Does God Accept Worship from Other Religions?

Christians need to stop listening to the world and start listening to God so that thinking Christian becomes as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. This is Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological conversations, Thinking Christian offers a mix of interviews and discussions that highlight the ways God is working in the lives of his people and question the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that keep the church from conforming more closely to the image of Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody, welcome to Thinking Christian. Today we're going to be looking at the State of Theology report. The State of Theology report is put out by Ligonier Ministries, and it's done in a biannual fashion. And they ask a series of questions and just ask Christians and non-Christians to rate their agreement with those questions on a sliding scale. And so it's a fairly standard survey that you could expect to get. But some of these questions, as we look at the evangelical responses, are a little bit troubling. And so I thought it would be worthwhile to get through and go through in Thinking Christian these questions and just discuss why we should or should not agree with them or disagree with them and give you some sense of what this survey really suggests and how we need to be thinking rightly as Christians about these various doctrines. And so the one we're going to address today is related to worship. And, you know, we've got we live in a pluralistic society, right? So in the United States, we have a number of different religions that are available to the individual Americans. Right. They could be Christian. They could be Muslim. They could be Jewish. They could be Buddhist, Hindu, any number of different things. And so the statement that the State of Theology report put forward to ask people how whether they agreed with it or not, was this God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Fifty six percent of evangelicals agreed with that statement. So fifty six percent of evangelicals, U.S. evangelicals agreed that God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Now, to put that in context, 56 percent is the highest percentage of agreement that people that this question is received over the last several years that the survey has actually been given. In 2016, 48 percent agreed. 2018, 51 percent. 2020, 42 percent. And in 2022, 56 percent agreed. So what are we really to think about this? What are we really to think about God accepting the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam? I think where we need to start really is what is worship? What do we think when we think of as worship? And how does it relate to the basic nature of God? In other words, if we think of it as just as long as I am aiming my adoration at a higher power, God recognizes that as some sort of abstract or generic acceptance of him and says, hey, that's great. Thanks a lot. I accept. Or is worship something more specific than that? That's really what I think we need to wrestle with first. What do you think, James, that generally how do people view worship? So is this like the state of worship? Really, people's perception of what worship is? I think it probably is. I think there's a mix of things. If I had to read into this, which obviously I will, because I think there's a lot that's sort of left to question about these statements. You know, in any survey, you're sort of getting the blank agreement or disagreement with a question or with a statement. And then we have to sort of read in and infer some things from that. And so what I would infer from this is two things. Number one, we've gotten very used to in America having been living in a pluralistic society. And we're uncomfortable with a God who does not accept Christianity, Judaism, Islam, all these other religions as worship. We're comfortable with a God who does not accept the worship of other religions. That may not mean that we think that all of those other religions lead to salvation. Right. May not have a corollary there, although I would be suspicious. Maybe there is a correlation between those two views. I think this is actually a better way of phrasing this statement because it stays away from salvific language and gives us a better insight into how people are actually thinking about their non-Christian neighbors. But if I look at Scripture and I say, what is worship? I would say it is the enactment of humble, submissive, reverent acts toward the triune God that acknowledge his authority and that are rooted in an obedience to his instruction. Now, if I phrase it as specifically as that, it starts to become clear that, you know, Judaism and Islam and these various other areas, they don't worship the triune God. And if worship is defined as sort of reverence to that triune God, then obviously that worship isn't accepted. I would argue that that's probably the biblical teaching on this. I think that we see instances in the Old Testament, for instance, we just went through on one of our other Useful to God episodes. We just talked about Cain and Abel, and you see Abel's sacrifice is accepted. Cain's, God looks down on. And so there is a right way, a way that is appropriate to honor and reverence God in worship. And I have to think that part of that is having a right understanding of who you're worshiping. And so I think that as we look at this question, it's a little concerning that 56 percent of people would agree that God accepts worship from all religions because it assumes that people of all religions are sort of aiming their worship at the same God. And I think that that is probably a little off. Yeah, well, and if you think about it and you think about the Old Testament and you think about how people were worshiping, there was worship that was detestable to God in the Old Testament. I'm not saying that other people's worship is detestable to God. But when you look at it and you look at the history and you look at the biblical history of it, then all worship cannot be aimed towards the same God. Right. I mean, you may, and I appreciate you may not want to say that it's all detestable to God. I will. I think that at the end of the day, if you if you really think about this, if you were to replace God accepts worship of all idols. Right. You know, there there's a sense in which other religions from a biblical standpoint are actually idolatry. Right. They have constructed a God from human hands apart from God's revelation in Scripture and are now worshiping that God that has been either physically constructed, which in some cases, that's actually what happens, or symbolically or conceptually constructed, which is no less a human construction. And so what I think we're really dealing with here is, does God accept idol worship? Right. And then you would even have to go to human sacrifice as an offering. And I guess that's that's a question too, is, is all offering worship. And I know that what we do, whether it's the liturgy, whether we're giving of our tithes and offerings and, you know, money, that is supposed to be an act of worship. That is the way our attitude should be. That is an offering of worship. Right. So is there a difference between offering and I guess this is contingent on what you're doing, what you're offering, right? It really is. I mean, you know, yeah, I mean, we.

