The illusions and assumptions of secularism are held with varying degrees of emotional intensity and self-awareness by the secularists. It would be a mistake to assume that if you have seen one secularist, you have seen them all. Although all secularists, by definition, share a common set of operating assumptions grounded in the illusions of mastery and self-sufficiency, these assumptions are manifested in a variety of patterns. To help give an understanding of some of this variety, especially as it touches on varying patterns of response to the gospel message, I have divided the secular world into three categories: the intellectual secularist, the self-fulfillment secularist, and the despairing secularist.

 A Profile of the Intellectual Secularist

     Of the three categories, the intellectual secularist is the one most likely to possess a well-reasoned, internally consistent world view. His distinguishing presuppositions include:

     (1) God is non-existent or irrelevant to matters of this life. Instead, the scientific method and our five senses are the only reliable standards for determining matters of truth and judging the reliability of information. As my former sociology professor used to say, "If I cannot measure it, I'm not interested."

    (2) Belief in God, Christ and the Bible are inconsistent with a "scientific" world view; therefore, "intelligent" people are not concerned with spiritual matters. The gospel and Christianity are consigned to the scrapheap of history. Edmond P. Leach, professor of anthropology at Cambridge University, is an articulate spokesman for this position. He says, "Our idea of God is a product of history. What I now believe about the supernatural derived from what I was taught by my parents, and what they taught me was derived from what they were taught, and so on. But such beliefs are justified by faith alone, never by reason and the true believer is expected to go on reaffirming his faith in the same verbal formula even if the passage of history and the growth of the scientific knowledge should have turned the words into plain non-sense."1

    Stanford University professor Michael Novak writes, "It is taken for granted in most intellectual circles that an intelligent person does not believe in God, and certainly not in any institutional religion." Novak goes on to state, "Indifference to religion is the ordinary mark of the serious intellectual."2 He later concludes, "Indeed, the thesis of the intellectual life in America is that there is no God.3 The intellectual secularist has reversed the biblical formula. To him, it is the wise man, not the fool, who says in his heart there is no God (Psalm 53:1).

     (3) Man is the apex of an impersonal evolutionary process and is therefore ultimately accountable to no one in matters of personal values, morality and behavior. Man is seen as a highly sophisticated, technological animal. He is, in the words of French theologian Tiellhard de Chardin, "the evolutionary process becoming aware of itself." As such, he is answerable to no one, especially God.

     The secular person is at home in such a universe, free to pursue the illusions of mastery and self-sufficiency. As Albert Camus states, "The universe, from now on without a master, seems to him neither sterile nor futile. The struggle toward the summit itself is enough to free the heart of man."4 As Timothy Leary reasons, "Trust the evolutionary process. It's all going to work out all right."5

 The Intellectual Secularist and the Gospel

     This type of secularist poses a unique set of challenges to the evangelist. His position will be defended rigorously from a materialistic, naturalistic, pseudo-intellectual framework that is internally consistent and at least partially satisfying to him. We need to realize that as communicators of the supernatural message of the gospel, we are, in a sense, coming as a visitor from another world. Here are some helpful points that will enable you to communicate confidently to this type of secularist.

     (1) The Christian communicator must be prepared to deal with the contention that the gospel is irrelevent to the human condition. This response is a logical extension of the secular presuppositions about God and man. Any thoughts of God as creator, redeemer, judge and lawgiver are nonsense to the intellectual secularist given his view of man as a mere product of the evolutionary process. The problem of sin and its effect on his eternal destiny is irrelevant, since he acknowledges no eternity to deal with and no objective standard from which to determine sin. Here we see that one's view of human nature is inseparable from his view of the relevance of the gospel.

     We must acknowledge that man's likeness to God points to his capacity and need for redemption. Jesus' call to repent and enter the kingdom of God presupposes that He viewed all men as sinners, helpless to remedy their own situation, responsible before God and in need of conversion. It also implies that He saw men as valuable and worth redeeming for the purpose of spending an eternity with Him.

     (2) The Christian communicator must guard against the fear of intimidation. It would be easy to labor under an intellectual inferiority complex as he contemplates talking to the intellectual secularist.

     In my experience, I have found that the intellectual secularist's antagonism toward the gospel is not grounded in a well-thought-through response to the biblical data. I first realized this as I attempted to share the gospel with my college history professor who had been openly hostile toward Christianity in his classroom lectures. In fear and trembling I made an appointment to discuss the gospel with him. To my surprise, and relief, I found that the last time he had read the Bible was in the eighth grade. His knowledge of Christianity had been picked up in barroom discussions and fraternity bull sessions. His views on the gospel were not grounded in a vigorous intellectual analysis of the content and implications of the gospel. They were simply the result of his ignorance of the spiritual realm.

