“This ‘omnicompetent’ vision of the state has become so ubiquitous that many evangelical Christians have lost their cultural memory of God-given, pre-political institutions, rights, and responsibilities that are to be protected but are not created, controlled, or governed by the state. As a consequence, believers have floundered in their response to unprecedented and illegal lockdowns of the church, the growing collapse of civil liberties, the total control of education, expanded abortion, euthanasia, no-fault divorce law, the redefinition of marriage and family, homosexuality, and transgender issues, largely because a scriptural world and life view norming our understanding of these questions and the role of the state with respect to them has collapsed. Instead, we have a liberal democratic and statist worldview drilled into us by the various organs of cultural life, where Jesus and a hope of heaven are spread on top as a sort of spiritual condiment giving religious flavor to secularism via the ministry of the churches.”
Don’t miss that last part of the quote. Boot is saying there that it is the church via its ministry that is spreading humanism as covered with a patina chocolate shell of Christianity like vanilla ice cream (humanism) dipped in chocolate (Christian jargon).
This explains why the visible church is so insipid and sick. There can only be one reason why and that is because for centuries now the church has refused to embrace a muscular Christianity that is characterized by a totalistic world and life view as drawn from the Scriptures which Boot is advocating. Instead, the Church has been swayed by pietism, quietism, low-grade forms of Gnosticism, Lillithism, defeatism, and retreatism. It has been so fearful of triumphalism it has embraced anything but muscular Christianity as the essence of holiness.
