primates and other leaders to reset the Communion on its biblical foundations,” the commitment reads. The statement notes that GAFCON and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (which has also effectively excommunicated the Church of England) represent 85% of the primates in the Global Anglican Communion, the third-largest Christian denomination after the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.
It remains unclear what will happen next for GAFCON and its ally, the Global South Fellowship. “The GAFCON primates are still finalizing the practicalities of the statement,” a spokeswoman for the conference told The Daily Signal on Tuesday.
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Written by Brenda M. Hafera |
Monday, April 24, 2023
Mimicry is perhaps the best answer we have as human beings. Explaining dutiful love theoretically is not as palpable as seeing the hands of a father made rough and strong through sacrifice. Boys learn much from the example of a good man….Virtuous femininity, masculinity, and marriages based on friendship draw us in with the attractiveness of goodness. Rather than pontificating in ivory towers about men and women, we are better served by going out into the world, finding good men, women, and marriages and imitating them.

Our Lost Boys
Multiple books have been released in recent years and the past few decades—The War Against Boys, The Boy Crisis, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, and Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It—that demonstrate with staggering evidence and statistics that our boys are suffering and lost. But we have not yet fully determined how to respond to these troubles, and reasonable voices on the topic can be hard to find.
Despite the presence of polarizing reactions, we cannot overlook the fact that our boys are floundering and bereft of purpose. Young men commit suicide at six times the rate of young women, and as the knowledge economy grows, and boys fall behind academically, even their IQs are dropping. The absence of fathers, technological and economic shifts, and an education system that does not nurture boys, are all contributing factors begging for commensurate solutions. If men and women can work in unique ways—ways that acknowledge our interdependence—to urge our boys to be conscientious and strong, this may help ameliorate the crisis.
Polarizing Reactions
Good-willed individuals agree that our boys are faltering, but we can become reactionary in our discussions and solutions.
Identity politics leftists tend to portray all masculinity as toxic. They do not have a vision of what healthy masculinity looks like, and are likely incapable of providing one, given that they deny there are differences between men and women and reject a conception of virtue grounded in an unchangeable human nature.
On the other hand, male advocacy often devolves into the discordant. Conservatives can sometimes fall into the trap of delivering sweeping generalizations about rigid gender roles that make constructive conversation impossible. Some writers even stoop to bombastic so-called “solutions” like an author in Crisis magazine who wrote: “We should do one really sound and sensible thing: take away women’s right to vote.”
Such folks insinuate that feminism is the cause of all ills, for men and for the family. They suggest that we should promote a strict division of roles as we had in the 1950s, with women leading private lives in the home and men pursuing careers and public life. This is a blunt description that doesn’t match the complicated realities and mysteries of the partnership between men and women. Nor is it what most women desire, as 60 percent of mothers with underage kids prefer part-time work. These arguments tend to alienate women and enflame young men, which does nothing for a crisis that will require the partnership of men and women to abate.
What is the boy crisis? Contributing factors include the absence of fathers, economic and technological churnings, and policies within our education system.
According to The Boy Crisis, written by political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray, the primary driver of the boy crisis is the absence of strong fathers and male role models in the community (single-sex spaces can help offset the missing example of a parent). Almost every school shooter is a dad-deprived boy, and such boys “are more likely to be addicted to drugs, video games, opioids, and online porn, more likely to be depressed, withdrawn and to commit suicide, they are even more likely to have their life expectancy shortened.”
In Men Without Work, American Enterprise Institute political economist Nicholas Eberstadt details how men of prime working age are willingly unemployed and spending a great deal of time looking at screens. (The elephant in the room is the rampant addiction to online pornography exacerbated by the invention of YouTube and the smartphone, which will require not only policy conversations but religious renewal to subside.)
In The War Against Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers, a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, raised the alarm over 20 years ago about our education system. She wrote, “Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory.” Identity politics has ascended even more since that time, and men (particularly white, heterosexual ones) are the prime scapegoat. Young men have reason to feel deflated and cheated.
They also have reason to be pessimistic about their futures. As indicated in The Boy Crisis, the median annual earnings of men with high school diplomas have dropped 26 percent in the past 40 years, while men today are simultaneously earning just 38 percent of university diplomas. Alimony laws can be disproportionately punishing, and many custody laws favor moms.
Constructive Responses
We have yet to work through comprehensive responses to these issues, especially as some of them, such as the growth of the knowledge economy, are not the result of deliberate discrimination or maliciousness.
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