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Chapter 1Introduction

Chapter 2Western Culture Today

Chapter 3How the Church has been influenced by Western Culture: Morality and Materialism

Chapter 4How the Church has been influenced by Western Culture: Service and Worship

Chapter 5Christianity in a Post-Truth and Postmodern World

Chapter 6Children, Family and Education

Chapter 7The Marginalisation of Christianity

Chapter 8Christian Identity: The Heart of the Problem

Chapter 9Christian Identity: A Way Forward

Chapter 10Conclusion

Sources and References

Index of Biblical References

Index

Look therefore carefully how ye walk,

not as unwise, but as wise;

redeeming the time,

because the days are evil.

Ephesians 5:15-16

(American Standard Version)

FOREWORD

This is a disturbing book. Many will not want to read it because they honestly know that it speaks truth to all Christians as we face the future. However, it is a book we MUST read if we want our churches to be visible, viable and vibrant places of hope and renewal.

Dr Sookhdeo acknowledges that for nearly 2,000 years the Church blazed strongly in the West, and, from a strong base in Europe, the rest of the world was evangelised. But, he contends: ‘The fire is now dying. The flame is faintly flickering. It has burned down to the embers, though not extinguished.’ This awoke a memory in me. When I became vicar of St Nicholas’ Durham in 1975, I came across the diary of the church for 1925 and found that the Sunday school had numbered over 1,000 and when the Sunday school had its summer outing to places like Seaburn or Barnard Castle, the church hired a whole train. Fifty years later, however, in 1975 the Sunday school numbered less than 20. I could barely take in the scale of that decline.

In Europe, Christianity has played a profound role in shaping the values and aspirations, institutions and forms of our society throughout the ages. I believe that it has been an overwhelmingly positive influence and remains crucial today for the sense of moral purpose and shared endeavour of the Western nations.

But Dr Sookhdeo notes that the church is threatened by the forces of secularism, militant atheism, moral relativism, postmodernism, pluralism, hedonism, and individualism. Historic, creedal Christianity has been replaced by therapeutic consumerism. Sookhdeo contrasts this with the world’s fastest growing religion – Islam, with its fixed sense of identity, its powerful symbols and ‘pillars’ and its strong sense of shared community encapsulated by the Arabic word umma. He calls upon the Western church to learn from persecuted Christians of the non-Western church and recover their creeds, commandments and community.

Though I do not wholly share his deep pessimism, I nevertheless believe that by and large his diagnosis of the causes of the decline of the Western church is correct. Indeed, this is a prophetic book which is a timely and telling indictment of all of us Western Christians. And Dr Sookhdeo’s call to repentance, I hope will lead to a profound reassessment by Western church leaders. Only a commitment to our core beliefs, and a passionate engagement with and challenge to our culture will result in the revival and renewal of the church which we all long for.

GEORGE CAREY

Lord Carey of Clifton

103rd Archbishop of Canterbury

INTRODUCTION

The Church in the West once blazed strongly. For centuries, the Bible was at the heart of European culture and the cultures of North America and Australasia. Society at all levels recognised God at work in the world and gave allegiance, even if nominally, to the Lord Jesus Christ. From the stronghold of ‘Christendom,’ the Gospel was carried across the globe.

The fire is now dying. The flame is faintly flickering. It has burned down to the embers, though not extinguished.

In pockets, the Church burns brightly. Many evangelical and Pentecostal churches are growing. Christianity burns strongly in the Caribbean and amongst Afro-Caribbean communities in the diaspora. Eastern Europe Catholics remain robust in their faith a generation after communism ended, and bring the blaze with them when they move to western Europe, North America or Australasia. Middle Eastern Orthodox Christian refugees show their Western hosts that they are not ashamed of their faith.

Sadly, these are exceptions. The Christian Post reported a 2017 study revealing that for each person in the UK brought up with no religion who later embraces Christianity, there are 26 people brought up as Christians who turn agnostic or atheist. In 2011, The Independent estimated that as many as 5,000 British people convert to Islam every year. The Western Church is rapidly declining and, if trends continue, many who are reading these pages in 2017 — the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation — will live to see it die — unless God graciously intervenes.