We exchange money for a lot of different things, right? Right. And so that sort of transactional exchange, when I pay for groceries at the grocery store, that is not worship. That's not a giving away of money to something. Well, you're buying something, yeah. Right. I'm just purchasing something that's the normal transactional relationship. Right. But if I were to go to a Muslim church and give an offering to support the propagation of Muslim beliefs, that, I think, constitutes an act of worship. And so, you know, we know as Christians, we believe as Christians, we know as Christians, the reality is, I think we have to be really careful with that language. What I don't want to present here is this. Christianity is not an opinion. While it's often phrased as an opinion, it's not an opinion. Christianity is reality. And so when we're speaking about these things, there is reality and there is illusion. That's really all there is. And so when we're thinking about reality, we can either support reality or we can support illusion. And I think that in this question, what I'm seeing is when God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, first, it's a little disconcerting to see those three lumped together. I understand why they're lumped together. They usually constitute what would be commonly referred to as like the Abrahamic religions, right? All of them reference Abraham and sort of come from that general vicinity. But even Judaism at this point does not accept Christ. And so the God they worship is not a triune God. They've rejected Jesus. And so if we take John 14, 6 at its face value, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. It's difficult to understand how even Jews standing at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, as sincere and devoted as they are in hoping that God will come back and reestablish the kingdom of Israel, reestablish, you know, send a Messiah. It, you know, we don't want to negate their authenticity. I think they truly believe that. Right. It doesn't mean that that truly believing it makes it true. And so what we have is we want to be respectful of other religions, but at the end of the day, no, I don't think God accepts false worship. They're giving their lives away. And I think this goes back to something, you know, very simple. Deuteronomy 6, 4, and 5. Right. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord alone. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, which I would say is, you know, that strength there, it's the Hebrew word meod. And so when we look at it in Genesis, the creation narrative, when God created the world and he's done with everything and he looks back on it and he says, this is very good. Meod is very. It's muchness, right? It's sort of like beyond good. Right. It's sort of what he's saying. So at the end of Deuteronomy 6, 5, it's your muchness, your variness, your meod. Right. Everything you are and have is to be dedicated to the Lord. Well, to dedicate it to the Lord, you sort of have to know who that is. And so within the limited range of revelation that the Jews were given in the Old Testament, I think they were giving worship. They were revering the God that they knew. Right. But once we get into the New Testament, there is God revealed in Jesus Christ. There is God received in the Holy Spirit. And so now what worship is, is not revering what you thought you knew. It's recognizing the God you've been worshiping the whole time. And so I think even with Judaism, we're on really shaky ground if we say, no, God accepts the worship of Judaism. I don't think that's true. Right. I think the rejection of Christ is rejection of God. And thus you have no conduit for worship. You have no context for it, because if God now is God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, you're not recognizing him as such. And that is part of what it means to give reverence to and obey the instruction of the triune God. I wonder how that goes over. And does it matter? Right. Because what you're doing is that you're saying, if you're a follower of Jesus Christ and you believe in Jesus Christ and you believe that he is who he said he was and you believe that he rose from the dead, that was the sacrifice that we are saved by. If you reject that, then that cheapens what Jesus did at the cross. Yeah. And I think the real crux of the issue, you know, aside from the identity of Christ, which is a real crux. Right. But here's what I'd say. I think that especially in America, and this is U.S. Christians that are being U.S. evangelicals who are being surveyed in the State of Theology report. Right. And so I think particularly in the United States, we have been we've committed to respecting the religion of others. We've committed to respecting that Muslims can be Muslims, that Jews can be Jews, that Christians can be Christians, and all the different sects and species of different religious belief. We've committed to respecting. I think there's a danger, though, in committed to respecting that, that we somehow think that we have to make those religious convictions align with reality in a way that they don't. We're going to break right there and then we'll be right back after these messages. