Christianity and Radicalism

Updating Christianity and Liberalism

It has been 100 years since J. Gresham Machen wrote his formative book “Christianity and Liberalism.” It still contains useful insights for our day. But the Liberalism it speaks about has been eclipsed, or metastasized, into a radicalism that now enforces its opinions on the Secular Academy. I will be writing a series of posts about how Christians can understand and confront this new totalitarianism.

I would like to start with this question, “why is this radicalism so popular?’ The answer is that it fills a need in the human heart. The context is an atheist or lapsed Christian. They grew up in a setting where people valued helping others and making a difference. For the atheist, this was the general American society that was shaped by Christianity, broadly speaking. For the lapsed Christian, it was Sunday School and Church.

This Radicalism allows them to fill that need, or attempt to do so, without God or Christ. It teaches that the world is a broken place, that humans are called to give their time and resources to improve it, and that “better” is measured economically and politically. The particular concern of the radical is “dominate.” If there is a dominant economic, political, or religious class, then this is, by definition, “oppression.” The proof of oppression is any form of inequality. If there is economic or political inequality, this can only be understood by the radical as due to oppression.

When the Radical studies modern history, he identifies a central hub of oppression: the Christian. The Radical argues that Christians supported capitalism, which exploited the working class around the world. Christian missionaries were sent ahead of the capitalists to prepare the indigenous people for exploitation. Christianity maintains a social power structure that privileges a few against the vast majority.

It does not matter to the Radical that the actual history disproves this theory. It does not matter that Christian teaching is the basis for believing in universal human dignity. It does not matter that Christians were at the forefront of protecting the exploited. These kinds of arguments do not change the mind of the Radical.

The reason for this is that the Radical’s beliefs are religious. And as religious beliefs, they interpret all of the radical’s experiences. They serve as the foundation of a system. This means that offering counterevidence is ineffective because it is just reabsorbed and interpreted to confirm the basic beliefs. At the basic level, the Radical hates the Christian message about God and redemption in Christ. To disprove the basic beliefs of a religion, you must show they are contradictory. But doing so does not guarantee persuasion. Although the Radical is motivated by a hatred of God, they are also motivated to find meaning in the world around them. When their belief system is exposed as meaningless, it leads either to a changed mind or to bleak despair.

In this sense, the present is very much like the first centuries of Christianity. The pagan elite, now in the form of the radical intelligentsia, realize that the Christian teaching about God undermines all of their own deeply held beliefs. They believe in a cyclical system. They deny there is anything transcendent. They deify nature and reject God the Creator. They look for “balance” and deny that sin is real.

I will have more posts updating “Christianity and Liberalism,” and I hope these can be of assistance in understanding the radical philosophy and exposing its incoherence.