Why is Christianity dying? When a fish goes bad, the rot starts at the head and then spreads to the body. Since the 1960s, Christian leaders have progressively betrayed the Gospel. The starkest example of this is aping the culture to affirm, bless and engage in pansexual lifestyles. This, lamentably, is merely one example of a wide-ranging liberalism that readily bends the beliefs of historic Christianity to avoid any confrontation with secular society. Many ordinary Christians, clergy and pastors struggle to remain faithful, but they are betrayed by the treachery of the hierarchy.

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, sparking off the Reformation. Luther was doubly troubled by corruption within the Church and the Ottoman armies marching across Europe under the banner of Islam.

Half a millennium later, the same twin threats confront the Church in the West, albeit this time Islam is advancing by mostly non-violent means. There is also a third threat that Luther did not have to face — humanism.

The New Civic Religion (Patrick Sookhdeo, 2016) charts the trajectory of the bold yet subtle strategy of humanism. The humanist leaders were zealous and creative evangelists, surpassing the fervour of Christian missionaries. The results are now plainly visible. In less than a generation, the humanists successfully uprooted Western culture from its Judaeo-Christian foundation on rock and transplanted it to a humanist edifice built on sand.

Humanism atomised Western society to the cult of fragmented individualism, making the word society sound strange and unfamiliar. Humanism bulldozed Biblical morality and replaced it with licensed permissiveness. Humanism offered a new distorted prism through which the brave new West could view the Church. Christians were no longer seen as the ‘good guys’ but as the ‘bad guys’ or at best the ‘laughably foolish guys.’

The Old Testament prophets condemned ‘those who call evil good and good evil’ (Isaiah 5:20). A more accurate description of our society is not possible. The leadership of Anglo-Saxon Christianity charge down the hill like the Gadarene swine, eager to keep up with or even outdo contemporary culture as it swiftly dissolves into decadence. We are seeing the horrifying prophetic vision of debauchery in the Jerusalem Temple where the 70 elders continued their placid worship while the walls were crawling with forbidden and detestable animals (Ezekiel 8:6-11).

Western Christianity has sold its identity for a mess of pottage. Christians no longer know who they are and so cannot withstand the multipronged attacks on their faith. People who have forgotten their past have no hope of a future. We will examine this all-important loss of Christian identity in Chapter 8.

Meanwhile, we grasp at metaphors to describe the comatose and life-threatening nature of the Church’s predicament. The Church has been poisoned. The flames have been doused and all but quenched. The rot is endemic.

Christianity is decaying and going down the gutter because the God of modern Christianity is not the God of the Bible.

— A. W. Tozer (1897-1963)

On 8 April 1966, Time magazine’s cover page shouted out a three-word question: ‘Is God Dead?’ The death of God article asked if religion in general and Christianity in particular was relevant in an age where communism, science and technology were making great strides. Then, 97% of Americans believed with absolute certainly in the existence of God. Fifty years later, that number has been whittled down to 63%, says a Pew study. God may not be dead, but Christianity is dying out across the Western world (Lipka, 2015).

The projections are alarming. Popular publications scream out scary headlines. ‘Christians are leaving the faith in droves and the trend isn’t slowing down’ (Business Insider, 28 April 2015); ‘US Christians numbers “decline sharply”’ (BBC News, 12 May 2015); ‘Church attendance drops to lowest rate EVER as UK faces “anti-Christian” culture’ (The Express, 13 January 2016) and ‘2067: The end of British Christianity’ (The Spectator, 13 June 2015).

Adapted from Aggregate Religiosity Index, updated from Grant, Sociological Spectrum, 2008

One of the most comprehensive studies measuring the religiosity of the United States from 1952 to 2013, was conducted by sociologist Professor Tobin Grant (Grant, 2014). After reviewing a number of measures of religiosity based on information about attendance at worship services, church membership figures, prayer, and feelings toward religion, Grant concluded that the United States is in the midst of what he described as the ‘the Great Decline.’ Grant contrasts this with the period he calls the ‘the Great Awakening’ shortly after the end of the Second World War, during which Christianity experienced a revival of sorts.