     The point is that the Christian communicator need not back away from the intellectual secularist for fear of being "eaten alive" in a scholarly argument. Even though an intellectual secularist may be brilliant by the world's standards, he may be surprisingly uninformed on matters of the gospel's relevance and power. Expertise in an area of intellectual pursuit does not ensure even a modest amount of insight into spiritual truth.

     It is also important to consider that the antagonism of the intellectual secularist toward the gospel may be grounded in his desire to maintain his autonomy in matters of personal behavior. The concerns of the intellect may be nothing more than a smoke screen for issues of the will and morality. This is not to say that all intellectual questions are a smoke screen for moral issues, but one must consider this possibility as he seeks to communicate the gospel confidently to these men and women.

     The famous British novelist and critic of Christianity Aldous Huxley was candid about his use of intellectualism as a smoke screen to cover the morality issue raised by a biblical perspective on man and God. "I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption....For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from...a certain system of morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom."6

     This issue of the "will not to believe" was made apparent to me after having a debate with two college professors on the relevance of religion to the 20th-century world. One man was an atheist political science professor. As we talked, both during and after the debate, it became apparent to me that he had never dealt seriously with the claims of Christ. He told me that he could not intellectually justify pursuing something that he could not prove. I then asked him if he would be interested even if someone could convince him beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesus was raised from the dead and that He was the Son of God.

     The professor quickly responded, "No, even if I could be shown that Jesus was raised from the dead and that He was the Son of God, I wouldn't be interested." I asked him why this was so, and he said, "I guess I just don't care to know." Even for this obviously brilliant man, the issue came down to a matter of his will. It was not that he could not believe, but that he would not believe.

     I had a similar experience with a sociology professor after I spoke in his classroom on the Christian perspective of love, sex and marriage. As we ate lunch together the next day, I asked him if he had ever considered the claims of Jesus Christ. He said, "Yes, partially, but I don't think I want to know any more for moral reasons. You see, I've been recently divorced and now am living with another woman. I'm just not open to talking about those things now."

     By these examples, I do not mean to assert that every intellectual secularist has moral problems, but rather that we should not assume that their hostility to the gospel is due to a well-reasoned intellectual response. It may come down to a matter of the person's moral disposition to pursue spiritual truth.

 The Self-fulfillment Secularist

     The self-fulfillment secularist is less likely than the intellectual secularist to have an intellectually grounded, internally consistent philosophy of life. This person is more or less the "beneficiary" of the intellectual secularist's success at imposing his world view and its operating assumptions on 20th-century western culture. He is a child of a culture that has systematically laid a foundation for, and catered to, those who desired to interpret their lives from a purely materialistic perspective which holds that any meaning, purpose or ultimate fulfillment is to be found in the worship and service of the finite.

     Although man is not seen in the stark evolutionary terms of the intellectual secularist, he is seen as a one-dimensional consumer, a "need machine" that exists for the opportunity to have needs met. The self-fulfillment seeker is the person who made Pulling Your Own Strings, Winning Through Intimidation and Looking Out for Number One best sellers. He is the market for the flood of self-help books lining the supermarket checkout counters.

    Definitions of what it means to be self-fulfilled vary greatly. Francis Schaeffer has suggested that two of the operating principles of the self-fulfillment secularist are the pursuit of personal peace and affluence. Personal peace is defined as "just to be left alone, not to be troubled by the trouble of other people, whether across the world or across the city – to live one's life with minimal possibilities of being personally disturbed. Personal peace means wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime, regardless of what the result will be in the lifetime of my children and grandchildren." Affluence is defined as "an overwhelming and ever-increasing prosperity – life made up of things, things and more things – a success judged by an ever higher level of material abundance."7

     Daniel Yankelovich, in his book New Rules, estimates that over 80 percent of the American public has bought into this idea of "need fulfillment being the stuff of life" philosophy.8 Seventeen percent are what he terms "hard core" self-fulfillment seekers. To them, needs are seen as sacred objects that one has a "moral obligation to fulfill." Yankelovich goes on to say, "The majority of Americans gladly echo the classic retort of Samual Gompers, founder of American organized labor, who, when asked the objective of the labor movement, replied with a single word, 'more.' For the overwhelming majority of All Americans, an important part of living the good life simply means 'more.’ ”9

     The self-fulfillment seeker wants to control and dominate, as does the intellectual secularist, but his sphere of control is directed primarily at his immediate surroundings and personal life. Questions of eternal destiny and life's true meaning are bothersome sidetracks to his goal of "getting ahead." Pleasure, position, power and possessions are some of his objective criteria for determining the meaning of life.

