The Secular Creed

Rebecca McLaughlin, author of the 2020 Christianity Today Book of the Year, Confronting Christianity, just came out with a brilliant little book, The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims.

You’ve seen the yard signs that popped up last year:  “In this house we believe…” followed by a list of claims like “love is love,” “science is real,” “black lives matter,” “no human is illegal,” and “women’s right are human rights.”  Just think of it:  our neigh­bors aren’t shy; they want us to know what’s deeply important to them.  Sounds like they’re trying to start a conversation.

McLaughlin recognizes there’s at least a grain of truth in many of these assertions.  Who can dispute the claim that science is real or that black lives matter?  And yet, these pronouncements carry certain connotations that hover in the shadows of the actual wording.  In The Secular Creed, “we’ll aim to disentangle ideas Christians can and must affirm from ideas Christians cannot and must not embrace” (p. 2).  The book gives a call to discernment.

A recurring theme is that, on the one hand, a truly secular, non-religious world­view provides no basis for human equality or rights (p. 7); from a consistently atheistic perspective, “no lives matter” (pp. 22-23).  On the other hand, the biblical teaching that all peo­ple are made in God’s image and thus have a unique dignity—“This is the soil in which the roots of human equality grow” (p. 8).

Again and again, McLaughlin takes the reader back to Scripture to sift truth from falsehood.  Take the mantra, “love is love”:  only by letting the Bible define love and set the limits for its flourishing can we confront this sloppy slogan and resist the way it’s used to justify acting on any and every desire.  “Loving a person doesn’t mean affirming all that person’s actions” (pp. 58-59).

The Secular Creed is a gritty, honest book written by a thoughtful Christian leader.  Read it, and be challenged … and emboldened!