Minority Report
Christian Freedom in the Contest with Secularism
According to Fulton Sheen, speaking in the 1970s with his usual insight and foresight, these are great and wonderful days. Why? From a flabby, weak, compromised body of cultural Christians, a Gideon’s army of serious soldiers for Christ is being called forth, trained and tested, made fit to follow him in doing the will of the Father.
Doing the will of the Father puts one on a collision course with the world. Now that Christendom, “the economic, political, social life inspired by Christian principles,” is no more, we have little choice but to become fit or to decline into apostasy. And the one who is fit, Sheen says, does not seek to avoid his cross, but to carry it. It is the opportunity to learn obedience to Christ in a world hostile to Christian principles that makes these days great and wonderful.
We should not suppose, as the secularist supposes, that our situation is post-Christian. There is no such situation, nor can be. Jesus Christ, who reigns in glory, has commissioned us to proclaim his kingdom to the ends of the earth. He has promised to be with us in fulfilling that task until the close of the age. Nothing has changed in that regard. The age in which we are situated is an age for deliberation, an age of choice. It is an age with many eras, no doubt, not all alike, and these reflect our choices; but it is indeed an age, not an era. It has a definite beginning, the coming of Christ, and a definite end, the return of Christ. Meanwhile, the gospel is preached. The doors to the kingdom remain open. Time is granted, individually and corporately, for our response. How much time, none of us know.
Christendom came to an end with the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. It was followed by a much briefer era pretentiously labeled the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. By the time of the French Revolution, it was clear that men had made up their minds against the gospel, just as they had once made up their minds for the gospel. It is clear now, despite what they said then, that they had made up their minds against reason as well.
Let us think back to Christendom for a moment. The growth of Christendom, though often choked by weeds, produced a flowering of reason. It produced many things of beauty and benefits too numerous to recount, in music and art and architecture, in agriculture and economics and law. It produced experimental science, which sprang from its belief in creatio ex nihilo. But in the end, men turned from it. Some turned because they preferred the false wisdom of Hermes, mistaking him for a contemporary of Moses and a second source of revelation. Most preferred the follies of the nominalists, mistaking universal substances, as Anselm put it rather crudely, for mere farting sounds (flatus vocis) from their own mouths. Others insisted that the lex orandi had been corrupted, mistaking themselves for contemporaries of Peter and Paul. Some insisted that the whole Christian worldview was outdated, mistaking Ptolemy for a Christian and Copernicus for a pagan.
These defections cut men off from the roots from which those beauties and benefits had sprung. The voice of reason, they said, was the very voice of God. But they would not let God be God, and so they corrupted reason and made liars of themselves. Never were men more dishonest, or more unreasonable, than they are today. They suppose they are discovering the secrets of the universe, yet they cannot even tell the difference between a man and a woman; or rather, they profess this a secret so well hidden in the depths of the psyche that only the individual can know it. They pretend not to notice that this secret manifests itself in outbursts of rage directed chiefly at women and children. It is not pure reason only, but practical reason too, together with aesthetic judgment, that has been corrupted. What are we left with? Hume and Bentham, emotivism and utilitarianism, a pincer movement that so constricts the flow of moral goods on which civil society depends that only the ruthless prevail—the ruthless and the self-righteous, who have drunk from the cup of reeling. And everywhere women and men, and such children as they still produce in dwindling numbers, are hurting and confused; some of them confused enough to do just what Jesus predicted: “the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.”
Such is the world into which this “Gideon’s army” is sent forth, following Jesus on the via crucis. Yet it may go gladly, if it goes freely. Jesus carried his own cross freely. Had he not done so, it would have been to no effect. The gift of himself to the Father—not in his life only, which he did owe, but in his death also, which he did not owe—was a gift also to us, a gift greater than all our sins and mightier than all our sorrows. He knew right well our situation. He knew the nature of the place and time that were his. He knew the thoughts and hearts of those whom he encountered. He knew where it would all lead. Yet he went forth willingly—an infant for infants, a youth for youths, a man among men, suffering from them and for them, until he came at last to their final enemy, death, which he conquered through his cross and resurrection.
If we go with him gladly, we may also go with him confidently, expecting victory. Sheen says that what we need in the Church today is a minority report: the sort of report brought back by Caleb and Joshua to the elders of Israel when the spies returned from their clandestine mission in Canaan; the sort that is not daunted by the seemingly indomitable foes we face in our era, the era of so-called “secularism.” I will remark on that report later, but I want first to give you the majority report, which, as I read it, is not wanting for insight. This is not the optimistic review of secularism that one finds in some quarters, where it is said that secularism itself is sound and that Christians should get with the program. Perhaps that was once the majority report, but with every day that passes, its credibility crumbles. No, the report of which I first speak is a critical review of secularism. It begins on the note of freedom, which it fears is fading fast.
The Majority Report
It is for freedom that we have been set free. Therefore we should not be surprised that those who first believed in Christ began to discover what saints always discover: the freedom of the poor in spirit, the freedom of the martyr. Or that, in this discovery, they discovered also the libertas ecclesiae, the freedom of the Church, and subsidiary freedoms such as freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of speech and association, and other political freedoms on which their successors would build in rebuilding Western civilization. But neither should we be surprised that, afterwards, men who did not believe in Christ should develop false notions of freedom, resting on a doctrine of autonomy that began to destroy freedom.
That doctrine took political shape in the form of secularism. We know that God, having provided for man’s redemption, has placed him under a suspended sentence until the second appearance of the Redeemer. “The times of ignorance God overlooked,” declares Paul, “but now he commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed.” Secularism is the retort that man has placed God under a suspended sentence, the condition of which is that he not appear in public.
Douglas Farrow is Professor of Theology and Ethics at McGill University in Montreal. His recent books include Ascension Theology, Desiring a Better Country, Theological Negotiations, and 1 & 2 Thessalonians in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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