This quote also explains the rise of the Church growth movement and then after that the rise of the Emergent Church. They are both reflections of Christianity as syncretized with a Cultural Marxism which is now the spirit of the age.
This kind of philosophy gives us what has been called “the religious spirit of transgression,” but it can only be known as such by those who have not quaffed from this spirit. This is so because even the idea of “transgression” can only be spoken of by those who have a standard beyond and/or above them. Those who embrace this Frothingham philosophy cannot speak of “transgression” because they have no objective measure for what is in bounds morally and what is out of bound morally. The only time modern man can speak of transgression is when someone commits the sin of not transgressing.
All of this means that for modern man to be religious today he must be one who is determinedly non-Christian. He must be the man who breaks every commandment of God. He must be the man who forswears any taboo of the past that was based on Christian reasoning and/or tradition. This means the religious people in our culture today, per the Frothingham quote, are the Feminists, the sexual perverts, the George Floyd rioters and those who supported them. The deeply religious people of our age are those who overthrow the faith once and forever delivered unto the saints in favor of rainbow flags, illegal immigration, Lesbian Bishops, and new creeds like the Cultural Marxist Belhar Confession.
For our modern deeply Frothinghamian religious age, it is the case that the more wicked a person is, by the previous standard of Christianity, the greater their faith is seen to be and the more intensely is their religious commitment exhibited. This means that the flaming sodomite, the proud surgically created hermaphrodite, the militant feminist are some of the most deeply devoted religious people you will ever meet. It’s just that their religion is the religion described in the Frothingham quote. These are folks living out the religious creed of their time.
In all this we are reminded, as Christians, that when we dip into this mindset, or give in an inch to this Spirit of the Age we are at that moment committing celestial treason. We have joined in high rebellion against the God of the Bible. When we insist that the Church must move in the direction of this new religion or must be sympathetic with these religious adherents of this different faith, we at that point denying the truth that the Church is the pillar and ground of truth.
We are thus living in an age where the question that demands being answered is, “Who will live more consistently in terms of their faith?” One has to give a tip of the cap to the Frothingham religionists who are so dedicated to their faith that they will surgically remove body parts, who will alter their speech and dress in order to keep the commandments of their religious order, who will completely unsex themselves in order to follow their religious code of transgression.
Unfortunately, for them, all those who hate God love death and try as they may to be good little religious doobies their religion of transgression will only end in both temporal and eternal death. The Frothingham age, undergirded by anti-Christ philosophy inspired by Hegel, and Kant, before Frothingham and carried on by Sartre, Camus, and the postmodernists after Frothingham, is dying. This is a philosophy built on sand and now the waves of reality are blasting it and unsurprisingly the house is collapsing. It can not bring the blessedness and freedom it promises.
