Trying to Eliminate Transcendence

Gary continues his talk about worldviews and Christian involvement.

During the French Revolution, Christianity was deliberately being erased by political elitists, but this did not mean that religion itself would be banished. The vacuum was filled with a new god. The French “proclaimed the goddess of Reason in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and in other churches in France… In Paris, the goddess was personified by an actress, Demoiselle Candeille, carried shoulder-high into the cathedral by men dressed in Roman costumes.”

The French revolutionaries were so opposed to mixing any part of Christianity with politics, that they overturned the entire social order. Their supposed “religious neutrality” created a state of “anti-religion,” an implicit atheism. Seeing where atheism was taking the country, the “cult of the Supreme Being” was established as a deistic civil religion controlled by the newly installed political establishment. To separate the Christian religion from the new revolutionary republic, the standard Gregorian calendar was reconfigured to reflect a more “reasonable,” non-religious approach to keeping time:

It is noteworthy that the two greatest atheistic regimes in history—the revolutionary governments of France in 1792 and Russia in 1929—tried to change the traditional week, hoping thereby to destroy Christianity. The French set up a ten-day week and the Soviets a five-day week, and both were rigidly enforced, but each lasted only a few years.

While America’s Constitution declares that it was “DONE in the Year of our Lord” 1787, the revolutionary French calendar began with a new year one.

Following the French revolutionary trend, the traditional way of dating scholarly papers and books is beginning to change among intellectuals and liberal theologians. B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini: Year of our Lord) are being rejected in favor of B.C.E. (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era).

These ideological changes have a long history in the rejection of God from the universe. The French Revolution consolidated power into a new nationalism that enticed some “to speak of the ‘goddess France.’ It meant that those who fought for France were no longer simply doing a job for which they were paid, but were patriots rendering due obeisance to a deity. For them, to do their duty was to do their sacred duty, language that has remained part of the liturgy of patriotism to the present, even in officially atheistic countries like the Soviet Union.”

Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths

The rejection of any type of “this-worldly” application of the Bible has resulted in the proliferation of man-centered worldviews that have steadily drained the life out of our world and left behind a spiritual vacuum. Will the church of Jesus Christ be prepared with biblical answers for the millions who will be ready to follow the light of the gospel as the folly of humanism is made manifest? (2 Tim. 3:9).

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Gary continues his talk about worldviews and Christian involvement. Going back to the French Revolution, he compares how France viewed and implemented their “new beginning” to how it was viewed and implemented in America. Secularists have long been trying to get rid of God, and sadly many Christians are aiding and abetting their efforts.

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American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources