Butterflies, Ants, and the False Religion of the Enlightenment

 The Alcon Blue Butterfly has an interesting technic to preserve its offspring. The caterpillars give off a scent that at first smells like food to the ants. The ants, therefore, take it back to their nests. Once there, however, they begin to give off a scent that mimics that of antlings. The worker ants cannot tell the difference and so begin to nurse them and leave them in the place where their antlings are nurtured. The caterpillars begin to devour the antlings because of it. Afterward they form a cocoon, and once breaking out of it, fly off home free and full of baby ants. The ants have no defense from it because they are bound by their own personal experiences through their senses, which have utterly failed to communicate reality to them. This sense experience is too deficient a means to evaluate reality to save their offspring.

The ancient Graeco-Roman world is one of democracy and republics. These political structures were those of inclusivism in the sense that lesser voices than the king still had a say in the commonwealth of the people. When Graeco-Roman ideas were once again adopted in the Renaissance, political organizations that once existed to inform the king now wanted more participation in his power, and even wanted his power altogether.

In the Reformation, the individual’s importance was rediscovered in that each man had to have faith in Christ and know Him personally. Salvation was not obtained by just being a part of the larger collective church. Each man had to give his say, his consent to follow Christ.

The merits of each of these applications of individualism can be debated. Certainly, the Reformation’s balanced view of both the collective church and the individual’s responsibility is biblical.

However, the inclusion of the individual would soon turn away from the bounds of its orthodox Christian parameters and adopt both a radical version of inclusivism along with the egalitarianism that is produced by it and the heresy of Pelagianism in order to feed it.

Thus was born the religion of the Enlightenment. In this religion, every human (eventually) must have a say in his own government. He must, therefore, decide what religion is true, where the Church could and could not dictate theology and morals to him, what the Bible could and could not dictate to him, what government could and could not dictate to him. Each person had his own experience and reason to come to his own conclusions concerning what was true and good for himself.

Science, man’s personal experience of the natural world, and philosophy, man’s reason applied to his personal experience, replaced the Bible as the vehicle through which knowledge of reality was obtained. God’s revelation to man, if there was one, was natural revelation. The Bible was simply one of many expressions of man’s experience of God, since to say otherwise would be to exclude rather than include the experience of other individuals in other religions and worldviews.

Therefore, Deism was an accommodation to the Enlightenment religion as the later comparative religions movement would be. God is just a generic God who belongs to everyone, not just a limited religion.

Eventually, a generic religion needed a generic origins story, so pagan myths that presented creation as a process of evolution was demythologized and applied to the natural world without the polytheistic elements.

Not only were religions studied as different expressions of the same God so that all were included, but since individual experience was the means to know the divine, spiritualism and the occult, ecstatic experiences like tongues, shaking, going into trances and prophesying new prophecies, began to take root as the common means of religious knowledge.

Governments were overthrown in bloody revolutions because people would no longer tolerate submission to powers with whom they had no inclusion. Regicide corresponded with the murder of orthodox Christianity in the West, and it all hinged on a Pelagianism that disbelieved the Bible when it warned that the mind is depraved above all things and desperately sick and should not be trusted over the Lord, who’s Word instead was to be trusted over our own understanding. According to the Bible, men suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They are always seeking to recreate the original sin by throwing off the authority of God that is exclusive and restricting of the wayward desires of human beings who look to autonomy rather than to be guided by God’s Word.

Liberalism was an accommodation to all of this that held the same Pelagian assumptions. It is the Enlightenment religion with a Christian husk made up of Christianese. It tore the Bible apart through evolutionary theories, like those found in Hegel, of Source/Form Criticism, which argued that the Bible was just a human creation that evolved over time and was pieced together and redacted numerous times. It adopted a comparative religions approach that attempted to give authority to those aspects of all religions that were similar and less or no authority to those things that made Christianity, or even other religions from one another, exclusive from the rest.

Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism was essentially this argument: that Liberalism, what is now called Progressivism (which should be a key word since this is the Enlightenment idea that man is getting better through his gaining better knowledge through his individual experience) is not a form of Christianity at all. It is an accommodation to modernity. I would argue, however, that it is not merely an accommodation. It is modernity. It is the Enlightenment religion. Enlightenment inclusivism is at its core, and anything else that does not conflict with that inclusivism can be syncretized with it.

Egalitarianism, which is nothing more than inclusivism applied to relationships, is also, therefore, not an orthodox Christian idea. It is part of the syncretism of the Enlightenment religion that has gone back into the Bible in order to reinterpret patriarchal texts in such a way so that they can now throw out the exclusiveness of various roles assigned by God through position or gender and replace them with a generic inclusivism that flattens out authority to all people. Relationships must be democratic or at least a republic, but that cannot be a dictatorship. “We have no king but Caesar,” once falling off the lips of those who rejected Christ’s authority, has now become, “I have no king but me.”

But what this means is that egalitarianism is not Christian. It’s not one flavor of it. It’s a different ethic from a different religion, one that is the opposite of Christianity. In essence, it’s the ethic of a giant cult that has engulfed our culture. It is far more dangerous than any other cult that has ever existed because those who are in it don’t even realize how religious it is. They just think it’s reality. But those aren’t antlings in the nest no matter how much the delusional experience tells us otherwise. There are predators in the house, and if we don’t identify them, we will surely pay the price for it.