American Christianity nosedived in the 1960s and 1970s, partly as a reaction to the Vietnam War. People began to question authorities and institutions, Church and state. After the 1970s, Christianity in the US remained relatively stable until the turn of the millennium. Since then, Christianity has plummeted far more sharply than in the 1960s and 1970s, and twice as fast. The number of atheists and ‘nones’ (people who are not atheist but who have no religious affiliation) is growing dramatically. Christianity plays far less of a role than in any other period since the 1950s. Correspondingly, the number of those professing belief in Christianity is plunging at an alarming rate, not just in the US, but right across the West.

In the UK, fewer children are being born into families calling themselves Christian. The British census found that the number fell by 5.3 million between 2001 and 2011. ‘One day the last native-born Christian will die and that will be that,’ commented The Spectator, calculating that, if 2015 rates of decline continued, Anglicanism would disappear from Britain by 2033 and indigenous Christianity by 2067. According to the British Social Attitudes survey, in 1983 over two-thirds of the population said they were Christian, but in 2017 this figure was down to 41% while 53% said they had no religion. In 1983, 40% of the population identified themselves as Anglican; by 2017 this had fallen to 15% (3% for the 18-24 age range). Between 2012 and 2014 some 1.7 million souls abandoned the Church of England, averaging 16,000 per week. (Thompson, 2015; Rudgard, 2017)

In March 2016, the British Mennonites held their last service, ending 400 years of history. Ed Sherit, a Mennonite elder, explained, ‘As with many Christian churches, we failed to convince the next generation that following Jesus is the best way. We lost the next generation.’ Reporting on the Church shutting its doors forever The Guardian (Sherwood, 2016) commented, ‘Another factor in the church’s decline was the changing attitudes towards religion in society generally. In the 2011 census about a quarter of the UK population reported that they had no religion, up more than 10 percentage points since the previous census in 2001.’

A significant proportion of the declining UK Christian population describing themselves as belonging to the Church of England admit to being ‘cultural’ Christians. The actual attendance figures of the Church of England paint a dismal picture. In 2016, the number of people attending weekly services dropped to below one million for the first time (about two percent of the population). Even this figure is an overestimate as it includes the same people who attend multiple services during the week. Those attending Anglican services fell by 12% between 2004 and 2014. Speaking at the Anglican primates’ meeting in Canterbury 2014, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby admitted that he did not expect a change in the trend soon despite ambitious and strategic interventions:

In some parts of the Communion decline in numbers has been a pattern for many years. In England our numbers have been falling at about 1% every year since [World War Two] … The culture [is] becoming anti-Christian, whether it is on matters of sexual morality, or the care for people at the beginning or the end of life. It is easy to paint a very gloomy picture.

Reacting to the attendance figures, Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, said, in a comment reported by The Guardian:

Church of England attendance now appears to have fallen below 2% of the population, and looks set to fall further given the preponderance of older churchgoers. This seriously calls into question its right to remain the established church. Indeed, it is inappropriate for there to be any established religion in a modern pluralistic society, far less one where the majority do not consider themselves to be religious.

The decline in membership is not limited to the Church of England. In 2015, membership of all denominations combined was 10.3% of the population. However, church attendance in all denominations was barely five percent. The Church of England accounted for almost half of all Christians attending church in England.

On 17 January 2016, The Times announced, ‘A post-Christian era has dawned in Britain.’ Those claiming to have no religion rose from 37% of the population in 2013 to 42% in 2015 to 46% in 2016 with only 31% claiming to be Christian. The survey noted that the figures would be much worse for Christianity if not for the influx of Christian migrants from Africa and Eastern Europe.

In Australia, the 2016 census revealed that just over 52% of the country was Christian (down from 88% in 1966). In the previous five years, the Muslim and Hindu populations had each increased by more than 100,000 (now 2.6% and 1.9% respectively). Nearly 30% of respondents said they had no religion. (Berlinger, 2017)

In Norway, a 2016 Ipsos study revealed that those who did not believe in God outnumbered those who did for the first time ever in the nation’s history. To the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ 39% responded ‘No’ while 37% said ‘Yes.’ The remainder did not know. Two years earlier, those answering ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to this question were equal in number and in 1985 only 20% of the population said they did not believe in God. This tidal wave of atheism and secularism is responsible for increased resistance to Christianity in Norway. In 2015, the Norwegian government asked all facilities for asylum seekers to remove crosses, images of Jesus and other Christian symbols, in case such items caused offence to non-Christians.