     We may find this person quite indifferent to spiritual issues because of his preoccupation with the needs of the here and now. Some may be very happy with their lives as they see a certain degree of success in meeting their goals. This spurs them on to an even greater commitment to their philosophy of life.

 The Hopeless Secularist

     Belonging to the same family, but on the other side of the spectrum, is the hopeless secularist. This person is in a tragic situation. He has inherited the assumptions and ramifications of secularism without laboring under the illusion of any of its false hopes.

     To him, science and technology hold no hope of making life better. The aggressive pursuit of self-fulfillment holds no promise of personal satisfaction. This person is usually painfully aware of his finiteness and lack of answers to his most basic needs and questions. He may even wonder what the questions are at times. Life has overwhelmed him. Difficult circumstances or his own despair make it impossible for him to see beyond his own next unfulfilled need: an empty dinner table, loneliness, alienation, fear of death, lack of personal worth, etc.

     Thus, the hopeless secularist is unable to find meaning or fulfillment in the pursuit of things, relationships or a vague hope for the future. He faces the stark realities of the human condition, and in that sense his is the most intellectually honest of the secular family. But his honest appraisal of life has left him in a state of personal despair.

     Woody Allen has accurately described the plight of the hopeless secularist. In an article in Esquire, Allen comments on the life of those who are intellectually honest about the human condition but who, as he, had abandoned the "religious answers." Allen divided their existence into two categories: the "horrible" and the "miserable." "Life is a concentration camp" and "people don't know why they are here, where they are going or when they are going to die." The hopeless secularist has run out of diversions, so there is nothing left to divert his attention from the fact that life in a "universe without a master" is indeed meaningless. In Allen's words, it "is absolutely stupefying in its terror and it renders anyone's accomplishments meaningless."10 The secularist has been victimized by his own assumptions and tragically fails to trace the despair of this world view to the fact that God has been left out. As atheist Bertrand Russell stated, "Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."11 He learned the "secret of secularism", that "there is no end to hiding from the ultimate end of life, which is death," and that on "humanistic [secular] assumptions life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does is a deceit."12

 The Christian's Response to the Secularist

     We have already looked at some things to consider in the unique case of the intellectual secularist. Now let us pursue some issues certain to be raised as we confront the rest of the secularist family with the gospel.

     (1) Don't generalize. Even though all secularists share in the assumption of the irrelevancy of God, are blind to the finiteness of the finite and see morality as relative, do not be too quick to generalize. While all secularists share in the same root problem, their lostness and separation from God are manifested in a myriad of symptoms. These symptoms range from a blatant denial of God and an arrogant confidence in man's self-sufficiency, to a selfish preoccupation with temporal pursuits, to outright despair. The secular person runs the gamut from pessimism to presumption. One may consider himself a slave of the grim task of just getting by in a hostile world, a fleeting whimper in an impersonal cosmic drama; another may be a total optimist, bullish on his own personal future. He may be a hedonist, or pragmatist, fully devoted to humanity's future, or selfishly in pursuit of "actualizing" his own potential. He may have bold hope in the wrong object or may have abandoned any hope at all.

     (2) Recognize secularisms weaknesses. It makes sense that if the secularist philosophy posits an unreal world in all of its  dimensions, there will be glaring inconsistencies and weaknesses in the secularist's attempt to assess life's meaning and purpose accurately. Wayne McDill observes, "God has so constructed His creation that any concept of reality contrary to the biblical view will ultimately find itself moving farther and farther away from practical truth, from the way things really are."13

     Secular man has, in a very real sense, profaned reality by his pretensions of mastery and self-sufficiency. It is a sad irony that secularism, desiring to exalt man by pronouncing him free from the "bonds" of his creature status, actually denigrates him. On the other hand, Christianity, which asserts that true freedom is found only in man's affirmation of his creature status – and is thus rejected by the secularist as denigrating – actually exalts man. As C. S. Lewis commented, "In modern, that is, in evolutionary thought, man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this [medievel thought] he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.”14

     The simple truth is that if man is a mere product of an impersonal evolutionary process, and if "all characteristics of human nature and behavior are capable of explanation simply in terms of the normal operation of the laws of physics in inanimate chemical matter,”15 then man is nothing more than a highly sophisticated, technological animal. He might be at the top of the heap, but a heap of what? "When man bears the price tag of matter only, human life is dirt cheap. Why not regard man as worthless if he is simply a soulless organism brought into existence by the same forces that produce rust on a tin roof and fungus on a rock?”16

    As Christians, we must recognize that secularism offers no legitimate basis for human dignity and is consequently bankrupt in terms of bringing lasting, satisfying answers to man's quest for significance, meaning and fulfillment. Man's search for these precious commodities east of Eden can end only in a denial of his own humanity. Apart from Jesus Christ, secular man loses now and in eternity. He is doomed to live in a world of illusion in this life and faces the horrifying prospect of eternal judgment in the life to come.

