Theologian Albert Mohler is sounding the alarm about the rise of “secular conservatism” in both America and the world, arguing that any form of Conservatism detached from belief in God and divine revelation is fundamentally not conservative at all. The cultural commentator and president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary makes the arguments in a new e-book, The Illusion of a Secular State & The Impotence of Secular Conservatism, in which he asserts that a conservative movement that denies God will jettison long-held hallmarks of Conservatism, including the defense of the unborn and the recognition of the biblical definition of gender.
“I firmly believe that there can be no recovery that takes the shape of a secular conservatism,” Mohler writes. “I also believe that the idea of a secular state -- which many take to be foundational for the American experiment -- is an illusion. Any lasting state will eventually make ultimate claims, and every society is based upon some claim of ultimate allegiance. A state that fails to acknowledge God will eventually worship a secular deity, demand the ultimate allegiance for itself, or enter a process of inevitable decline and decay.”
The book is a compilation of speeches Mohler has given in recent years, including one this summer at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C.
“To be conservative is to hold allegiance to certain fixed truths and principles,” Mohler writes. “...Conservatism requires fixed religious truths as well as traditions. I would underline the fact that these fixed religious truths are grounded in specific acts of divine revelation, on which we are entirely dependent.”
The political and ideological Left in America, Mohler argues, is not grounded in “any objective moral order,” embracing unbiblical notions such as the belief that “a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy.”
“The Left brings to the table absolutely no ontological commitments of its own. It’s all just politics and power. It’s all they can see. A conservatism that plays the same game and shares the same assumptions is no genuine conservatism. It is just a language game or a way of playing for time,” he asserts. “... When you have a conservative movement that is not itself committed to ontology, everything collapses into a matter of endless negotiation.”
American conservatives, he writes, must not follow the lead of the British Conservative Party, whose former leader, David Cameron, spearheaded the push to legalize same-sex marriage.
“At that point, the entire ontological structure of Creation Order was denied by a party that still dared to call itself conservative. A party that does such a thing does not deserve a conservative reputation, much less conservative affirmation. This act, taken so brazenly, was a repudiation of Creation Order and the order that had made this civilization possible. … There is no lasting conservatism that is not self-consciously grounded in revealed truth and in ontology. To be conservative is to affirm what is real. If we lose this conviction, we lose everything.”
Conservatives, no doubt, must have “secular allies” in culture, Mohler writes. But “at the end of the day, without an ontological commitment which is grounded in theological conviction, I don’t believe there’s any lasting conservatism to be found,” he writes.
America was founded on an affirmation of divine revelation, Mohler asserts.
“When the founders spoke of nature and nature’s God, when they claimed we are ‘endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,’ that is not just decorative language, it is not just illustrative language. The Declaration of Independence makes a truth claim,” he writes.
Conservatism “has to be grounded in a commitment to truth,” Mohler concludes.
“A secular worldview, consistently held, denies what we believe to be absolutely necessary and foundational, a conservatism that negotiates with that worldview in the end will have the same destination,” he writes.
Today’s society is facing “insidious attacks” against “human dignity and the sanctity of life, the goodness of marriage and family, the structures of human society, even the reality of good and evil,” he writes.
“We live amidst a great rebellion against transcendent reality, the true, the good, and the beautiful,” he writes. “… I do not believe this nation and all that it represents can survive abandoning its theological roots. We will recover those roots and commitments or lose everything.”
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Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
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