The Cultural Shift

Pastor Dave Monreal, Lead Pastor

When did the cultural shift happen? Most things don’t happen in an instant. Sometimes we mistake the result of something with the cause. For instance, over the years I have heard of many people cite the removal of prayer from the public schools as the cause of decline in public education. However, the removal of prayer was the result of a number of years of secularization and pluralization that had been occurring in the culture that made it acceptable and, in the eyes of the court, advisable to ban school-sponsored prayer.

Of course, at this point I am not sure that I would be in favor of reinstituting school sponsored prayer because in addition to the Evangelical pastor, we will have the imam, the shaman, the wiccan witch, and the new age guru also leading our kids in morning prayer. The idea of prayer being in school harkens back to a day when Christianity was the main religion assumed by the larger American culture. I could imagine if there were still school-sponsored prayers it may be the Evangelicals that would call for it to be put to an end. Just some food for thought.

But the origins of the shift really began during the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Prior to the Renaissance, revelation was the final authority and reason was subservient. In other words, The Bible in particular and the teaching of the church more generally were thought to be the final authority on what was true. But a shift began to take place that affect all of western thought and culture. Reason began to be viewed as superior to revelation and it was reason that judged what was and was not revelation. Think of it like this:

          Revelation               Reason
          Reason                    Revelation

Why is this significant? Because as this fundamental shift in thinking began to take hold people began to increasingly believe that they had a right to judge what was and was not true, what was and was not revelation from God. People began to reject the miracles of the Bible and see the Bible as merely a human book of man’s attempt to find or create God rather than a divinely given book that was inerrantly and infallibly communicated to the original authors.

For centuries this had only a slow but significant impact but over time it began to undermine the very fabric of western culture and everything that was accepted and believed was called into question. Attitudes began to change, morals began to erode, and as the church lost influence over the culture following the 2nd World War, we saw the society become increasingly pragmatic and sensate. There is no supernatural events or divine revelation. The church began to lose influence over the culture in large part due to a shift in theology and attitude. A certain theology became the dominant theological viewpoint and it held that since this world was going to be destroyed when Christ returned and Christ is going to return imminently, then the church should not be involved in art, literature, and the sciences and instead only focus on evangelism. As a result, just as the secular mindset was gaining ascendency the church withdrew from the larger culture and focused exclusively on spiritual matters.

Again, each one of these ideas I have shared entire books have been written and there is an immense amount of detail and nuance that is involved so please take this as a brief, thumbnail sketch of western thought and culture. As I have said before, we need to consider historical events, philosophical shifts, theological changes, technology, economics, urbanization, politics, education, modernity, secularization, radical relativism, and biblical illiteracy to get a full orbed view of our present cultural context. This is just one facet of many.