I’m currently reading “A Christian Manifesto” by Francis Schaeffer. I had to buy it second-hand from Amazon, as his books are hard to get in the UK (he was an American and he died in 1984). Here is a bit about him in Wikipedia.
The blurb from the cover of the book says:
“It happened so subtly that few people noticed at first. Little by little, morality and freedom started to crumble. It came first in government, in education, in media – and finally it began to shake our familes and our own lives. something fundamental has changed. Law and government no longer provide a foundation of Justice and morality but have become the means of licensing moral perversions of all kinds. Education has become the enemy of religious truths and values and the media have provided the means for propagating the change. In this explosive book, Dr Schaeffer shows why this has happened. First he shows how we have failed to understand the problem – to see that the whole foundation for society has shifted radically from it’s original Judeo-Christian basis to a humanistic basis. As the humanistic view takes over, it necessarily destroys the whole way of life built upon Judeo-Christian heritage.
A Christian Manifesto is literally a call for Christians to change the course of history – by returning to biblical Truth and by allowing Christ to be Lord in all of life. To do this , Schaeffer says, will involve a head-on confrontation with the false view that material or energy, shaped by chance is the final reality. Schaeffer’s provocative conclusion is that when the state directly defies the absolute law of God, it’s authority becomes illegitimate. In this case, the Christian is bound to resist the state by whatever means necessary – through direct legal and political action, and possibly through massive demonstrations of civil disobedience.”
Personally, I’m not at all comfortable with the call to civil disobedience, since in Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 we are told to obey the powers which God has established and permitted (unless the governmental law is in direct contradiction to God’s law). But the first part of the book certainly does a good job of pointing up how western society (although Schaeffer is focused on American society) has become secularised, and the impact that this has had.
A couple of quotes from the book will help to summarise the main issue discussed:
“I propose that secularism militates against religious liberty, and indeed against personal freedoms generally, for 2 reasons: first, the familiar fact that secularism does not recognize the existence of the ‘higher law’; second, because, that being so, secularism tends towards decisions based on the pragmatic public policy of the moment and inevitably tends to resist the submitting of those policies to the ‘higher’ criteria of a constitution.”
“The media and especially television have indeed changed the perception of not only current events, but also of the political process. We must realize that things can easily be presented on television so that the perception of a thing may be quite different from fact itself. Television not only reports political happenings, it enters actively into the political process. That is, wither because of bias or for a good story, television so reports the political process that it influences and becomes a crucial part of the political process itself. In the midst of all this Christians must certainly not uncriticaly accept what they read, and especially what they see on television, as objective. This is especially the case when the subject under consideration is one we know to be different from that which their world view normally causes them to champion.”
“What is to be done when the state does that which violates it’s legitimate function. Why were the Christians in the Roman empire thrown to the lions? The Roman State did not care what anybody believed religiously; you could believe anything, or you could be an atheist. But you had to worship Caesar as a sign of your loyalty to the state. The Christians said they would not worship Caesar, anybody or anything, but the living God. Thus to the Roman Empire they were rebels, and it was civil disobedience. That is why they were thrown to the lions. Through the ages Christians have taken the same position as did the early church in disobeying the state when it commanded what was contrary to God’s law.”
