When There is No God and Truth is Relative

Sometimes being visionary about the future means being able to accurately understand the past…and how it repeats itself. The following excerpt is taken from an article on americanvision.com

Regrettably, many churches during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power accepted the argument that religion and morality should be separated from politics based on the neutrality claim mandated by secularists and liberal religionists. “Religion was a private matter,” historian Richard V. Pierard writes, “that concerned itself with the personal and moral development of the individual. The external order — nature, scientific knowledge, statecraft — operated on the basis of its own internal logic and discernable laws.”[2]

The church’s sole concern and domain was with a person’s spiritual life, and this is the way all tyrants like it. “The Erlangen church historian Hermann Jorda declared in 1917 that the state, the natural order of God, followed its own autonomous laws while the kingdom of God was concerned with the soul and operated separately on the basis of the morality of the gospel.”[3] It was because of this disjunction — built on the myth of neutrality and a two-kingdom approach to reality — that Hitler hoped to carry out his devilish schemes unhindered by religious arguments and pressures. Not everyone succumbed to the neutrality logic. The “Confessional Church” took a different, non-neutral, position:

[It] opposed the Nazification of the Protestant churches, rejected the Nazi racial theories and denounced the anti-Christian doctrines of [Alfred] Rosenberg and other Nazi leaders. In between lay the majority of Protestants, who seemed too timid to join either of the two warring groups, who sat on the fence and eventually, for the most part, landed in the arms of Hitler, accepting his authority to intervene in church affairs and obeying his commands without open protest.[4]

Those “who sat on the fence,” having fallen for the neutrality myth, supported Hitler by default. While they did not openly join with the “German Christians,” a pro-Hitler alliance of ministers and churches, their inaction, their supposed neutrality, “landed them in the arms of Hitler” any way.

America had its own affair with religious neutrality. Congressman Wilson Lumpkin (1783–1870) attempted to use the neutrality argument to keep Christians from arguing against removing the Cherokee Indians from Georgia in what has become known as the “Trail of Tears”:

“[Lumpkin] decried those Christians who left their proper realm and sought to involve themselves in politics as ‘canting fanatics.’ He said he had no trouble with ‘pure religion’ (that is, religion that steered clear of politics), ‘but the undefiled religion of the Cross is a separate and distinct thing in its nature from the noisy cant of the pretenders who have cost this Government, since the commencement of the present session of Congress, considerably upwards of $100,000 by their various intermeddlings with the political concerns of the country.’”[5]

Liberals and conservatives alike would be horrified at Lumpkin’s claim of religious and moral neutrality if it had been used to overlook the horrors of slavery and ethnic cleansing. But the neutrality argument is still used, mostly by liberals who don’t want today’s Christians interfering with the burgeoning control and power of government that permits woman to kill their unborn babies and same-sex couples to marry.

In 2003, Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry criticized the Vatican for saying that “Catholic politicians like him have a ‘moral duty’ to oppose laws granting legal rights to gay couples.” He went on to say that “it’s important to not have the church instructing politicians. That is an inappropriate crossing of the line in America.”[6] Would Kerry agree to the following logic of his position?:

“It’s important not to have the church instructing politicians about slavery.”
“It’s important not to have the church instructing politicians about ethnic cleansing.”
“It’s important not to have the church instructing politicians about civil rights.”

Would you like to read the whole article? Click HERE.