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed with inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty? More families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up and many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text guide to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text guide to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. This is Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological conversations, Thinking Christian offers a mix of interviews and discussions that highlight the ways God is working in the lives of his people and question the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that keep the church from conforming more closely to the image of Christ. I recognize that God does not want me to coerce these people into being Christians. There's no way to force them into that, right? There's no way to—there's a great Adam Sandler skit on Saturday Night Live. This is like a perfect example. Just follow me for a second. He's pretending to run this tour company in Italy. And about, you know, midway through, he says, listen, I just want to give a disclaimer, right? If you're sad in America, you're probably gonna still be sad in Italy. Right? He says, here's what we can do. We can take you on a hike. What we can't do is make you into someone who loves hiking. Right? And so he's got this dichotomy. And I think that's very much how we need to think about religion. Right? We can, you know—our job is not to force people to become Christians. Right? You can't force someone into becoming someone who loves hiking. Right? Right. Take them on a hike, but I can't force them to love hiking. Yep. And I think that, you know, if we, in America, when we think about that respect, we either respond to then this type of a question, God accepts the worship of all religions. We accept that, or we respond to that in this way. We either say, well, if I say he doesn't, that sort of slights everybody else. And that's gonna make them feel bad. And that sort of isn't particularly respectful. But I think that that's actually the least compassionate answer. And so what I would argue is that if we were to say, no, we don't agree that God accepts the worship of all religions, that is not to disrespect all religions, but to refocus us on our Christian mission of making disciples of all nations, of saving people from an idolatrous existence, of sharing the gospel with them. It has nothing to do with, you know, sort of the weird Christian nationalist stuff or let's make everybody Christian just by name or whatever. Like, none of that. Sheer evangelism and discipleship. Just helping people understand who God is and hoping and praying that they convert to Christianity, that they truly have a life-saving relationship.

I think when we say, no, God accepts the worship of our religions, I think we're discounting our mission as the church to bring these people into all truth. And it, I think, blunts our compassion, really, because there's no longer any reason for us to be particularly compassionate because, after all, God is accepting their worship, too. Maybe there's more that I don't know. Maybe He's gonna do more than I think, so why should I try to convert them? That's sort of my concern with this type of question and the answer. You know, 56% agreeing with this is a little bit scary because it does suggest that people are adopting sort of a live-and-let-live attitude, which I think is a little bit more American and a little bit less Christian. Yeah, and then, as you have said many, many times, you know, as far as discipleship, that cheapens discipleship as well. How can you be a disciple and then go along with that same thing? It really is the same thing, like we were talking before. But discipleship, there's no reason to disciple people if they're always on the right track or they're worshiping the same God, right? Yeah, it's a very strange sort of... I think, you know, the various things that we can infer from this statement are on a range of... There's a spectrum of problems related to those who agree with this statement. Are they saying that God accepts the worship of all religions and thus accepts all those from all religions? That's a whole separate issue, right? If you're accepting the worship, does that mean you're just, you're really happy that all these lost people are worshiping something? Right, right, yeah. And I just don't... I'm not sure I see God, you know, being particularly pleased with that, right? Like, and again, I think that maybe sometimes we're glamorizing other religions, right? We tend to distinguish between world religions and cults. And there's a real distinction between those, right? I don't want to, I don't mean to collapse the two. But the reality is, you know, the basic idea of worshiping something is pursuing it with a gusto, right? That encompasses a, if not all, of your life, a large majority of your