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.

I object to two legislative attempts to impose the Secular Religion upon citizens of Illinois: SB 3249 and HB 5596.  They are wholly unnecessary as LGBTQ icons and their works are already present in government schools.

My objections concern the establishment of secularism as our national religion, the valorization of LGBTQ icons more for their sexuality than their gifts and accomplishments, and using the legislature of Illinois as a social engineering lab.

In this my 65th year, our society is nuts.  Rather than being led forth into light and away from ignorance, children are being herded by teachers (and politicians) into Plato’s cave, where the darkness of identity politics, victimhood, and androgyny flicker on the walls.

What was called religion is now marginalized and silenced, and the new dogmatists have a Great Awakening going on.  Secular religion is being established, and SB 3249 and HB 5596 will further that end.

In scholar Mary Eberstadt‘s meaty essay “The Zealous Faith of Secularism,” secular religion has all but replaced the faith that once filled the now nearly-empty church pews. This new religion is a faith free of certainties—a religion that allows one to have his cake and eat his neighbors’ too. Eberstadt writes that “This substitute religion pantomimes Christianity itself in fascinating ways. It offers a hagiography of secular saints, all patrons of the sexual revolution.”

Is that not who faithful Secularists want enshrined in public schools through the “Inclusive Curriculum” bill?

People of faith tend to hunker down under a continual bombardment of political sociology experiments and the attendant media assaults on objections to legislation like Illinois SB 3249 and HB 5596, which demands an “Inclusive Curriculum” that “requires that all social studies and history classes in grades k-12 include the “role and contributions of… lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.” School children should be taught that all people bring gifts that delight, inform, and/or provide positive paths to citizenship, and Walt Whitman, Carson McCullers and James Baldwin do that very well in our curriculum already. Explicit identification of their sexual proclivities does nothing other than advance the sexuality doctrine of the Church of Secularism. Object to this sacred dogma and be damned by the later day Lollards of secular religion.

Tell me, who will your children be after 13 years in the Church of Secularism?

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to both your state representative and state senator to ask them to reject this effort to politicize curricula in order to advance biased beliefs about sexuality to children in government schools.

IFI Worldview Conference May 5th

We have rescheduled our annual Worldview Conference featuring well-know apologist John Stonestreet for Saturday, May 5th at Medinah Baptist Church. Mr. Stonestreet is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “Making Sense of Your World” and his newest offer: “A Practical Guide to Culture.”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture.

Click HERE to learn more or to register!