Brian Baxter *

July 2004

During the past few years, several Australian Religious Right organisations have been trying to sell their supporters on the idea of a ‘Christian worldview’. A large number of groups, from Answers in Genesis to Salt Shakers, claim that this viewpoint is the only acceptable way of looking at the world and that it applies to every area of life, including politics, ethics, biology, economics and theology.

If all this seems totalitarian in concept, that’s because it is! Only an evangelical protestant Christian of the most reactionary stripe could be happy living in an Australia ruled by leaders with a ‘Christian worldview’. People advocating this outcome should frankly state that their true aim is to turn Australia into a theocracy. How are they planning to achieve their objective?

National Alliance of Christian Leaders’ Strategy Summit

In November 2003, the National Alliance of Christian Leaders (NACL), a loosely-based alliance of Australia’s Religious Right bodies, held a ’strategy summit’ in Canberra. The purpose of this meeting was to ‘develop a strategic blueprint for a discipled Australia’, and the conference was led by David Yates from the so-called Centre for Worldview Studies. Yates has since become the chief of staff of Jim Wallace’s Australian Christian Lobby.

According to the Australian evangelical weekly New Life of 27 November 2003:

[The NACL meeting] decided that the [moral] relativism that permeates Australia leads to apathy, cowardice and tyranny. Because people can’t distinguish between right and wrong, they don’t care, are fearful to act, so no-one stops wrongdoing. In contrast to this, the Christian response is to notice wrongdoing, feel an urgency to stop it and become involved in bringing wholeness and justice.

This report was written by Helen Woodall, the editor of New Life, and is an indication of how far Australia’s evangelical protestant community has fallen under the sway of the Religious Right, itself dominated by American ideas and personalities. It is seriously suggested here, as a basis for strategy, that Australians in general can no longer distinguish right from wrong and that ‘no-one’ now stops wrongdoing!

Woodall’s report went on to say that ‘we need to see the world through God’s eyes’ and ‘to organise our time around God’s plan’:

Change needs to be top down, from good leaders as well as bottom up, from the grass roots. The leader needs to submit totally to God and to pass God’s will on to all he leads …
[N.B. Shades of David Koresh and numerous other cult leaders. Loud alarm bells should be ringing by now, even among fundamentalist Christians!]
Discipling [means] teaching and living out biblical principles at all levels of society. Children need to be trained so they can recognise God’s voice.

Religious Right leaders like Jim Wallace publicly reject the idea that their organisations want to impose a Christian theocratic political system on Australia, but this is the inevitable outcome of a successful ‘Christian worldview’ approach. Woodall’s outline of the movement’s goals amply confirms this:

[Goals include] unity in truth; recognition of Christ’s authority in the church, family, individual and government; … legislature to force Christian values; … the kingdom [i.e. Religious Right Christian values] permeating the structures of society; [and] biblical government.

These objectives would be realised through actions such as ‘promoting Christian models’ and ‘nullifying cultural compromise’. The promotion of ‘Christian models’ can, in practice, only mean the attempted imposition of dominionist/Reconstructionist systems advocated by writers such as Francis Schaeffer and Rousas Rushdoony. At the very least, this would require the supplanting of democratic forms with an ultra-conservative Christian hegemony, while a worst-case scenario would see society return to the laws and social practices of the Old Testament. This could include capital punishment for a wide range of offences including adolescent rebellion against parents; and the reintroduction of slavery.

The nullification of ‘cultural compromise’ would have to entail a general roll-back of the hard-won gains of women and minorities, and the strict curtailing of freedom of religion in this country. Fundamentalist Christians would occupy all public positions of importance, the better to ‘force Christian values’ upon us via the legislature, executive and judiciary.

Darrell Furgason

A few months before the NACL strategy summit, Dr Darrell Furgason of the Canadian Centre for Worldview Studies had visited Australia and outlined his ideas for our country:

Christians need to be equipped to think holistically about every area of life from God’s point of view.[New Life, 1 May 2003]

We note at the outset that Furgason and his friends are in no doubt that they can identify ‘God’s point of view’ as regards ‘every area of life’, a claim that immediately reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984.

[A major problem with today's Christians] is the secular/sacred dualism in their minds. They don’t know how to shape the country biblically in economics, politics, law from a biblical point of view … I don’t believe that is the will of God. We are called to disciple nations and teach God’s will and way for every part of life.