In Iceland, a traditionally Christian country, people are abandoning the Church en masse. According to a Gallup poll (The Washington Post 23 January 2016), 90% of the population claimed to be Christian in 1996. In just 20 years, this figure had fallen to 46%. In the same period, non-believers rose from 13% to 54%. The poll did not identify a single respondent who believed that God created the earth. Bjarni Jonsson, Managing Director of the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association, commented on Christianity’s catastrophic decline in Iceland: ‘Secularization has occurred very quickly, especially among younger people. With increased education and broad-mindedness, change can occur quickly.’

In 2014, a Gallup survey on religiosity identified Sweden as the least religious country after China. China had decades of atheist communist rule; Sweden is a country with a strong Christian heritage. Only eight percent of Swedes attend a religious service and those go do so very occasionally, at Christmas and Easter. The Swedish government website has a page titled ‘10 Fundamentals of Religion in Sweden’ explaining Sweden’s secularisation:

Sweden is a highly secular nation and Swedes appear to see little connection between religiosity and happiness. According to The Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism (2012), only 29 per cent of Swedes claim to be religious, compared with 59 per cent globally. These figures rank Sweden as one of the least religious countries in the world. Not all Swedes are comfortable with the at times prominent cultural role of the church either, and many people pursue alternative forms of ritual. With marriages on the rise in Sweden, civil weddings now account for nearly a third of all marriage ceremonies. In addition, secular ‘name-giving’ ceremonies (namngivningsceremonier) for infants also exist, with the aim of celebrating the arrival of a new child without the religious overtones of a christening.

The website goes on to explain how much secularisation has affected not only society but also the Church.

Christianity and the church may have maintained ritual and cultural importance in Sweden, but this has not prevented the country from becoming one of the world’s most liberal societies. In some areas where religious and social conservatism often prevail, such as the right to abortion, no serious debate exists in Sweden. Living together and having children without being married is also socially acceptable, and recent statistics suggest that more than 40 per cent of first-time parents in Sweden have children before getting married. The Church of Sweden has often accompanied liberal social change rather than obstructing it. For example, in 2009 the church decided to begin performing same-sex marriage ceremonies as Sweden legalised same-sex marriage in the same year. At the end of 2014, 5,356 women and 4,212 men had married a person of the same sex. Traditional yet new thinking, secular yet religious, tolerant yet challenging — it all holds true for Sweden.

The National Geographic article ‘The World’s Newest Major Religion: No Religion,’ describes the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, or ‘nones,’ who now constitute the second largest ‘religious’ group in North America and Western Europe. ‘Nones’ make up a quarter of the American population and have overtaken Catholics, mainline Protestants and followers of all non-Christian faiths combined.

There have long been predictions that religion would fade from relevancy as the world modernizes, but all the recent surveys are finding that it’s happening startlingly fast. France will have a majority secular population soon. So will the Netherlands and New Zealand. The United Kingdom and Australia will soon lose Christian majorities. Religion is rapidly becoming less important than it’s ever been, even to people who live in countries where faith has affected everything from rulers to borders to architecture. (Bullard, 2016)

The death throes of Christianity are significantly affecting the social fabric of the West. The article points out that this realignment towards atheism has profound outcomes on how people view the world, how they regard death, how they act towards others and how they raise their children. The Western church is losing, or in most countries has already lost, the battle over abortion, euthanasia, prayer in schools and same-sex marriage.

We have entered the ‘post-Christian’ era. The German philosopher Hermann von Keyserling first used the term in his book America Set Free (1929). The term regained popularity in the 1960s following the ‘death of God’ movement. A group of theologians, recognising the decline in a belief in God, argued that for Christianity to survive it would have to do so without an orthodox understanding of God.

Today, the Church is scarcely distinguishable from society. Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (2017), writes that we entered ‘the new Dark Age.’ There is hardly any difference between the behaviour of Christians and non-Christians in the West, as we will see in Chapter 3. Christians are as likely, and in some cases more likely, to have sex before or outside marriage, lie, cheat, steal, divorce and pursue materialism than their non-Christian counterparts.

