As hard as it is to believe, the conservative Christian state of Iowa is now officially housing in its state capital a satanic altar. Complete with a goat head and candles, the satanic symbols were placed in the state Capitol last week, where it will reportedly remain for 14 days as a symbol of “religious freedom.”
– A satanic display in Iowa’s state house has drawn objection but no action from Republican Governor Kim Reynolds.
– The understanding of religion has shifted, and religion is now often considered a matter of personal belief rather than a source of social order.
– Some argue for a restoration of cultural sanity and a return to foundational values for a flourishing and faithful society.
While the Republican governor Kim Reynolds has called the satanic display objectionable, she refuses to use the power of her office to have it removed. The same goes with the Republican majority in that very capitol building. Republicans have solid majorities in both chambers of the Iowa legislature, they supposedly represent conservative Christian values, and they are doing it by publicly displaying a satanic altar in their state house.
We wouldn’t be surprised if something like this were happening in the lunatic insane asylums that pass as state houses in capitols like Sacramento or Albany. Astonishingly, this is happening in one of the reddest nations in the country under the de facto approving gaze of a Republican governor. This approval is based on the notion of ‘religious freedom,’ which is a conservative value. Blue states are removing statues of our founding fathers from their state houses while red states like Iowa are erecting satanic altars. How do conservative values end up giving us Satan worship?
The first thing we all need to understand here is that our whole conception of religion has changed over the years, and it has changed dramatically. The Latin term ‘religion’ had nothing to do with your own private beliefs, subjective sentiments, or personal opinion or persuasion. Religion historically meant social order.
Anything that involved maintaining social order involved religious activity, and all cultures believed that the ultimate source of social disorder was blasphemy, or insulting or cursing the gods. So religion first and foremost had to do with rightly relating to divine agents, but that right relationship was the prerequisite to a right relationship with each other. The two greatest commandments in the Bible are to love God and love your neighbor.
This sense of social order is reflected in the term ‘culture,’ which comes from the Latin ‘cultus,’ which means worship. Another way of thinking of it is that religion is the cult of culture. Religion, as the cult of culture, provides the sacred that in turn sanctifies every aspect of human life including relationships, politics, food, fashions, literature, art, architecture, music, and poetry the whole of human society is held together in and through religion.
Unfortunately, that is not how we think of religion anymore. Beginning in the 18th century Enlightenment with the ‘scientific revolution,’ religion was redefined as something you can believe but cannot know. Knowledge was redefined according to the methodologies of skepticism and scientific rationalism. Anything that fell outside the purview of science like religion was something you could believe but it could not be known. Today, religion is considered anything one believes. It is a matter of belief, not of knowledge. That is why it is not allowed in schools.
Schools are supposed to be about acquiring knowledge, not religious belief. Over the last century, religion has been dislodged from social order. The theory here is that religion is now solely something you believe, and so what the state of Iowa is doing is ‘affirming your right to believe.’ So-called conservatives are at the forefront of that affirmation, even if that manifests itself in a Satanic altar in the statehouse.
Republicans and Democrats affirm the legitimacy of the Enlightenment’s redefinition of religion. Particularly in our schools and institutions of learning, many are reconsidering that redefinition. Every culture is going to have sacred beliefs that are considered absolute and unquestionable. The profundity and eternality of those beliefs will determine the stability of the culture.
This is why our founding fathers held to an accommodationist relationship between church and state where the church and state work together for a flourishing, humane, and faithful society and culture, which stands in stark contrast to what is called a separationist view between church and state. This has been so dominant in our nation since the 1940s. Scholars are overwhelmingly of the opinion that our Founding Fathers were virtually all accommodationists and that the First Amendment’s anti-establishment clause is meant to be accommodationist. The notion that a satanic altar has some kind of mythical parity with that of a Christmas display is a civilizational absurdity. Patriots are rising all over the nation and are slowly but surely taking our nation back through a politics of restoration, a restoration that will return our nation to cultural sanity and, above all peace on earth and goodwill toward men.
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