I've been wondering about this idea that sometime in the mid-20th century, the western church (both Protestant and Catholic) went through a kind of 'Hegelian' style of transformative revolution in its theology... What I mean by this is that the general mission of churches fused with secular ideals of an evolving world consciousness and a global social transformation towards an enlightened humanity. This shift essentially produced some kind of synthesized Christian-Secular Theology that has caused churches to view their own great commission of spreading the Gospel of Jesus as bound up with the global mission of spreading the ideals of liberal democracy.
This theological transformation seems to have occurred as a result of the world wars, the ensuing cold-war period, mass revolutionary movements in Latin America, and an emerging "Liberation Theology" ... I'll expand a bit on each of these below.
Post-WWII Anti-Fascism/Anti-Communism movement:
The traumatic experience of the world wars, and the perception of America as a global liberator of peoples being oppressed by the forces of Nazism and Stalinism. Both Protestant and Catholic churches attached themselves to a geopolitical narrative of Good versus Evil, effectively transforming the liberal democracy of the United States into an inherently moral secular power in the world. The Shining City on a hill.
A popular Cold-War narrative was that the West represented God and the Soviet Union represented Godlessness. (This was actually when the phrase "In God We Trust" was added to our money), however the architects of this narrative were careful to point out that the United States only represented religion in the universal sense of a "supreme being" that people of all faiths believed in. (This pluralistic god actually harkened back to the original founding of the American nation and the masonic/Deistic beliefs of the founding fathers.) This was really the universal god of an enlightened secular people that have transcended to something beyond any particular religious faith.
Liberation Theology:
Through the Church's championing of the Civil Rights movement and the socialist revolutionary movements of Latin America in the 1960's, the church began to see its collective mission more and more in the perspective of socio-political transformation. The church came to view itself as having a leading role in this social transformation and became in some way attached to what is a Permanent Cultural Revolution, and the sentiment that the world was morally improving with more and more liberalizing social planning. This eventually bled into the Feminist movements, and woman were seen as needing liberation from a male dominated society, etc... Basically the church grew to see its central mission as promoting 'social justice' through the vehicle of social revolution and the power of the democratic state.
So the church basically became part of a permanent and ongoing cultural revolution that is vaguely categorized as the global promotion of "liberal democracy"... the mission of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ has become eclipsed by a veneration for and desire to protect what is seen as a sacred universal liberal democratic order in the world, a kind of theo-political hegemon of a therapeutic State power.
There appears to be a problematic trade-off that accompanies the Church's spiritual attachment to this secular order. By advancing the secular theology of the State as the moral power of God's unfolding will on earth through the spreading of democratic human liberty, Christians have implicitly decided to deprioritize their own Biblical theology (obvious points like the rejection of homosexuality, or the recognition of and forbidding of killing children in the womb, or the need to remove easy-access to inappropriate contentography from society)
As just one example, churches become theologically aligned with the state on the need for the U.S. and NATO to bomb this or that country in order to spread democracy, but when it comes to advancing issues that are directly addressed in the New Testament (e.g. warning against homosexuality) the church basically falls apart and cannot arrive at any conclusion, because of the internal contradiction of having Christian theology fused with that of secular liberal democracy, where the 'rights' of the individual supersede anything representing Biblical morality as an influence in society.
The theology of the secular state is made very clear every day. The consciousness of the world is evolving the more humanity is liberated from its oppressive structures. When you hear the phrase of being "on the right side of history", you get a sense of this Hegelian style of theology. World history itself is a story of the universe evolving and becoming aware of itself through humanity's evolution and transcendence. As males and females are liberated from their biology, we are moving ever closer to our ultimate gnostic freedom from reality itself.
I think another problem is how little we understand the secular world as something deeply religious. Marxism is frequently portrayed as a movement that is economic in nature, and yet is far more accurate to frame it as a religion. As with the permanent revolution of Progressivism, it is a religion of 'becoming'... of human transcendentalism as manifested through state power.
Just some thoughts... I am looking for other points of view on this issue.
This theological transformation seems to have occurred as a result of the world wars, the ensuing cold-war period, mass revolutionary movements in Latin America, and an emerging "Liberation Theology" ... I'll expand a bit on each of these below.
Post-WWII Anti-Fascism/Anti-Communism movement:
The traumatic experience of the world wars, and the perception of America as a global liberator of peoples being oppressed by the forces of Nazism and Stalinism. Both Protestant and Catholic churches attached themselves to a geopolitical narrative of Good versus Evil, effectively transforming the liberal democracy of the United States into an inherently moral secular power in the world. The Shining City on a hill.
A popular Cold-War narrative was that the West represented God and the Soviet Union represented Godlessness. (This was actually when the phrase "In God We Trust" was added to our money), however the architects of this narrative were careful to point out that the United States only represented religion in the universal sense of a "supreme being" that people of all faiths believed in. (This pluralistic god actually harkened back to the original founding of the American nation and the masonic/Deistic beliefs of the founding fathers.) This was really the universal god of an enlightened secular people that have transcended to something beyond any particular religious faith.
Liberation Theology:
Through the Church's championing of the Civil Rights movement and the socialist revolutionary movements of Latin America in the 1960's, the church began to see its collective mission more and more in the perspective of socio-political transformation. The church came to view itself as having a leading role in this social transformation and became in some way attached to what is a Permanent Cultural Revolution, and the sentiment that the world was morally improving with more and more liberalizing social planning. This eventually bled into the Feminist movements, and woman were seen as needing liberation from a male dominated society, etc... Basically the church grew to see its central mission as promoting 'social justice' through the vehicle of social revolution and the power of the democratic state.
So the church basically became part of a permanent and ongoing cultural revolution that is vaguely categorized as the global promotion of "liberal democracy"... the mission of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ has become eclipsed by a veneration for and desire to protect what is seen as a sacred universal liberal democratic order in the world, a kind of theo-political hegemon of a therapeutic State power.
There appears to be a problematic trade-off that accompanies the Church's spiritual attachment to this secular order. By advancing the secular theology of the State as the moral power of God's unfolding will on earth through the spreading of democratic human liberty, Christians have implicitly decided to deprioritize their own Biblical theology (obvious points like the rejection of homosexuality, or the recognition of and forbidding of killing children in the womb, or the need to remove easy-access to inappropriate contentography from society)
As just one example, churches become theologically aligned with the state on the need for the U.S. and NATO to bomb this or that country in order to spread democracy, but when it comes to advancing issues that are directly addressed in the New Testament (e.g. warning against homosexuality) the church basically falls apart and cannot arrive at any conclusion, because of the internal contradiction of having Christian theology fused with that of secular liberal democracy, where the 'rights' of the individual supersede anything representing Biblical morality as an influence in society.
The theology of the secular state is made very clear every day. The consciousness of the world is evolving the more humanity is liberated from its oppressive structures. When you hear the phrase of being "on the right side of history", you get a sense of this Hegelian style of theology. World history itself is a story of the universe evolving and becoming aware of itself through humanity's evolution and transcendence. As males and females are liberated from their biology, we are moving ever closer to our ultimate gnostic freedom from reality itself.
I think another problem is how little we understand the secular world as something deeply religious. Marxism is frequently portrayed as a movement that is economic in nature, and yet is far more accurate to frame it as a religion. As with the permanent revolution of Progressivism, it is a religion of 'becoming'... of human transcendentalism as manifested through state power.
Just some thoughts... I am looking for other points of view on this issue.
