The attempt to bridge the differences between religions in order to make religion generic has been an ongoing obsession of religious reformers that have a progressive bent of mind. Such a one-size-fits-all type of religion has found its way into many churches, reaching even the Vatican, where it has caused confusion, disorder, and disunity among Catholics. I think this tells us all we need to know about “progressive” church reform: it is a way to ruin churches, not improve them.

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There is no limit to the degradation that comes from the call from liberals for “inclusion,” hypocritically joined with the exclusion of Christians that follow the Gospel. It gives faithful Christians the option to accept watered-down Christianity or leave the church.

Compromising instead of promoting doctrine, to “make it compatible with other religions,” dilutes and weakens every authentic faith, an outcome welcomed by globalists that want God “on their side.” What side, we must ask, is it that denies the Gospel? It is the side of apostasy, supported by heresy — an actual rejection of God.

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What a misplacement of the will! The de facto surrender of spirituality and morality to might dims the actual value and potential of everyone it affects.

The reality surrounding us and forming our very being tells me that separating God from morality is equivalent to separating the body from the mind. The brain, thanks to its Creator, is designed to engage in reality, not ignore it or fool with it. Thoughtful exploration of reality reveals more of what is spiritual in it than material, something that many serious scientists have discovered, time and again.

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Agenda-driven liberals and progressives have yet to discover the wonders locked up in their heads, centuries after their vaunted “progress.” This cognitive deficit has made many pastors think that it is their mission to improve Christianity instead of promoting it. Do they really think Christ can be outsmarted?

The manic desire among progressive religious leaders to make religion “inclusive” has given globalists the option to use religion to advance their agendas. And it has become a way to include evil practices. Are we to be so naïve and indiscriminate as to include death and self-destruction, when such outcomes are “validated” by calls to “choice” and “liberation”? Christian church leaders fail to guide people through the tangles of morality in life when they include ideas and attitudes in their preaching that are at odds with the Christian Gospel. This puts them at odds with Christ.

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Christians that look the other way when children are killed before or during their birth, or lives are taken at any age for political reasons, or the sexual function of the body — designed for bringing children into the world — is abused or debauched in a brothel, are not acting as Christians.

Are we to turn off the moral lights from God because they are “outdated” or, in the lingo of bygone years, “old-fashioned”? Isn’t this forgetting that having a body with a head on it is also “old fashioned”? Transhumanists would agree and make it justify their purpose in redesigning the body. But how would they redesign the brain, using the brain they already have?

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Shutting off God’s moral lights invites degeneracy in churches where adherence to the Gospel has become a thing of the past. A downward trend in church morality with spineless pastors actually has a long history. Over 200 years ago William Hazlitt recorded: “It was in January 1798 that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud [to hear Coleridge] preach...A poet and a philosopher getting up into a...pulpit to preach the gospel was a romance in these degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity...as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart.” (From William Hazlitt’s “My First Acquaintance with Poets.”)

Connecting the depth of the heart with the height of the intellect is difficult for Christians when they argue over doctrine, as though it is open to debate. Differences of outlook must never thwart the will to seek and abide in the truth regarding our union with God. The way is not found, as some “interpreters” believe, in abiding in one’s conscience. Many who have done so have found themselves believing different things. This is the way to heresy, not unity.

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Connecting to God via His Word is fundamental to every Christian. True Christians do not wander from the unity with God they had at birth to the apostasy that ensues from pastors totally asleep regarding the truth.

Such a state of oblivion was not permitted by the man of science and mathematics that we know as Blaise Pascal. Pascal ultimately concluded that “the laws of nature and the laws of God − God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars − set limits on us. Reject them as oppressive, and we suffer; accept them as opportunities, and we prosper.” (From a statement on a slip of paper sewn inside Pascal’s coat, found after his death.)

How many have fallen asleep from the reality that we are connected to God, our Creator? How many are roused only by the “the times” from their slumber, forfeiting the success and happiness that come from waking up to God?

Too many are drugged by the heresy that has made pastors forget that their mission is to lead their flock to the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6).

Anthony J. DeBlasi is a veteran and lifelong defender of Western culture.

Image: Public domain.