life. And so if we were to substitute anything in there except for all religions, right? You could say this about addiction. God accepts the worship of alcohol. God accepts the worship of pornography. God accepts the worship of, you know, illegal drugs. No, he doesn't. These are problematic human conditions. These are things that we give ourselves to, that we give our attention to, that we give ourselves over to, to pursuing. We put energy into them, right? We dedicate ourselves to finding them, like those kinds of ideas. That's what worship entails. And so if we substituted anything of those in here, I think we'd get completely different answers. But because it's religions, we tend to view religion as something that has general utility. Religion, in other words, teaches morals and someone who worships a fairly sanitary, relatively nonviolent, generally wholesome God. Surely God accepts that worship. And I'm just not sure that's the case because all of those adjectives fall short of holiness. We serve a holy God. We serve a God who is set apart. And it's difficult for me to believe that a God who is set apart is going to be particularly happy having, you know, a mistaken identity. Right. Well, you know, and it gets to, like when we were talking about the separation of church and state, when we looked at that. And you look at, you said something, and it really made a lot of sense to me. There is a difference between the sacred and the secular. Yeah. And, you know, it's as simple as that. As, you know, when you look at separation and then you look at what holy means, right? Yeah. Holy is actually what that separation is. That's right. It's set apart. Yeah. And that's not to say, well, we're, it's divide and conquer. It's not, that's not, that's not the holy thing. Yeah. I think, you know, at the end of the day, you know, we have adopted this impression that the church is a voluntary society. Right? Like, it's sort of like joining Sam's Club or Costco, right? We buy in for our membership and then we can cancel at any time. Yeah, if somebody hugs me. Right. If somebody hugs me at Costco, I'm gonna sock them one. But I mean, that is, hey, brother. That's generally the idea that we have of the church, right? It's a voluntary association. And in part, that's because we tend to view, even as Christians, we tend to view, I think, Christianity as an opinion. Yeah. It's our personal opinion. But the reality is the church is not a voluntary society. We're called into this. Right? We're drawn into it. And I don't want to get into the whole Calvinist-Arminian stuff, right? But just if we think about the Bible verses that were, you know, 1 Peter talks about this. Paul's writings have this all over the place. Christians are called into this. Right? We aren't, we don't choose it. Right. It's not like, oh yeah, no, I know, I know about Jesus. I know he raised from the dead. I know, I know all that. I'm just opting out for the moment. I'm good. Right? It's sort of like, no, the church is constituted by something other than our volition. Right. And so, even if we view it from that angle and we take a step back and we say, well, does God accept the worship of non-Christian religions? No. God has called the people apart. He separated us from everyone else to give him worship, to give him glory. And these other people are not there. They're not doing that. It's part of what distinguishes us. And so to collapse, you know, other religions into that, I think is a real problem. It suggests things about the church that simply are not true. The church is a distinct entity in and of itself. And in order for it to be a distinct entity, it does things that are distinct as part of its nature. And so, even though we call what we do worship and what other religions do as worship, they are fundamentally different things. And they're aimed at fundamentally different characters. The God that Islam worships is Allah. I don't know that God. I have no relationship to him whatsoever. I know his name, Allah. Outside of that, I know nothing about Islam. Truly. Like, nothing. Right? Judaism is a little harder to distinguish because you've got the Hebrew Bible. Right? But the real crux of it is Jesus Christ. I mean, Jesus is the stumbling block. And so, we don't... I don't think we get to preserve the, you know, the Jewish people as worshiping the same God as we do, given that the New Testament talks about Jesus as the stumbling block. And so, we've got to be really clear about this. I think it goes to our identity as much as it goes to the lostness of these other religions. At the end of the day, the church is fundamentally distinct, and we do distinctive things by nature of the fact that we have a relationship with a distinctive God. That's sort of where it sits for me. So, this one is really deeply concerning because it is, like I said, it's, you know, 56% of U.S. evangelical Christians. Right? That's a crazy number, man. It really is. You know. It doesn't mean that 56% of people in your church feel this way. Right? But 56% of people surveyed, which is...

