Gingrich Challenges "Radical Secularism" At Liberty U Speech

Former Speaker of the House and potential Republican presidential candidate in 2008 Newt Gingrich wasted little time in trying to claim the late Jerry Falwell's mantle of leadership in the religious right. Speaking at Falwell's Libery University's commencement last Saturday, Gingrich said:

''A growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation cannot profess the truths on which it was founded,'' Gingrich said. ''We are told that our public schools can no longer invoke the creator, nor proclaim the natural law nor profess the God-given quality of human rights.

''In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms,'' he said.

Gingrich also decried what he called judges' overreaching efforts to separate church and state.

''Too often, the courts have been biased against religious believers. This anti-religious bias must end,'' he said.

Not surprisingly, Gingrich has the "us-against-them, black-and-white" mentality of the religious right down cold. Of course, it is that attitude that, in my humble opinion, has led to much of the devisiveness in today's society, both in the church and politics.

I'm not the only one that thinks so. Robert Parham, the executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics, writes:

With Falwell now passed from the scene, Gingrich wants America to believe the Moral Majority founder entrusted him to bear this witness, just as Falwell bore it before him.

By conflating the Bible and Declaration of Independence, the former House Speaker fashions a civil religion, which is an inauthentic religion, in the search for power.

In Gingrich, the witness becomes the politician. The Christian God becomes national deity. The Christian faith becomes the prevailing cultural ideology. The people of God become synonymous with the messianic American community.

That is a false faith, and dangerous.

Authentic religion from the best of the Christian tradition transcends every nation and sits in judgment of every culture.

Authentic religion advances the delivery of justice to the poor and marginalized over rallies to appoint conservative judges. It pursues peacemaking over self-righteous patriotism. It seeks the welfare of the minority neighbor over false claims of religious persecution of the majority.

Gingrich offered no such sense of authentic religion as articulated in the biblical witness. Instead he modeled a civil religion, invoking the name of God some 30 times in his commencement address at Liberty University.

He threw in multiple references to the "Creator," "the Lord," the "Almighty," the "Divine" and "to the Truth," using more terms referring to God more times than a standard Sunday morning sermon.

It was as if Gingrich thought that by referring often enough to the Deity, he could establish his spiritual authority to inherit Falwell's mantle.

"This is a false faith, and dangerous." Believe it.

Also dangerous is the vision Falwell established for his Liberty University School of Law:

Falwell, the prominent televangelist and father of the Moral Majority who founded Liberty University in 1971, died less than a week before the school granted its first law degrees to 50 graduates on Saturday. But his dream of "training a new generation of lawyers, judges, educators, policymakers and world leaders in law from the perspective of an explicitly Christian worldview" remains very much alive.

Perhaps Mel White's comment about Liberty turning out a bunch of "little Falwells" was closer to the truth than I hoped.