As early as the 18^th century, John Wesley, founder of Methodism, had warned of this compliance. ‘What one generation tolerates the next generation will embrace.’

In the span of a single lifetime, Europe and the Western world have become almost unrecognisable. Society is hurtling towards hell in a handbasket of moral debauchery. Christians who hold conservative views are seen as dangerous to society.

A relativism that is not only post-Christian but inherently and intentionally anti-Christian has replaced Christianity. This relativism has demolished Christian virtues and labelled them unenlightened, backward, intolerant, sexist, exclusivist, bigoted, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, and, in some cases, illegal. The tables have been upturned as social mores once regarded as immoral and sinful under the influence of Christianity, are now normalised and celebrated.

This has left the Church facing a fatal crisis of identity. Desperate to survive and remain relevant, it has struck a Faustian bargain with postmodern Western ideals, tolerating and taking on unorthodox beliefs and behaviours. This has, in fact, produced the opposite effect, alienating even more people and making the Church an object of ridicule. In fact, evidence from recent studies suggests that liberal churches die fastest.

In the Western world in particular, where Christianity is marginalized and secular culture dismisses it as an ideological has-been, where daily we rub shoulders with persons of other faiths and of no faith, and where within the older Protestant churches tolerating the intolerable is advocated as a requirement of justice, versions of Christianity that care more for experiences of life than for principles of truth will neither strengthen churches nor glorify God…. The well-being of Christianity worldwide for this twenty-first century directly depends, I am convinced, on the recovery of what has historically been called catechesis − that is, the ministry of systematically teaching people in and coming into our churches the sinew-truths that Christians live by, and the faithful, practical, consistent way for Christians to live by them. — J. I. Packer (2008)

Worse still, the West exports its increasingly immoral values and ideals across the world. Such ‘activism’ is provoking violent extremist groups, especially from conservative religions like Islam, to challenge this assault on traditional morality. There is no excuse for such violence, but Westerners need to understand that these groups justify their violence as a holy war on a morally bankrupt West. In 2016, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a prominent lawyer and the first Muslim woman appointed to a UK cabinet position, expressed her deep belief in Britain’s need to return to its Christian roots and a ‘Europe that is sure about its Christian heritage.’ ‘For minority faiths to feel truly comfortable about who they are, the majority has got to be sure about who it is,’ she added.

On the night of 13 November 2015, a series of seven coordinated attacks rocked the city of Paris. Over 130 people were killed, many more seriously injured. That night’s deadliest attack was at a rock concert. Three gunmen with assault rifles entered the Boulevard Voltaire and began firing indiscriminately into the crowd, killing 89 and wounded over 100 revellers. The band from California performing that night was the Eagles of Death Metal. The terrorists opened fire as the band was leading the crowd in singing a song called ‘Kiss the Devil.’

Who’ll love the devil?

Who’ll sing his song?

Who will love the devil and his song?

I’ll love the devil, I’ll sing his song

I will love the devil and his song

Who’ll love the devil?

Who’ll kiss his tongue?

Who will kiss the devil on his tongue?

I’ll love the devil I’ll kiss his tongue

I will kiss the devil on his tongue

Soon after the attack, the band released a statement on social media talking about their ‘prayers for those affected in these tragic events.’ A band that sings satanic lyrics later offers prayers for the victims of the attack without any apparent irony.

On 22 May 2017, a terrorist detonated his bomb at an Ariana Grande pop concert in Manchester, England. In ‘Side to Side’ Grande sang, ‘Tonight I’m making deals with the devil/And know it’s going to get me in trouble… Let them hoes know.’ Grande is famous for promoting ‘raunch’ culture. Masquerading as a liberation movement for girls in their early teens, her music appears to be grooming girls for ‘consequence-free sex.’ Many of Grande’s songs and videos simulate pansexual promiscuity. Yet many parents permit and even encourage their teenage daughters to attend her concerts and endorse the raunch culture and lifestyle.