In other words, forget all about the existence of a secular sphere. Everything - from which god you worship down to how you spend your holidays - is essentially sacred in its nature. And if other people don’t understand this, you need to ‘disciple’ them, through your legislatures ‘forcing’ Christian values on to an unwilling populace, among other means.

At the moment the church is silent and society is shaped by humanism, Marxism, atheism and other philosophies. This is not what God wants … The world should be run God’s way. There is a kingdom way for managing families, a kingdom way for economics and politics and law … [We] should not be apologetic about the ways of God or let other values take over. Just as the world has to obey the laws of physics so too we have to obey God’s way as a civilisation.

And how are we to know exactly what ‘God’s way’ might be? Why, it’s all in the Bible, as interpreted by Furgason, Schaeffer, Rushdoony and many other helpful dominion theologians. One of the more prominent of these is David Noebel of Summit Ministries in Colorado, and for a few dollars a range of Religious Right groups will sell you his book The Battle for Truth: Defending the Christian Worldview in the Marketplace of Ideas.

David Noebel

If you are a Christian who regards concepts such as compassion and justice as important, the following will probably not interest you greatly. The parable of the Good Samaritan is rarely or never invoked by Religious Right ‘Christians’. Nor are phrases like ‘turn the other cheek’ or ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’. There is an important lesson here: these ‘Christians’ are not what most of us recognise as Christians. Their interests are centred around ‘dominion over the earth’ i.e. the gaining of political power, rather than ‘loving your neighbour’ or helping the less fortunate.

With this in mind, let us turn to Noebel’s book. Following a couple of introductory chapters, The Battle for Truth is divided into forty parts, comparing and contrasting four different worldviews - secular humanism; Marxism-Leninism; ‘cosmic humanism’/'New Age’; and ‘Biblical Christian’ - in their application to ten different fields of study, namely theology, philosophy, ethics, biology, psychology, sociology, law, politics, economics and history.

Obviously there are many other worldviews - Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, anarchist etc. - and even the ones Noebel examines such as ‘Biblical Christianity’ are defined in ways that suit his purposes. Nevertheless, many Australian Religious Right groups fully accept this analysis and enthusiastically promote it among their supporters, so let us work with what we have here.

Noebel’s sources

Religious Right authors tend to draw heavily on the work of their colleagues in the movement and Noebel is no exception. A quick glance through the list of endnotes reveals names such as Rousas Rushdoony, Francis Schaeffer, D. James Kennedy, James Dobson, Gary Bauer and numerous other heroes of the American Christian Right. Creationist authors like Henry Morris and A.E. Wilder-Smith are also included, and sources such as these give us a good idea of what to expect from Noebel’s text.

Paradoxically, while Noebel’s book is rather long and covers a wide array of topics, it is singularly lacking in variety. It strongly reminds me of, say, a Stalinist tome on the glories of the communist system, except that communism has been replaced by an atmosphere of bizarre otherworldliness. Rather than trawl through each of Noebel’s forty subjects, I will examine just two, ‘Biblical Christian Law’ and ‘Biblical Christian Biology’.

From Noebel’s point of view, man-made law is a lot of nonsense:

The Christian believes that God has provided laws (and a means of discovering those laws) for mankind. ‘God is the only legislator’, says Carl F. H. Henry. ‘Earthly rulers and legislative bodies are alike accountable to Him from whom stems all obligation - religious, ethical and civil.’ [231]

God has revealed his unchanging law to mankind through natural law - Every person has a conscience - some inherent sense of right and wrong [234] - and has further made his law known to man through the Bible. We search Noebel’s book in vain for some convincing basis for these claims; indeed, his chapter on ‘Biblical Christian History’, which attempts to argue for the Bible’s historical foundation, is both logically feeble and completely outdated. My impression is that he has read no modern biblical criticism whatsoever, and by ‘modern’ I mean, since Strauss! And if he has not read the material, how can he expect to counter it?

