Making a Noun a Religion

[HKHaugan]

Recently I watched a debate between Dinesh d’Souza and Andrew Bernstein “Is Christianity Good or Bad for Mankind?” It was a spirited interchange before a University of Texas audience. d’Souza is President of Kings College in New York City and made the movie “2016.” Bernstein is a leader in Objectivism, a movement based on the writings of Ayn Rand, author of “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” both of which were made into movies.

Objectivism is a philosophy based on the idea that reason is the only necessary vehicle for mankind to build relationships and maintain society. As the debate progressed it was quite obvious that the anti-Christian polemic it presents carries the usual arguments that all religions are bad because of the suffering they cause in the name of whatever deity they follow. But the thing that stood out in my mind was not so much the ‘for and against’ arguments. It was the objectivist position that reason is above everything and the absence of reason produces fantasy which characterizes all spiritual thinking. What Bernstein would not admit but obviously implied was that reason is his god. He believes in it to the point of hostility which certainly came out in his emotional replies. D’Souza rightly pointed out that Bernstein capitalized the ‘R’ in reason which means he made reason an object, a noun and in essence, deified reason, thus making it his god. He had the sound of an evangelist promoting belief, trust and faith, all in reason and all the ingredients of a spiritual definition and religious system.

Now here’s the point. What Bernstein has done, like many others, is to take a perfectly marvelous gift of God, reason, and separate it from God to make it a religion that poses as anti-religious so as to appear non-spiritual and non-religious. What he has actually done is to make a religion out of a noun, a part of speech an idol, and the intellect a god. If you follow this process historically what most ‘religions’ have done is to take words that describe actual God-given abilities, then build in personally derived mental and emotional attributes, and make them idols. Objectivism is simply another religion that has made reason its god, its founder a saint, intellectuals its priests and a system of thinking that is its commandments. There is no doubt in my mind, given human nature, that people devoted to this system would inevitably persecute and execute those whose intellects and reason were not able or aligned to their system. It’s the only ‘reasonable’ thing to do.

Any religion that does not deal with the fact of sin and its only cure, Jesus the Christ, will tend to eliminate its opposition. This is true not only of religious but of political, civil, social and educational religions across the board. When institutional churches in the past have killed their opponents or suspected opponents, they left the person of Jesus out of their deliberations, the Bible out of their logic and the Holy Spirit out of their action. They operated out of the spirit of fear motivating personal fear that people would no longer follow their leadership so any opposition had to be squashed.

We see the beginning of the same dynamics in the liberal religious institutions of today that fire clergy, take away visible property and resort to civil law to maintain their power. This is exactly how the Roman Empire dictated its authority over the religions of its day demanding emperor worship and worship of the state, along side their beliefs as the means of survival. It starts in a seemingly innocent way with the spirit of compromise in a secular culture that uses God’s ideas and His given abilities and redefining them to maintain their power base. Secularization is a slow process of moral erosion that in time causes the collapse of a civilization as history so factually has recorded. Secularization is a religion in itself. Its first beachhead is the compromise of morality, its politicization of immorality and the elevation of leaders who condone immorality and then dogmatically pursue any opponent.

The seedy dynamics of religion are the devil’s tools that actually work. Genesis 3 shows how he basically operates. He has designed a simple fourfold plan to undermine the individual. First, he works hard to get us to doubt God’s Word. Second, this leads us to doubt God because we can dispute the need for Him having found ways to object to His Word. Third, having justified ourselves apart from God we elevate ourselves into His place by thinking and acting apart from Him, redefining and making our own rules. Fourth, we entice others through our new found logic to join us as we navigate with our new road map of morality. Tell me this isn’t the devil at work in a grand way on our personal and interpersonal level. He certainly has gained a strong foothold in religious institutions in America and the rest of the world. Please, please, check out Genesis 3 again.

All one has to do is to look at the evidence in the compromised leadership of denominational churches and even the politics in many independent churches that are just as denominational as the others. It’s the leadership in all our public and religious institutions that have betrayed their people. Leaders have a way of talking themselves into believing wrong is right and overlooking the Bible as the only true moral directive. Didn’t Isaiah say the same thing as he warned Israel? “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter (Is.5:20).” Need we say anymore? Well, yes. The next part will delve a bit more deeply into this issue of making a religion out of a noun.