not trivial, agreed with that statement. There's either confusion about it or actual belief in it. Either one, I think, are problematic. Stick around, we're coming back. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide, or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. This is Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological conversations, Thinking Christian offers a mix of interviews and discussions that highlight the ways God is working in the lives of his people and question the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that keep the church from conforming more closely to the image of Christ. How much do you think that, as we have seen in political circles, how much do you think that is because, you know, when you look at like 9-11 and you think about those times where these are very divisive times from a religious standpoint because of political and terrorist acts that happened, how much do you think that is the perception of these 56% of evangelicals that because of political correctness with the whole Hamas and Israel, how much do you think that is a political thing that people have said, you know, we have to be politically correct here because otherwise we get labeled as something else? You know, I don't know. It's difficult to know because this is an anonymous survey. And so my concern, I would actually be happier in a lot of ways if people felt pressured into answering this way. Right, right. Right. I think the trouble is that it's an anonymous survey. Nobody's going to know that you answered one way or the other. Right. Ever. I mean, it's going to be reported just like it is right now on the website. We don't know who these 56% were that were responding. We just know that they responded. Who are you calling now? Yeah. And so I think the more troubling idea is that, you know, given the things that you reference, 9-11 and the various difficulties we've had with terrorists and now with Hamas and all that kind of good stuff, I think my more, the more pressing concern very much is, do people actually believe this? In other words, respect has turned, or respect intolerance, has turned into acceptance. Right. And what I mean by acceptance is not, you know, I could go to a dinner party with you without, you know, berating you in the middle of it, right? I don't mean that. What I mean is, have we gotten to a point where we bought into this idea that Christianity and that Christianity, the Christian doctrines that portray God, are actually just Christian clothing that has been put on something that is more real than actually the Christian God? In other words, there's a reality out there that we dress in Christian garb, but that reality can also be dressed in Jewish garb or Muslim garb or Hindu garb or, you know, whatever. And I think that, to me, is the bigger danger. In other words, are we really seeing here people saying there are multiple paths to God? That's certainly not what the question says or the statement says. But that would be my bigger concern because I don't see how people would feel pressured to answer a particular way on this question, given that it's anonymous. But I don't know because, I mean, if you look at, I wonder how many people, let's say, in recent years, you saw people change their minds on gay marriage. You heard that the majority of people, especially evangelical Christians, were not for gay marriage, right? Sure. And then there was this certain, there was about a five-year time period, maybe even faster than that, where there seemed like people started changing their minds. Whether that was anonymous or whether that was, you know, suddenly the polls changed, right? What was that? Was it just that we were conditioned? We were, there was like this sandpaper on those, these are deeply held beliefs, and that perception says, well, I, even if it's anonymous, I don't want to be known as being somebody who's intolerant, right? Yeah, so I'd say two things. Number one, it's probably a real complex issue. I mean, it's probably a whole show in itself, right? Because what I would start pointing to are things that desensitize us to and sort of begin to erode our convictions about those issues, right? So I know a lot of, know a lot of gay people. I trained a lot of gay people when I was a personal trainer. It's harder to condemn someone when they're standing right in front of you and you actually know them, right? It's much easier to condemn an issue. Right, but yeah, and that's, I don't know if condemnation was, but it was actually perceived as that, right? Yeah, so I'll, let me rephrase it because I think you're right. Condemnation language probably isn't the right language, but I think it's harder to tell the truth to someone that you know and like, right? It would have been very difficult, I think, for me to talk to some of the clients that I developed relationships over multiple years about my convictions regarding same-sex practices. That would have been really difficult. Yeah. But to speak about it in the abstract, right, with no particular referent, fairly simple. And so what I think partly, I say that to say this, in part what I think happened in the United States with regard to something like gay marriage was that it became mainstream, and in becoming mainstream, it became sympathetic, and in becoming