After the Manchester bombing, journalist Alexis Petridis explained in his column for The Guardian why he took his daughters aged seven and ten to such concerts. ‘I take them because I think those big pop gigs do something incredibly important.’ Recalling the first time he took his older daughter, then aged seven, to a concert, he wrote, ‘… it was the way it gave her a first glimpse of a world that was previously outside her experience, a more adult, or at least more mature world than the one she knew, a world that would one day be her own, and how excited she was to see it, how — as she put it — grown-up it made her feel.’ For Petridis, ‘Music aimed at teenage girls is derided but the likes of Ariana Grande provide the kind of empowering, transcendent experience that terrorists hate.’

Cultural analysist, Jenny Taylor, added her critique of the dangers of raunch culture in the aftermath of the Manchester attack.

That the dark excess stalking such entertainment events contributed to a moral and social atmosphere in which wholesale sex grooming was able to take place without public comment for two whole decades seems to have escaped the sentimentalists’ notice. Sexuality was something that used to be held to need the constraints of parents and guardians and society as a whole. Now parents ferry their children to these spectacles.

Two weeks after the Manchester attack, pop-star Justin Bieber made a speech during a charity performance in support of the Manchester victims. God TV reported the story under the headline ‘Justin Bieber Preaches at Manchester Benefit Concert.’ Christian Today ran a similar story, praising the celebrity Katy Perry (who sings ‘I kissed a Girl and Liked It’) for her tweet ‘praying for everyone @ArianaGrande’s show’ and extolling Grande who led a prayer backstage before the benefit concert. Ruth Gledhill, editor of Christian Today, described the concert as ‘imbued with a sense of godliness, and the power of good to triumph ultimately in the face of evil.’

If the evangelical media can uncritically endorse raunch culture celebrities like Grande and Perry and can applaud Justin Bieber, who lives the sex, drink, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle to its fullest, the Church in the West is well and truly trapped in the dungeons of its own decadence.

WESTERN CULTURE TODAY

In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behaviour. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because [it is] uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation’s grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and social ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thoughts; they have not only been relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized. — D.A. Carson (2011)

Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity, not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result, is no longer the consensus or ethos of our society — Francis Schaeffer (1984)

Culture is the collective beliefs, values, worldview and way of life specific to a group of people. Distinctive cultural elements include norms, symbols, heroes, language, rituals, practices, dress and more. Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede defines culture as ‘the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others.’

What are the ideologies, philosophies and worldviews responsible for the ‘collective programming’ of the Western mind in a post-Christian age?

ATHEISM

Western culture has shifted from a Christian worldview to a culture that is not merely indifferent to God, but militantly campaigns against belief in a supernatural or transcendent being. The cultural Marxist philosopher György Lukács summed it up as a refusal ‘to accept the world as something that has arisen (or e.g. has been created by God) independently of the knowing subject,’ preferring ‘to conceive of it instead as its own product.’

Over the last half a century, militant atheists have creatively camouflaged atheism as ‘humanism’ and vigorously promoted it in schools. An indoctrinated younger generation has bought widely into believing that God does not exist, this life is all that there is, humans are the pinnacle of an evolutionary process, and that ‘religion poisons everything’ — the sub-title of a bestselling book by British atheist Christopher Hitchens. A belief in the non-existence of God affects how people view the world, themselves, others, marriage, family, sexuality, the meaning of life and their purpose in the world. If there is no God, afterlife or consequence for one’s actions, a sense of self-importance increases, as does the pursuit of sensual pleasures. As Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted.’

Hitchens, along with Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. American philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris, and American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett have come to be known as the ‘four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse.’

What do atheists look like? In 2015, the Atheist Alliance International reported on the demographic makeup of atheists stating that the majority of atheists are Western, white (78%), middle class, university educated, men (68%). According to an earlier 2012 report from the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, only 3% of US atheists and agnostics were black, 6% were Hispanic, and 4% were Asian. Some 82% were white. Not surprisingly, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett are all white, university educated, Western men.

New Testament scholar Craig Keener, after a comprehensive study of miracles in a wide variety of cultures, concludes that routinely rejecting the possibility of the supernatural is a deeply Eurocentric impulse.

Atheists are addressing this lack of diversity and trying to spread their ideology across racial, gender, social and educational boundaries. In the above 2015 report, they even suggest co-opting the ‘ongoing implementation of the UN System Wide Action Plan on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women’ as one strategy to promote atheism. (Diaz & Hamill, 2015) This exposes the United Nations’ involvement in spreading atheism, albeit thinly veiled by the noble cause of gender equality.

