by A.W. Tozer
That there has been a large-scale return to religion in the Western world, and more particularly in the United States, is too evident to need much proof. Religion is in vogue again. It is now considered smart to be religious.
This movement toward religion set in about the time of the Second World War and has continued ever since, in violent contrast to the attitudes that prevailed after the First World War. Civilized men came out of that first world struggle bitter, cynical, disillusioned and thoroughly angry with God. False prophets, in and out of the pulpits, had led people to believe that the race had progressed so far in the direction of universal brotherhood that war had become impossible. The arguments they advanced in support of their belief were too fragile to stand up under the battering of facts, but faith in peace and brotherhood had come on the world like a Yo-yo epidemic and everybody that was anybody was playing with it. The only voices that sounded a discordant note in the universal chorus of peace were those of the Fundamentalists who were ignored completely as being unlearned, reactionary and 200 years behind the times. So cheerfully singing a lullaby of "Peace, peace," the world plunged into a blood bath the like of which had not been known or imagined up to that time. What the people did not believe could happen did happen before their eyes. Like Cain of old, the world was exceeding wroth and its countenance fell. God had let the human race down. Religion was a fraud. Piety was hypocrisy and prayer a throwback to the jungle. They would have no more of that.
An embittered world took revenge on the hope that had failed it by debunking everything formerly considered sacred. The popular writers of the period gleefully exposed the weaknesses of everyone in history that had enjoyed a reputation for godliness or even plain decency. The Puritans were shown to be hard, cruel men who hated the human race; the Pilgrim Fathers were tried and found guilty of downright hypocrisy. Washington was a whisky sot and Lincoln a neurotic who loved off-color stories and used religion only as a convenient cloak. And so it was with everyone and everything else associated with religion.
Hardly anyone of any prominence in literary and philosophical circles believed in God. A "new era" was just ahead when the "new masses" would rise up, throw off the yoke of religion and establish a "new republic," a Marxian utopia having most of the characteristics of the Biblical millennium, but with one important difference: this man-made golden age would have no place for God or Christ or the Bible. Or if there were to be a Bible it would not be the Hebrew-Christian book given by divine inspiration, but a humanistic anthology composed of select passages from writers of the stripe of Lucretius, Rosseau and Shaw, compiled very likely by Henry Mencken or H.G. Wells.
A new dream of peace and brotherhood had come to the world, rising this time not from misplaced religious faith, as the previous dream had done, but from a thoroughly mundane secularism that would have no part of God or religion. The spiritual atmosphere between the two wars was materialistic, skeptical and self-confident. The prevailing ideology was a watered-down and disguised communism. The Commies were romping all over the White House lawn, lecturing in our universities and writing for our best magazines. The prevailing mood was humanistic. The motivating philosophies varied from each other in minor details, but they were all "one world" philosophies. This world was all that mattered. Anything beyond it was speculative and unproved. Faith in a world above was mere wishful thinking and could actually slow down human progress by lulling men into inactivity.
In such a soul state the civilized world moved into the unspeakable horrors of World War II. Then the wholesale murder of civilian populations, the incredible iniquities of the Nazis, the shocking collapse of trust among the nations of the earth, the monstrous violations of the spirit of brotherhood, the inhumanity of man to man, the triumph of perfidy, the near ending of civilization, and finally the appearance of weapons potentially capable of bringing a flaming end to the human race itself-all this quite literally scared people into a return to religion. The humanists had failed. The starry-eyed faith in man's ability to find his way alone was bombed and burned out of people's hearts. The world began to look around for God.
So came about the return to religion. The mid-fifties finds the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme from where it was in the mid-twenties. Religion is back in style again. People can now talk about their faith without apology. It is intellectually respectable again to believe in God. The religious motif is back in the literary and entertainment world once more. Just everybody and anybody is willing to come forward and say, "This I believe." And no one acts embarrassed or changes the subject. Religion is back in fashion.
The fact cannot be disputed.
( Article taken from The Price of Neglect, Chapter 23 )
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