sympathetic, people had someone to identify with and to say, these are human beings just like we are. Now, there's many things about that that I think are good. Yeah, I agree too. You know, one of the things that I was surprised at when we were, Kim and I were going through our foster care training, there's a whole unit on transgenderism. And one of the things they teach in there is that there's a much higher percentage of transgender youth who end up homeless because their parents kick them out of the house. Right. Now, I don't care what your feelings are about transgenderism, any of you out there, right? You can be for it, you can be against it, you can be whatever. But I think everybody should be able to agree that young teens being kicked out on the street and becoming homeless is not a good thing. Right, I agree, yeah. And so you sit back and you say, yeah, that's where, that's what I mean when I say there's a certain degree of tolerance that I think we all need to have for these things, right? And so that's the part that I think would be really good, is if we could just sit back and say, I deeply disagree with the decisions you're making for your life. I deeply disagree with the things that you're thinking. You know, I can deeply disagree with those things and still not put you out on the street to suffer. Right. Like, that's just patently wrong in my mind. And so I think that there's, my point is, there's a familiarity that I think allows for

and then I think there's a familiarity that drives beyond tolerance to acceptance. And I think that tolerance was probably within the range of what we needed as a society within the United States, right? And that tolerance would have included Christian conviction regarding various lifestyle choices. In other words, I can speak against a lifestyle choice without that being viewed as hatred. I just don't see that that's the right move for us to make. Yes, be loving, right? Yes, be tolerant, right? I don't think there's any reason for us to be burning people at the stake or even condemning people publicly. I don't find those things to be particularly palatable to me as a Christian. But at the same time, these are lost people. And so, what are we really trying to do with them? Well, we're not trying to change them morally. That's not our job. Our job is to proclaim the gospel to them. And so, when we think about a statement like this, which is, you know, God accepts the worship of all religions. I see us abdicating that central duty that we are supposed to exercise. If we are to proclaim the gospel to all people, and we're willing to say, no, God accepts your worship. Don't worry about it. I don't know where we're at as a church. And that is, to me, the scariest part of this. Well, and then if you look at it, and, you know, we're going to do some shows about the whole Christian nationalism type of thing. You kind of say, wait a minute. Maybe that part of the perception, maybe that's part of the erosion, is that people are saying, I don't want to be like them. I don't want to be looking as a hater or all of those kind of things. And, you know, hatred is really the optimum word there because, unfortunately, tolerance, which I think we do need tolerance in the very basic term of tolerate rating others. But that doesn't mean you say, boy, I'm going to endorse their God as well and say that their God is equal to our God. You know, and that's what I think. And then you have to say, too, is that, is Christian nationalism a religion in itself, too? Because what you're saying is that they worship the country. You know, they're going to sing, I'm proud to be an American before they sing holy, holy, holy, right? And it's tough to argue a convergence of these ideas, right? So I don't want to present the idea that these two are absolutely linked together, right? But what I would say is if I were a betting man, right, and I were, you know, reading the tea leaves and putting some of these things together, what I see is the preclusion of the establishment of a state religion and the provision of free exercise keeps the government from authorizing any particular religious establishment as the state establishment of the United States. And so what you have is, for instance, you know, you had this in early colonial America. The federal government didn't have the same level of power that it has right now. And so up to even, you know, into the 1817, 1820s, maybe even eking closer to the 1850s, certain states within the United States had state-established churches. So the famous Jefferson letter to the Danbury churches, right, or the Danbury Baptists, that was a response to a letter that the Danbury Baptists had written to Thomas Jefferson from a context in which the Baptists were trying to be a church within a state, Connecticut, that had a state-established church. The Congregationalists were the state-established church of Connecticut. And so you take a look at that, right, and you say, okay, we've gotten past all that, right? There aren't any more state-established churches. But that First Amendment does not preclude the United States from creating a civil religion. In other words, it precludes it from establishing any existing religious establishment, but it does not preclude it from being a religion unto itself. And I think that's