160406 The Christian in the 21st Century Lesson 1 A Secular World

Lesson One: A Secular World “God Gave Them Over” Rhetoric to the contrary, the United States has never been a Christian nation, at least not in the sense of being primarily populated by people who have given their lives to the Lord. Lip service has always been more popular than discipleship. However, whatever their spiritual failings, Americans of a century ago generally accepted some of the Bi-ble’s core moral precepts: you ought to go to church, you ought to stay married to the same person all your life, and so on.Today, we are in the final stages of the dissolution of that moral con-sensus. The recent disputes over homosexual marriage are nothing more than a rearguard action. The larger battles, over the acceptability of things like premarital sex, abor-tion, and divorce, have already been fought and lost. The Bible has been dethroned from word of God to self-help book, occasionally use-ful (like when it says “Judge not, lest you be judged”) but eminently ignorable.This is a novel spectacle in the Unit-ed States, but it is an extremely fa-miliar pattern. Every year, we take another step down the trail blazed by the Gentile nations of old as de-scribed in Romans 1. Our nation has never deserved the appellation of “Christian”, but it is well on its way to earning the designation “pagan”. ©Copyright Matthew W. Bassford, 2013. This material is subject to a Crea-tive Commons attribution-noncommercial-no derivative works license. This means that it may be reproduced, shared, and used freely, provided it is attributed to the author, not used for commercial purposes, and not altered in any way. For more information, please see creativecommons.org