Introduction

“I’m not religious”

“I just follow the science”

“All religions are designed to manipulate people”

I said all three of these once, and I meant them. I grew up nominally Catholic, the kind of family that shows up to church two or three times a year, and by high school I even let go of that. In college, I became a confident atheist. There was no God, no hell, nothing above me to answer to. When I pictured religion, I pictured the failures of the church I had walked away from, and I wanted none of it. I believed in what human beings could make. History was climbing. Science was the road forward. People were better now than they had ever been, and we were only getting started.

A few years later, I became a Christian and began to study the Bible. However, for years after I called myself a Christian, I would open my Bible and flinch at what I read. I assumed the Bible had fallen behind the times. It took me far too long to understand that the flinch I was feeling was coming from the hidden religion I had carried with me, not from the words of Christ. The religion I never knew I had joined. That religion is what this book is about.

America has been invaded by the idea that you can choose not to be religious. That somehow, being religious is just an additional choice in your many choices of being human. There are those “superstitious religious people” like Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and all the rest who just don’t follow the science. They believe in a supernatural realm with a sky daddy, or a massive group of gods. They’re absolute lunatics, aren’t they? But the “non-religious” group? They’re enlightened. It’s those people who have released the shackles of such oppressive, traditional doctrine that ancient farmers once followed.

Ironically, if you ask 10 Americans what their beliefs are, 6 would say Christian, 3 would say “no religion”, one would land in the “other” category, and almost all of them would be lying. The vast majority of Americans bow to one altar for one religion: humanism.

Humanism is a religion with creeds, priests, doctrine, altars, and sacraments. It has saints and martyrs, heretics and excommunications, missionaries and catechisms. It has holy days, even a holy month in June. It has a creation myth, a fall, a savior, and an end-times prophecy. It has everything a religion has ever had, except the honesty to call itself one.

You will see in the following chapters that humans, because they are made in the image of God, cannot escape their religious tendencies. When we reject the true God, we do not find an empty void; we find a different god to worship.

Many of us look at the accounts of ancient societies worshiping statues and wonder why they would do such a ridiculous thing. But we are doing the same thing in America. There is a reason the Bible talks so much about idols; humans are not above them; they are quite literally the only other thing we can worship when we walk away from God. America is incredibly idolatrous; we’re just dishonest about it.

Most importantly, every person is religious by default because everyone lives in a universe they didn’t create. It is a ridiculous notion to think we have full authority over our lives when we did not even make them ourselves. Want to live life by your own rules without consequences? Go generate everything from nothing, then maybe we can talk. Until then, you have no choice but to worship something.

America is not one nation under God; we are one nation under man. We have worshiped the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25), and have exchanged the truth for a lie. Our religious activities are still present, but we are worshiping an idol rather than God. I’m not just talking about the atheists and secularists; I’m talking about Christians, too. The nation has been so infected by humanism that even the evangelicals have turned Jesus into a figure who just so happens to agree with everything the culture says.