The Church of the State

Via the Crunchy Con blog (mmmn, granola) comes a fascinating and painful article on the "Protestant Deformation", a devastating analysis of what began as a good and righteous attempt to remove the barriers between God and Man has now become a political, rather than spiritual, movement.

"The Protestant Reformation was thus giving birth to what by the early 20th century would become the American Creed. The fundamental elements of that secular creed - liberal democracy, free markets, constitutionalism and the rule of law - were already fully in place in the United States in the early 19th century. This spread of the Protestant rejection of hierarchy and community from the arena of salvation to the arenas of economics and politics was driven by a particular inner dynamic, or rather decline, within the Protestant faith itself."

My old pastor once remarked after seeing a half-time show at the Alamo Bowl that stated the Conquistadores came to America for "Gold, Glory and God" that is was a shame that the eternal beauty of the Gospel of Christ was lumped in with two other things so temporal and crass. We have the wonderful, beautiful gift of a faith that crosses cultures with ease and is a beacon of light to all the world, yet we insist on wrapping it in the filthy rags of this world. May God be merciful on us for our failings.