Returning to the ‘Law’ chapter, the theocratic and dominionist thrust of Noebel’s book quickly becomes apparent:

[G]overnment exists not so much to create laws as to secure laws, to apply God’s laws to general and specific situations … False law-making - such as ‘concessions to the majority’ as a basis for the legalisation of abortion, homosexuality, pedophilia or incest [Note the tendentious combination of these four practices/orientations] - will not be tolerated by God. [235-6]

Naturally, the Bible lays down guidelines for ‘an earthly system of law’ [N.B. just one!] and has even provided us with an example of God’s system in the Book of Exodus. Extreme Reconstructionists want us to re-establish the legal system laid down in the first five books of the Old Testament, and it is interesting to see Noebel immediately turn to one of those books when casting around for his ‘example’. He shrinks from using the term ‘Reconstructionism’, though he draws on the work of Rushdoony in this chapter. It is clear that Noebel’s suggestions for the reimposition of archaic legal and political forms would be entirely unworkable in a modern society, and could only have the effect of replacing democracies with an extremely harsh theocracy.

‘Biblical Christian Biology’

It comes as no surprise to discover that Noebel is a convinced creationist:

[I]f evolution is true, then the story of the Garden of Eden and original sin must be viewed as nothing more than allegory, a view that undermines the significance of Christ’s sinless life and sacrificial death on the cross. [138]

This is the major stumbling block for virtually all Young Earth Creationists; people like Carl Wieland of Answers in Genesis refer to it constantly. It can equally be viewed as an argument against the ‘inerrantist’ interpretation of the Bible, although creationists don’t like to think about this:

If Adam was not a historical individual, and if his fall into sin was not historical, then the Biblical doctrines of sin and of Christ’s atonement for it collapse. Of course, this conclusion is unacceptable for the Christian. Thus, it is our contention that the proper Christian worldview requires a belief in the Creator as He is literally portrayed in Genesis. [139]

That is to say, if you are not a Young Earth Creationist, you cannot claim to be a true Christian, nor hold to a ‘proper Christian worldview’. And Noebel and his associates wonder why they are accused by many Christians of being aggressive, illogical and divisive.

The remainder of this chapter is a cornucopia of long-discredited creationist arguments, ranging from Paley’s ‘Watchmaker’ and the venerable ‘Second Law of Thermodynamics’ argument, through to the assertion that no ‘transitional forms’ have ever been discovered in the fossil record. For a detailed refutation of these positions, I refer the reader to Jeffery Jay Lowder David Noebel on Atheism and Biological Evolution (2000)

Noebel concludes by saying that, today:

[M]any evolutionists hold desperately to their theory, simply because it is the only explanation of origins that excludes God. [147]

This is a ludicrous position and could only be asserted by someone who knows he is preaching to an exceptionally credulous choir.

A point I would like to make here is that, for all his documentation, much of it based on other Religious Right authors, Noebel does not in fact read very widely. While he tries to give an impression of deep and comprehensive knowledge, it is clear that he reads little or nothing that is critical of his own predetermined views. His main talent seems to lie in the ability to construct specious arguments in support of pre-set conclusions that obviously carry great psychological and personal significance for him. His book is thus a potboiler, and his ‘Biblical Christian worldview’ a chimera.

Conclusion

Religious Right organisations would like Australia and other societies to become ‘Christian nations’, adhering to a ‘Christian worldview’. While they deny that this would require the replacement of our democratic political system by a ruthless fundamentalist theocracy, there is simply no other way for them to achieve their objectives. Why would moderate Christians, members of other religions and non-religious Australians accept an outspokenly fundamentalist Christian government and political system unless they were forced to do so?

Besides this, a ‘Christian nation’ as proposed by the Religious Right comes with a lot of noxious baggage, creationism being only one illustration. Another is their view of the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world, which tends to distort many of their historical and political judgments, for example, their attitudes towards the Middle East and the Muslim world in general. On the whole, these people are very distrustful of inquiry per se, as they cannot face the idea that their foundational beliefs might be called into question.

Beware of any ideology that subordinates argument to conclusions. This includes the ‘Christian worldview’.

References

Lowder, Jeffery Jay, David Noebel on Atheism and Biological Evolution (2000) -
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/noebel.html

Noebel, David A. (2001), The Battle for Truth (Harvest House Publishers)

Salt Shakers website - Links: Christian Worldview - www.saltshakers.org.au

Woodall, Helen, A Christian worldview, New Life, 1 May 2003

—— How to disciple our nation, New Life, 27 November 2003