The Gathering Storm
Secularism, Culture, and the Church
By R. Albert H. Mohler, Jr.
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
In the midst of the most tumultuous year in a half century, when the attention of the whole world is focused on a pandemic, a recession, and a protest against racial animosity, the president of one of the largest evangelical seminaries in the world releases a book entitled The Gathering Storm and fails to mention anything remotely connected to these front-page concerns.
Instead, R. Albert Mohler obsesses about human sexuality and its disruption of traditional Christian norms. He is so very worried about sexual freedom, so concerned that too many people are having too much sex, especially without the benefit of marriage or the production of children.
According to Mohler, the primary results of this “pandemic of sexual intercourse” (88) are abortion and homosexuality. Therefore, Mohler spends his entire 11-chapter, 212-page rant contending that they constitute a sustained attack on truth, justice, life, law, family, culture, liberty, and indeed, all western civilization.
The “storm” that is “gathering”, according to Mohler (borrowing a phrase from Winston Churchill who wrote about the Second World War) is “the evaporation of religious belief and its binding authority” (page 5). Authority is a big deal for Mohler, as he uses the word 29 times in the first chapter, by which he means something about the Bible, the Church, and important people like, well, himself. People, it seems, are doing what they want and not reading the Bible rightly, not attending the right churches, and certainly not paying nearly enough attention to the right people. For shame!
To give a public symbol to this dire cultural situation, Mohler turns to the burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral last year in Paris, France. That tragedy is the proper symbol for the demise of the sacred and the rise of the secular. Our white, western, Christian culture is now a burned-out relic of what it once was.
Who is to blame for this supposed victory of secularism over religion?
Well, as it turns out, some familiar foes: Hollywood, liberal churches, Democrats, and the universities. They are the four horsemen of the evangelical apocalypse, carousing on every page of this sad diatribe and crushing all that is good and godly beneath their unholy hooves.
The most troubling thing about this interpretation of the world as we know it is the kind of Christianity Mohler wishes to defend. Nowhere in his description of the Christianity he says is disappearing are the words love, joy, peace, compassion, kindness, grace, empathy, service, or humility. Certainly not humility. The “life that is found in Christ” (120) is all about authority and inerrancy, sex and sin, danger and judgement.
Yes, there is a nine-page addendum on faith, hope, and love at the end of this self-righteous screed. But the platitudes therein offer nothing to balance the angst and anger that dominate the text from beginning to end.
Furthermore, Mohler fails to address the real moral issues of our day (and every day): war and peace, wealth and poverty, opportunity and oppression. He never mentions racial animosity around the world, the misuse and abuse of women, the flood of refugees seeking solace from death and danger, threats to the created order (such as global warming), or even the tsunami of sexual abuse in his own denomination.
It might be ironic that his book arrived on my door step the very day that his denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, announced the largest annual drop in membership in one hundred years. With books like this and the religion it promotes, who possibly can be surprised!!
It is an election year, I should note, and that explains almost everything about this book: title, timing, and text. Earlier this year, Mohler went public with his conversion to Trumpism, announcing that he had changed his mind about the President and now thinks Trump deserves four more years of office. That may have been his last-ditch effort to win the presidency of his own denomination, or it may have been a public relations stunt to promote the sale of this book. I suspect it will function more fully as an interpretation of what he means by “wise engagement in the midst of this pressing crisis” (191). And what he means is this: Donald Trump and his version of America and Christianity are the best way for us to survive the storm clouds of secularism and stand on solid rocks of “God, truth, and liberty” (186).
Whatever.
(June 2020)
