Secularism or Paganism?

For the last century, the United States of America has engaged in a great secular experiment: what if we pretended that God was irrelevant? What if we pretended that we could make laws that ignored God? Could the ‘public square’ be a place of free, rational discourse—free from claims about the implications of Christian theism on public life? This pretended neutrality has served to reveal one thing: that the line between secularism and paganism is dangerously thin. I’ll revisit that point later, but let’s first take a brief diversion into the hazy world of Cannabis and Constitutionalism.

The International Church of Cannabis (yes, you read that right) is in the midst of a battle with the city of Denver, Colorado, over what the ‘church’ claims to be its First Amendment rights to religious freedom. The battle began after the ‘church’ was ordered to remove an eleven-foot, bright pink statue that it erected on their property, a street corner in a residential area.

Striking, isn’t it? A religious group dedicated to smoking weed is appealing to the U.S. Constitution on the grounds of the First Amendment, an amendment designed to protect the Christian conscience. Now, without getting into debates about originalism versus living Constitutionalism, what does this tells us about the state of our nation? More than anything else, it indicates that the Constitution is no longer fit for the American people. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to put it the other way: the American people are no longer fit for the Constitution.

The Constitution has very little to say about God—it only mentions God indirectly, noting that the document was drafted ‘in the year of our Lord, 1787.’ While some might want to read this as a latent atheism in the Founders (or at least an etiolated deism), there is another way to explain the apparent lack of God. As John Adams famously said, “the Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people, and is wholly inadequate for any other.” That is to say, the Constitution presupposes widespread belief in God and the accompanying Christian social behaviors that stabilize a society.

Nevertheless, the lack of explicitly Christian language in the Constitution has been exploited as a ‘get out of morality free’ card by progressives for the last 150 years. And that’s just how we find the International Church of Cannabis appealing to their ‘Constitutionally-protected’ religious freedoms. Because our nation—Christians included—has gone along with the belief that the Constitution, and consequently all law, can exist and preserve social order without a Christian foundation, we now find ourselves confronted with open paganism.

Why is this the case? Why does a silent secularism end up manifesting itself as open paganism? Because nature abhors a vacuum. If there is a moral vacuum, something has to fill it. Man is homo adorans, he was created to worship something, so when God is stripped of his public relevance, the public will find other things to worship, like cannabis, or himself, or whatever that thing on the courthouse in New York is.

Secularism is never truly secular. There is always a god of the system. In a liberal democracy such as our own, the god is demos, the people. Just listen to any political pundit invoking Omniscient Polls and Almighty Consensus—such things are imbued with godlike characteristics, and everyone must fall down and worship before demos.

Christians must reclaim the public square, not ceding an inch to secularism. We must not buy into the notion that laws can be value-neutral. Law, morality, and social order have no rational basis other than the Triune God of Scripture.