“It is our duty, as far as lies in our power, immediately to organize human society and all its institutions and organs upon a distinctively Christian basis. Indifference or impartiality here between the law of the kingdom and the law of the world, or of its prince, the devil, is utter treason to the King of Righteousness. The Bible, the great statute-book of the Kingdom, explicitly lays down principles which, when candidly applied, will regulate the action of every human being in all relations. There can be no compromise. The King said, with regard to all descriptions of moral agents in all spheres of activity, “He that is not with me is against me.” If the national life in general is organized upon non-Christian principles, the churches which are embraced within the universal assimilating power of that nation will not long be able to preserve their integrity.
~ A. A. Hodge,
Evangelical Theology, 283-84.
If R2K “theology” is successful one result will be a sense of relief among those who advocate missionary Humanism. The advocates of hegemonic Liberalism are content with a religion that is privatized to the Church realm. Missionary Humanism does not care if the American Church elects itself to privatize the Church’s Christian voice to a realm of Redemption. Shoot, Missionary Humanism is content even if American law does not directly outlaw all private religious speech and exercise for the same reason. In both cases Missionary Humanism understands that the exclusion of Christian theological reference in the broader culture, whether brought about by the self-censorship of the Church or brought about by Legislation forbidding the Christian faith from probing into the public square, works to insulate the public square and civic discourse from a Christian theological frame of reference that, if free to walk in the public square and affect civic discourse, would train the broader community to forswear agnostic mental habits.
Conversely, when the Church self censors itself so that it does not allow itself to speak to the public square, or if the Church would be legislated out of the public square the effect would be to safely train the wider community into a pagan worldview. A second effect of sealing off the voice of the Christian Church from the public square is to create a de-Christianized social eco-system which would lead to the Christian faithful themselves to gradually doubt the objective truth or public relevance of their marginalized Christian beliefs — due to the persistent, subliminal effect of the given a-priori’s of the social eco-system in which they are embedded. If the dominant, persistent social practice of the wider community is anti-Christian the impact inevitably will be to peel away confidence in the Christian faith in private and redemptive realms.
Such a tamed religious community is no longer a threat to the liberal secular order or to the plans of hegemony of Missionary Humanism.
