Social Progressives: Today's Idolaters

Social Progressive : Today's Idolatry

In the Old Testament the continual failing of God's people was to abandon him for worship of idols. In the new testament the call of missionaries like Paul to pagans was to give up their idols and believe in God through Jesus.

What of Western society today? I say that we have abandoned – or are well into the process of abandoning – God for a new idolatry. Not the crude idols cast from metal or carved from wood or stone, but every bit as real, destructive and demonic!

So if it is not these externals, what are the real features of “idols”?

Through Jeremiah God says: “you have abandoned me, a spring of living water and hewed out cisterns for yourselves, cisterns that can hold no water”. I think this gives us both a cause and effect: the basic idolatry is putting our trust in any “thing” other than God. The result is that we forego the utterly dependable “spring of living water” and end up with something which will ultimately always fail us “cisterns that can hold no water”.

So take the example of agricultural life in ancient times. God controlled the weather and promised Israel prosperity if they served him and obeyed his laws. Instead they continually fell to believing that Baal controlled the weather, attributing Gods providence to another! Then they tried to propitiate Baal by such destructive things as ritual prostitution and human sacrifice. This led to God withdrawing his provision – sometimes heralded in advance as with Elijah announcing as God's spokesman: “there will be neither rain nor dew until my word.” At other times reflected on later as in the common prophetic: “I gave you famine in every city; yet you did not turn to me.”

So our modern idolatry is simply making substitutes for God. As In the past, we have also attributed the good things God has wrought, to our idols and embraced practices which can bring only misery.

The most obvious substitute is in morals.

The proper source and authority for morals is God – his perfect moral character exemplified par excellence in Jesus, and his commands revealed in the scriptures. As I have often said, being human we may disagree and debate on how to understand and apply these, but vitally we accept God as the ultimate reference and authority.

The substitute moral authorities are human collectives. Here God is specifically excluded from consideration. Moral values and decisions are humanly derived and the group proposing them depends the psychological weapons of propaganda, 'group think' and social engineering to obtain conformity within their number and on stamping out competing voices and brute force to impose their chosen rules on society.

In Australia, and I suspect the West generally, the “new morality” has been diametrically opposed to the “traditional” moral mores largely formed by Christian thought. I hope to be more detailed in future posts. But as to results we are already seeing some of the misery caused by the new sexual morals through marriage and family breakup and its devastating effect on children plus the magnified incidence of sexual abuse of children by step-fathers.

Another substitute is “Nature” instead of God.

The Bible stresses the fact that God created the heavens and the earth and everything in it. The “how” is irrelevant. If science is right about the mechanisms (as I think likely) that detracts nothing from God's role. Scripture teaches that the earth and its plant and animal life belong to God and were provided chiefly as a home for us humans (whom God created in his image) and given to us to dominate and manage for him. This gives a very balanced and nuanced approach to dealing with the natural world.

Modern Western environmental activism and “animal rights” movements reject all this. Instead they deny all the above. In varying shades from a sort of pantheism or nature worship to treating “the planet” as an end in itself, they show a strong tendency to be anti-humanity. Take just one example: in Australian waters we have a surging population of “great white” sharks – partly because of bans on fishing them. Increasing numbers of surfers are being attacked and killed by the sharks. “Conservationists” lobby against culling the shark numbers claiming the ocean is their (the sharks') domain and if humans enter it and are killed, so be it! This is a truly frightening, and not isolated, attitude.

Some marks of the new paganism:

a) As stated, the opposition to and active destruction of traditional “Christian” morals and values (for example to value of human life and joy; and virtues such as goodness, kindness, fidelity and self control)

b) Opposition to Christianity to the extent of utilising groups whose morals clash violently with their stated values. For instance pandering to and encouraging Islam and using it as a stick to beat Christians with (eg Christians are “islamophobes” hence morally bad) even when treatment of women within Islam goes against every fibre of feminism!


c) It runs with the worst in human nature – which is the easy downhill road; whilst the godly fight against that nature, try to reform it and encourage the best in it – which is an uphill road!
For instance the encouragement of sexual immorality (which needs little encouragement!) is like the pagan religions of old; The whip-thin vegan “I use bicycle not polluting car” echoes the self flagellation of many pagan religions which as scripture teaches does nothing to reform corrupt human nature.

Another feature I have noticed goes hand in hand with progressivism is hatred. Love is the teaching of scripture, but it goes against the grain to love others as ourselves, and particularly to love our enemies, yet this is the goal we strive towards. Hatred on the other hand is a strong passion that comes easily out of corrupted human nature. And I have noticed that almost uniformly adherents to “progressive” beliefs hate with a passion all who dare to disagree with them. Mercy is a Christian virtue, even in dispensing justice the motto grown into Christian jurisdictions has been “justice tempered with mercy”. Adherents to the new paganism conspicuously show no mercy.

d) It is Nietzschean in its definition of “truth”. Traditionally in Christian societies “truth” matters. A statement is true if it corresponds to reality. For the new morality truth = utility. A statement is true if it advances your adgenda.

e) The new pagans look to a perfect world created by humans: Christians see this world as always in a process of decay due to corrupt human nature and are encouraged in their attempts to build a better world by the assurance that Heaven, ruled by God, will indeed be perfect.