Darwin’s Ghost or the Holy Ghost?

We all must choose between those options.

A few weeks ago, Jules Gomes reported here on the results of a deeply unsettling study. The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found that only a small and shrinking percentage of self-identified Christians actually believe in several essential elements of the traditional Christian creed. The extensive national survey found, among other things, that:

Only 9% of American Catholics believe in the existence and influence of the Holy Trinity … 20% of Protestants, 24% of “born-again” Christians, and 16% of self-identified Christians adopt the fundamental tenet of Christianity “that God exists in three unique, equal, and indivisible persons.” … [O]nly 3.9% of Protestants attend Sunday services each week, while a tiny percentage of Catholics (0.26%) attend Sunday Mass each week.

What’s happening here? Whole books should be researched and written by scholars to understand this phenomenon and figure out how to reverse it. One obvious answer is that pastors (including bishops and the recent pope) have stopped preaching the Gospel and replaced it with politics. Whether they’ve lost faith themselves or are cravenly trying to trim their sails to the winds of elite cultural forces, too many Church leaders have hollowed out Christian doctrine and wear its skin like a suit.

Treating the Church as a Political Party or Tribe

Mostly we see this displacement of doctrine by politics on the progressive Left, in Mainline and “inclusive” churches that redefine Christianity as a “movement” aimed at redistributing wealth and power — which was the core theory of KGB-sponsored Liberation Theology and its stepchild, Black Liberation Theology (the faith Barack Obama espouses).

Since Screwtape plays both sides of the field, we’re also seeing churches get hijacked by the far Right. Some in Protestant circles espouse Christian Nationalism, while some Catholics embrace intolerant Integralism. Each movement takes legitimate insights on the limits of classical liberal political theory (i.e., the American Founding) and spins a strategem on how the Church can claw back power.

The problem isn’t Christians trying to use the State to enforce the Natural Law God wrote on each human heart. That’s our duty, and it’s why the Church has been the single most powerful humanitarian influence in the history of the world — the enemy of abortion, infanticide, slavery, prostitution, and every form of sinful exploitation.

But since the Enemy is ever whispering in our ears, it’s easy to swing too far to the Right and start to treat the Church more like a tribe that seeks wealth and privilege for their own sakes — and takes unseemly glee in seizing those things from outsiders. The upsurge of archaic antisemitic conspiracy theories among some in the MAGA movement is an especially repugnant example of that temptation in action. (And I say this as someone who loudly opposed neoconservative foreign policy and served as a Pat Buchanan presidential delegate at the Republican National Convention in 1996.)

The Lie We All Grew Up Believing

The rot goes much deeper, however. The Church wouldn’t be vulnerable to crass political movements if believers all had their houses in order. A Christian whose faith was solid would be able to spot it the moment some pastor crossed the bright line between legitimate advocacy for biblical imperatives and some ugly Marxist or tribalist power grab. Then either call out the abuse or walk away.

Look at those crazy numbers again — the vanishingly small percentage of believers who fully believe in the Trinity and other basic tenets of the faith which are clearly stated in the Word of God. Why does that happen? How are we now so prone to slink into heresies that were condemned 1,700 years ago?

I think it’s a false paradigm, a cultural myth, that seeped into the Western mind 150 years ago that renders faith so fragile these days. Even most of us who grew up in the Church and attended religious schools have been soaking in this anti-religious acid bath all through our lives, unaware.

Darwin’s Unholy Ghost

Put bluntly, I’m talking about Darwinism. I don’t mean his careful research into plants and flowers, or even his speculative claim that all living creatures share a common descent. No, I mean his broader project, which came to permeate every aspect of Western culture: the effort to explain away human life, all life, and finally the entirety of the universe, as the product of random chance.

That’s a faith-killer. You can’t believe that, even implicitly, and still cling to faith in the God of the Bible. The Jewish and Christian traditions teach us that life is a wondrous, mysterious gift from an all-knowing, all-loving Mind. Since Darwin’s time, every intellectual discipline, from the hard sciences to religious studies, has striven to prove the opposite: Life is just some flotsam that happened to wash up on the beach. Those two views can’t be reconciled, full stop.

What happens when you try?

You end up like Francis Collins, whose crusade against Intelligent Design marched in lockstep with his jihad to force an untested, abortion-derived vaccine onto millions of believers and his LGBTQ initiatives at the National Institutes of Health — all of which he did while claiming to be a born-again believer.

Why is the impact of the Darwinist claim so powerful? Because it’s radical and goes to the root of how we interpret literally everything that exists, and every event in our lives. For instance, the transgenderist claim that human beings come not in two biological sexes but 47 ever-shifting human genders:

[A]ll life, including human, is a piece of cosmic happenstance with no trace of a Designer. We’ve trained ourselves to see the existence of the sexes not as some artifact of a loving Maker who has in mind a plan for how we ought to live. Instead, the sexes are just a clumsy, messy means of reproducing the species which happened to confer a greater fitness on some long-ago lower animal, so he survived. We’re no more bound to respect our sexual nature than we’re morally obliged to live as hunter-gatherers, merely because our ancestors did.

Christians who accept transgenderism aren’t doing it because they’re too compassionate, excessively moved to embrace the “marginalized.” They’re buying into postmodern fantasies like that because they don’t really believe God made the world. They’ve been trained to see everything as a series of random accidents, with no rhyme or reason, and certainly no deeper meaning. You can slap a whole box of “Jesus” bandages on that gaping wound, but your faith will just keep bleeding out.

So if we want to inoculate people against losing their faith in the mysteries of biblical religion, we need to get them studying Intelligent Design, which shows in exquisite paleontological and archaeological detail that random chance could no more have produced the entire natural world than the winds and weather could have carved Mt. Rushmore. That’s why I’m constantly sending people to check out the work of the Discovery Institute. Indirectly, but profoundly, the scientists and scholars over there who are dismantling Darwinism are also serving the pro-life, pro-family movements and neutralizing the acid that eats away at faith.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.