We who are identified with a Fundamentalism must now see where we stand amid the spiritual failures and successes of the past. Our enemy is both old and new. He is old, in that modern Secular Humanism was birthed in America by an old enemy who attacked the very foundations and fundamentals of early American Christianity. He is new, in that a new variety of blendings and amalgams have been made in our own time through not only the failure of the Public School system, but also the apostasy of Protestantism and denominationalism. In the old enemy we see an apostasy away from the Pilgrim-Puritan ethic; in the new enemy we see an apostasy away from the Protestant-denominational ethic.
We must pause at this point and identify the public death of several ethics which were native to the United States of America from our early days. These ethics consisted of at least six upon which America was founded: (1) the Judeo-Christian ethic, (2) the Protestant-Reformation ethic, (3) the Puritan-Pilgrim ethic, (4) the Biblical-Commonwealth ethic, (5) the Geographical Bible-Belt ethic, (6) the Historic-Denominational ethic.
A careful study of each of these will reveal that there are at least seven definite ingredients which influenced the birth of our country and the writing of our sacred documents which we have departed from in the present twentieth century actions of our political structures and religious institutions.
We could spend much time in the rightful condemnation of all of the political departures from these founding ethics, and in the end it would be profitable to a better understanding of what is wrong with the present American system. However, as biblical believers in the Lord Jesus Christ and in the inerrant, infallible authority of His Word, we must seek to find the other inroads among us, ourselves, that are doing the greater damage. While it is true that Secular Humanism has invaded the Media, the Federal Government, the Public-School System and related bureaucracies, and that they can be rightfully placed back to the Harvard Liberal Elite, yet there is the greater spiritual responsibility among those who are identified with the Protestant and Fundamental movements of the world.
A number of questions rightly arise from my own heart as I stand personally responsible to God as a believer in the literal fundamentals of the Bible. You, as an individual, must ask the very same questions, too.
First, will the failure of full obedience to the Word of God among all of us bring about a collapse of Fundamentalism as it did to the Puritan-Pilgrim movement of long ago?
Second, is there growing somewhere among those who call themselves Fundamentalists a new humanism, or possibly a reputed Christian humanism, that is more deceptive than Secular Humanism?
Third, are the side effects of the Neo-Evangelicals, the Charismatics, and the Pseudo-Fundamentalists influencing us to depart from a true scriptural separation?
Fourth are we inconsistent in our claim to the matter of separation by being militant against some obvious errors while fellowshiping with others who are actually living on the borderline?
Fifth, are there personal sins in our lives that hinder us from a greater spiritual understanding and discernment of what and who the enemies are within our own churches and schools—and that will ultimately defeat our concerted victory against new foes not yet identified on the horizon?
Sixth, are we teaching sterile, static and stale information to our dear families of parents and children because we are powerless in prayer and faith for our times?
Seventh, are we as magnificent in our daily life with the Lord Jesus as we are militant in certain areas of our lives against the apostasy? Which simply means, Do we have an incomplete definition of scriptural separation.
These seven questions do not at all represent even an introduction to what seems to be my need before God Almighty in these horrific days of the twentieth-century apostasy. Could it be that we have truly identified all the enemies before us in the twentieth century and have not yet fully identified our darling enemy—our darling self—before Almighty God? Is it evangelism that we need the most? Or is it personal revival?