MORAL RELATIVISM

The idea of God is the type and foundation of the principle of authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, humanist, economist and philosopher (1846)

‘What you believe is true for you. What I believe is true for me.’ The view expressed in such a statement is called relativism. What may be right for one person in one situation can be wrong for another person in the same situation or the same person in another situation. It is not for anyone to question or judge the behaviour, actions and decisions of anyone else.

For many Westerners, absolute right and wrong no longer exist. In the US, the roots of this worldview go as far back as 1932 as seen in the report of the Character Education Committee of American Association of School Administrators, which was to form the basis of a morally relativist culture in the coming decades.

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology. This of course does not involve the denial of the principle of continuity in human affairs. Nor does it mean that each generation must repudiate the system of values of its predecessors. It does mean, however, that no such system is permanent; that it will have to change and grow in response to experience — Character Education Committee (1932)

The chickens of moral relativism have come home to roost with the 2016 Barna survey, The End of Absolutes: America’s New Moral Code, revealing more than half the US population to be moral relativists. Fifty-seven percent of Americans believe that defining what is right or wrong is a matter of personal experience. Seventy-four percent of millennials (those born between 1980-2000) believe that morality is relative, agreeing with the statement, ‘whatever is right for your life works best for you is the only truth you can know.’ This figure is three times higher than that for those born before 1945. The study credits the school curriculum for this shift and concludes:

Christianity has for the most part been removed as the moral norm of culture and replaced with a new moral code, which consists of six tenets:

1.The best way of finding yourself is by looking within yourself.

2.People should not criticize someone else’s life choices.

3.To be fulfilled in life, you should pursue the things you desire most.

4.The highest goal of life is to enjoy it as much as possible.

5.People can believe whatever they want, as long as those beliefs don’t affect society.

6.Any kind of sexual expression between two consenting adults is acceptable. (Haverluck, 2016)

POSTMODERNISM

[In] the multidimensional and slippery space of post-modernism anything goes with anything, like a game without rules. Floating images … maintain no relationship with anything at all, and meaning becomes detachable like the keys on a key ring. Dissociated and decontextualized, they slide past one another failing to link up into a coherent sequence. Their fluctuating but not reciprocal interactions are unable to fix meaning. — Painter, author and professor Suzy Gablik speaking on how postmodernism is expressed in art. (Callincos, 1989)

Postmodernism is linked to moral relativism but goes deeper. Moral relativism rejects moral absolutes; postmodernism rejects all absolutes. Indeed, the very idea of absolute truth is considered fiction. Worse still, truth claims are in reality claims to power. Truth is subjective and plural. Consequently, there is no fixed meaning to text, authority, thought, norm or reality. Everything, including the Bible, is open to multiple interpretations. No interpretation can be final or definitive. Our view of reality is entirely a matter of perspective. Individuals construct their own truths. Reason is suspect. Feelings trump facts. Experience and emotion supersede empiricism or reality.

Postmodernism is Pontius Pilate personified, mockingly asking Jesus, ‘What is truth?’ (John 18:38).

A postmodern society permits everything and prohibits nothing. The only taboo is to declare something taboo.

PLURALISM

Pluralism is the view that all cultures, religions, beliefs, norms and practices are equally valid — even if they contradict each other. For a culture to claim it is better than another culture is cultural imperialism. Faced with the diversity of many races, religions, cultures and beliefs, pluralists insist that pluralism is the only path to peaceful coexistence. Most postmodernists are also pluralist.

Pluralism celebrates diversity and dialogue between cultures and religions. However, far from pursuing the noble virtue of tolerance as might be expected, pluralism enforces a reductionist and minimalist lowest common denominator between cultures and religions. Its iron fist of uniformity thus destroys the distinctiveness of all religions and cultures.

Pluralism is eroding the Judaeo-Christian basis of the Western legal system and compelling new legislation against Christians and in favour of minority cultures and religions. At the same time, pluralism ignores harmful cultural practices like Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), child brides, polygamy, forced marriage and harmful religious practices like punishment for apostasy. Immigrant communities in the West are increasingly importing and following these practices.