Statistics show not only that more people belong to churches, but that a larger per cent of the total population are now churchgoers, or are at least identified with the churches; and certainly no one would deny that religious rallies and evangelistic campaigns draw vaster crowds than at any other time in modern history.
These things being so, would it not be logical to expect that moral conditions would be better as a consequence? But the situation is exactly contrary.
More new and expensive church buildings, more professed Christians, huger crowds and stepped-up religious activities have raised the moral standards of the civilized world not one inch. In the midst of all this the church stands completely impotent. She is impotent because she is in her Babylonian captivity and cannot sing the Lord's song in a strange land.
She is custodian of a Christianity that has become almost wholly secularized; her own moral standards are disgracefully low, the fire of her worship has burnt down to a gray ash, and her whole inner life is seriously and tragically impaired. The inflationary religious boom of recent years has given us more Christianity, but it is worth less. Religion has become popular.
Thousands of uninstructed and bewildered persons have "accepted" Christ, but they have no remote idea of the true meaning of the cross. They are not penitent; they evince no real fear of God; they have not separated from the world; their psychology is pagan, their ambitions are carnal, their lives empty. They turned to Christianity because it was at the moment the popular thing to do.
They innocently believed what they were told and did what they were urged to do; but tragically they accepted a Christ that is no Christ and a cross that is not the cross of Christ. Religious gatherings swarm with this kind of Christians. It takes no particular prophetic gift to foresee with a fair degree of accuracy what the outcome will be.
A war or a depression or some other violent dislocation of the social order will deflate our shiny religious balloon. From some direction harsh reality will strike swift and hard and the millions who have taken refuge under the glass roof of popular Christianity will find themselves without a cover; then, bitter and disillusioned, they will turn in fury against the gospel, the church, and every form of religion.
Cynicism, materialism, and unbelief will blanket the world again as it did after World War I. The Christian who has not compromised his testimony is now in a position of peculiar strength. Through him the Lord can work to bring back the church from her Babylonian captivity. God's poor captive children will look to the Ezras and the Nehemiahs who have suffered with them in their affliction but who have never accepted Babylon as their true home.
Post published in: Faith