Redefining Always

Dr. Mohler (in his 2/24/17 Briefing) says it first: “the experts cited in his article say that secularism has always been prevalent in New Hampshire. Now that requires a redefinition of always, because it certainly wouldn’t have been the case if you go back to the founding era of New Hampshire, if you go back to the Revolutionary or even before that to the Colonial era. That’s where we get the very idea of the New England Town Church.”

I want to talk about “redefining always”, which is something I’ve heard Dr. Mohler do often, but first a little-known historical fact:

Dr. Mohler is right about the early colonial era being very religious. But as far back as the Revolutionary era secularism had some very lively advocates in Vermont and New Hampshire. Ethan Allen headed a militia, The Green Mountain Boys, which defended an area called The New Hampshire Grants against the colony of New York before the Revolution, and later fought in the Revolutionary War, famously capturing Fort Ticonderoga. Ethan Allen started writing a book with a friend as a young man, and completed it after the war. It was called “Reason: The Only Oracle of Man”. Its purpose was “reforming mankind from superstition and error,” the most prominent of those superstitions being Christianity. The book didn’t sell, so maybe you can’t say his point of view was “prevalent”, but secularism does have deep roots in New England soil. There have always been rebels against the authority of the church. Part of what makes the modern world modern -- and as secular as it is -- is that the church no longer has the power to crush that rebellion.

Dr. Mohler continued, “Every single village would’ve had a church, and the church would’ve been at the very center of the community. So when we’re told that New England has always been secular..., well, that redefines always as in, well, say, the modern age, or the last several decades, or since the beginning of the 20th century.”

You might think that’s silly, to speak of something as recent as the 20th century as the meaning of “always”. But later in the podcast, to Brandon Phinney’s statement that “Love, morality, justice, etc. are not strictly religious doctrines, but originate in our human nature to do good for ourselves and for others,” Dr. Mohler answers, “How does he know what justice is? By what standard would he even use this term? ... This very secular worldview has to borrow its terminology from, well, historic Christianity. That is to say that even the secularist vocabulary is bound to moral language that is the inheritance of Christianity. Where in the world would otherwise these terms make any sense?”

Dr. Mohler is saying that Christianity is the source of morality, and that all our moral language we owe to it. Nowhere in the world except within a Christian worldview, he claims, do words like ‘justice’ make any sense. Morality, in other words,  has always been, and is by its very nature, Christian.This is like saying  that “always” and “everywhere” mean the Christian era in the West.  This is a common theme of Dr. Mohler’s. When he says the world has “always” been some way, up until “the moral revolution”, he means in the Christian West, and he’s typically thinking of how things were about 50 years ago in America.

Christianity is about 2000 years old, which is a short time compared to the age of civilization, let alone humanity. Is Dr. Mohler saying no one used words meaning right or wrong, just or unjust, before Jesus? They were used in the Hebrew Bible, which did not inherit these concepts from Christianity.  The reverse is true. Pre-Christian Greeks and Romans certainly had moral teachings and judgments, and the concept of justice. Rome was famous for its legal system. In fact, virtually every human society has some shared sense of right and wrong. So if morality is a universal (meaning it is found wherever humans are), who is correct, Phinney, who attributes morality to human nature, or Mohler, who claims its origin is historical Christianity?

Christianity is one tradition among many. It claims to be able to ground morality in the authority of God, and that nobody else can explain why morality is true. But having morality is different from being able to explain it on the basis of something external to it. Can you do arithmetic? Do you know what two plus two makes? Now can you explain why arithmetic is true? There are some very thick books on the foundations of arithmetic which practically no one understands. But we don’t need to understand its foundations in order to have good reason to believe in its truth. You might say two plus two equals four because God said so, just as you can say murder is wrong because God said so. If that is a satisfying explanation for you, congratulations. Some of us are not so easily satisfied. And while we might like to understand more deeply the foundations of morality, we don’t yearn for that particular non-answer.