Tried With Fire

When we attended the 2012 Ligonier Conference, Dr. Robert Godfrey spoke on the damage anti-intellectualism has done to the Christian mind and traced its rise in American history. After the Revolution, the glory of individualism took hold in such a way that "Power went from the snobs to the mobs" in three specific areas - medicine, law, and religion. In The Search for Christian America , the authors also discuss the Revolution's affect on theology, but they get specific with the school that was affected. It was Calvinism. "The kind of democratic individualism unleashed by the American Revolution altered no dimension of the church more than its theology. Most obvious in the fifty years after the Revolution was the revolt against Calvinism. But most notable was the revolt against the accepted ground rules of theology itself. This second revolt attacked especially the long-standing Christian conviction that it was valuable for an educated segment of the church to re...

When I was in elementary school, the Cold War showed no signs of letting up. The designated bomb shelter was the janitor's office/storage room off of the loading dock. I have no idea how the teachers, kids, and support staff would have fit, which is probably why the student handbook also advised us to hide under our desks. Yeah, right. We had family friends who were members of the John Birch Society. They tried to get my dad to join thinking that as a Chinese immigrant he would hate the Communists too. He refused, but they still gave him literature detailing the latest conspiracy theory in which powerful Americans were allied with the USSR to take away "life as we know it." During a crisis like this, "it is a natural human reaction to turn to the past for support." 1 Appeals are made "to recover the Christian roots, the Christian heritage, the Christian values of an older America. Our instinctive reaction is to recover what we have lost." 2 Thi...