largely what we're seeing right now. We're seeing a rise of civil religion, and we're seeing a definition, a redefining of sacred and profane. And so if we bring it down to brass tacks, there's a lot of things that are involved in defining religion, right? So this is not a sociology of religion discussion. But if you just bring it down to brass tacks and you think, what do religions do? Right. Well, in part, what they do, one of their main functions is to distinguish between sacred and profane. They create distinctions. And I think that in a large part, that's what we're wrestling with here. I think it's becoming profane to say that another religion does not have access to God. I think it's becoming profane to say that, you know, certain perspectives are inappropriate or sinful or that God rejects them. And I think it's becoming sacred to accept all people. Yeah. And so what you end up with is this sort of unholy merger of government and spirituality or government and sort of pseudo-theology that creates problems like I think what we could be seeing here in this survey, where 56 percent agree that God accepts all worship from all religions. It's a very big problem, right? Just sitting as this rock. And I have a feeling that there's, you know, the complexity of sorting this out is far beyond what we're going to deal with today. But I will say, I think civil religion has a lot to do with it. I think lack of discipleship in the church obviously has something to do with it. And I think that our context in an environment of privilege and provision, and I know privilege gets used a lot, right? So I'm not using it in terms like white privilege or anything like that. But if we look at the difference between American Christians and Christians all over the world, we got it pretty good. Yeah, we're not the persecuted church. Right. We get paper cuts, not persecution. And so, like, we're, you know, that's what I mean by privilege. We have we have a lot of prosperity. We have a lot of general well-being in comparison to a lot of the rest of the church. And to some degree, that prosperity has been attributed to our system of government as opposed to our God. And so now these statements begin, I think, to make more and more sense because our loyalties are subtly shifting away from our God to our government. That's my big concern. I don't know that it's that simple, but that is my big concern. Well, I'm glad that you did. You simplified it because it is, it's a big issue. I know I just went down a couple of rabbit holes and I apologize for that. But not at all. These were, these are the kind of conversations where you don't hear very often because people are afraid to talk openly about this and have a civil conversation about it because it quickly becomes something other than civil. Yeah. Yeah. It really does. And I think that's, that is unfortunate because these are the things, if, if Christianity cannot distinguish itself from other religions, even just on one point, like, yeah, we worship just like everybody else and we worship basically the same God as everybody else and God accepts all our worship. And it's like, so are you telling me that I should go to a, you know, a mosque on Sunday to share in their worships and God accepts it as well? The downstream effects of it, I don't think people are thinking about when they're answering this question.

When they're agreeing with it, I don't think they're getting what they're really saying. And so that's where I have trouble with this. And I do think it needs to just be a cordial conversation. You know, I don't really believe in shouting people down or even getting angry or defensive, but I do think that we need to hold our boundaries. I think there have to be distinctives, and if we can't have those distinctives, we are not really Christian anymore. The church is something, right? And it's something not of our making. We're supposed to stay within that. And when we don't, we're just, we're distorting what it is. That's not what we're supposed to be doing. So yeah, that's, you know, this, if you haven't looked at the state of theology report, I'd encourage you to do so. You can find it at thestateoftheology.com and you pull up a nice, they've got a great PDF where it summarizes a lot of these findings. There's a few of the other questions that we'll be addressing on other episodes of Thinking Christian, but you can find it again at thestateoftheology.com. So I'd encourage you to check it out and we'll welcome you back next time on Thinking Christian when we address another few of these different statements that were put out in the theology report and kind of dive into what I'm thinking about them, how we, how we should process them as Christians. And yeah, looking forward to those conversations. So thanks a lot for being here. Thanks Richard for the interaction. Thank you James. I want to take just a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. Christians need to stop listening to the world and start listening to God so that thinking Christian becomes as natural as breathing. Looking for ways to stay positive? Brighten your day with the free Story Behind podcast. Hear weekly short stories that showcase true joy, love, and hope. Listen now at lifeaudio.com or by searching for Story Behind wherever you get your podcasts.