#private interpretation

If being a Christian means, me and Jesus, then you don’t have to, nor should you, say a word about your faith in public. It is a “private matter.” One way this idea has been developed in recent years is when politicians speak of “freedom of worship” rather than the Constitutionally protected “freedom of religion.” Freedom of worship means you keep your beliefs in the building or in your mind, but don’t you dare bring them out in public. Because of this trend many Americans today may even say that faith does not have a place in the public square. This is based on the inimical twisting of the phrase “separation of church and state.” While intended to protect churches from state harassment, today it is widely viewed as eliminating the church from the state. The exact threat to churches that stimulated the creation of the protection has now been realized. There is a state church, and it is secular.

The dagger of private interpretation has sliced deep into Western European and Canadian societies and is slowly piercing our skin in the United States. The church is persecuted in those cultures. Preaching Catholic doctrine can get you imprisoned in Canada. Those in the church who would seek to join progressives will have as much success as those who tried to mollify communist regimes. The Vatican recently tried to do so with communist China, and the results are an enhanced persecution of the faithful in that country. There can be no intersection of either communist or progressive doctrines with the teaching of the Catholic Church.

If you eliminate the authority and teaching office of the body of Christ (the church) in society, a community that is designed to be an actual leaven within the world, religion has no valid place in the public square. And when you eliminate the body of Christ, you can more easily eliminate Christ himself. If Christianity is solely a personal decision based on “me and Jesus,” then the government can somewhat legitimately state that all religious views must be kept private.

Prior to the Protestant revolution, the church provided and was granted authority to provide guidance on morals, determining right and wrong, life and death, and other ethical issues. With the advent of Protestantism and the implications of the doctrine of private interpretation, secular governments increasingly took the opportunity to replace themselves as the arbiters of issues formally under the purview of the church. Some elements of the Church fought back against this trend, but others tried to alleviate governmental concerns by modifying religious practices. Any such attempts by Christians to go along with the secular governments usurpation of these issues was welcomed. In communism the result was often a church of the state, which subjugated or eliminated the divine and replaced it with a nationalistic love of the state. China is an example of this today. Progressive Western liberal democracies take a similar but different track, subjugating Christianity in the name of “equality.” This has led to such absurdities as the European Union’s stating that it has no Christian heritage, blindly rejecting centuries of Christian influence that helped create their once vibrant societies.

Private interpretation in the West can now be seen as “you believe what you believe, and I’ll believe what I believe.” Its rotten fruit is rampant moral relativism; “my truth is my truth, and your truth is your truth.” As the West has eliminated the church, the body of Christ, from any meaningful role in the public square, the pagan culture has usurped all roles formerly restricted to religion. This has led the secular church to promote the killing of people who were not having a good day in the name of compassion, to ignore the scientific proof of an embryo being a separate human life in the interest of fairness, and to ignore the biological reality of man and woman in the interest of equality. If you choose to deny these progressive truths, you will be punished.