    (3) Be sensitive. We must approach the secularist with empathy and insight into his attitudes and operating assumptions. We must have the wisdom to understand his reasons for believing as he does, without falling prey to any of the erroneous assumptions that he holds. This is a balancing act that will be developed in our lives only through study and practical experience. The challenge is to empathize so as to understand, but to be equipped with the proper biblical data so that we might expose wrong thinking.

     How can we do this? First, we must approach the secular person not as an enemy, but as a fellow human being, created in God's image, whose deepest need in life is to realize that he is meant to be a redeemed child of God.

     Second, we must ask probing questions. Historian Arnold Toynbee posed the ultimate question to the secularist: “Are we accidents that have no meaning in terms of this reality from which, as persons, we are temporarily differentiated? Or are we truants, who have alienated ourselves from the source of our being by a perverse tour de force that we cannot sustain beyond the brief span of a human life's trajectory?"17

     We must ask the secularist to consider whether the vague uneasiness of his heart could be the image of God in him crying for completion. Might not his guilt, or loneliness, or frustration, be a symptom of the deeper problem of his alienation from and rebellion against his Creator? Might his desire for joy, peace, love, hope and life beyond the grave be authentically met only through the forgiveness and restoration found in Jesus Christ? These are the types of questions that will challenge the secular person's assumptions and cause him to ask questions that find their answers only in Jesus Christ.

     We must work to engage the secular person at his point of greatest felt need and trace these symptomatic problems to his real need, which is resolved only in the cross of Christ. We must present the gospel in such away that the secularist realizes that true fulfillment will never be realized apart from renouncing his independence from his Creator and bowing before Him, recognizing Him as Lord. The secular person must realize that his pursuit of the gods of materialism, power, pleasure and success brings a fulfillment that is temporary. Only Jesus Christ can bring lasting satisfaction to the eternity in his heart.

     (4) Be confident. The Christian communicator must be confident in recommending the gospel to the secularist, who needs to understand its clear statement that he is a creature, responsible to his Creator. The gospel must be understood as a clarion call to turn from a life of self-deification and to submit humbly to one's appropriate status as a creature in his Creator's kingdom. The gospel assures the secularist that apart from such a response there is no escape, for one day these self-destructive illusions will be brought to light and judged by God Himself. In short, the Christian communicator must bring the truth of the gospel to bear on the mind and heart of the secularist, convincing him that a life lived by his operating assumptions will result only in self-destruction.

     Although the secularist often will give the impression of being truly self-sufficient, under this thin veneer lies a human being with a God-shaped vacuum in his heart. As Christian communicators, we realize that "the real situation is that man who is made in the image of God is unable, precisely because of those qualities in him which are designated as 'image of God,' to be satisfied with a god who is made in man's image."18 God has left Himself a witness in the heart of every person that bears testimony to the fact that finite things – whether material possessions, relationships, fame or power – can never satisfy an eternal need.

     This unsatisfied longing of the heart, common to all men and women because they are designed in God's image, assures us that the message of the gospel will always be relevant to those who are willing to appraise the human condition honestly. As Reinhold Neibuhr observed, "Faith in Christ could find no lodging place in the human soul, were it not uneasy about the contrast between its true and its present state.”19 Or, as Pascal put it, "For who finds himself unhappy at not being a king, except a deposed king?"20

     Walter Lippman, the columnist and avowed humanist, reconsidered his secularist assumptions in his later years. Once a believer in the ability of science and education to solve all of man's problems, he came to the point of expressing disappointment in their failure to bring about an improvement in the human condition. He wrote, "If ever there was a generation who could have done it, we could have. We meant so well, we tried so hard, we failed so miserably. What the world needs is a different kind of man." Atheist Bertrand Russell conceded, "It is in our hearts that the evil lies, and it is from our hearts that it must be pulled out.”21 As Christians we must boldly suggest to the secularist that this different kind of man is made possible only by the heart-changing power of Jesus Christ.

     The Christian communicator must never lose sight of the fact that the gospel is fallen man's only hope for true meaning and fulfillment. Daniel Bell, professor of social sciences at Harvard, states, "We've gained enormous power over nature via technology, and yet the 20th century is probably the most dreadful period in human history." The writer of this article, reporter Fran Schumer, observed, “A century that has seen the Gulag, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the spread of nuclear arms has caused some who used to champion rationalism and science to humble themselves. Since their secular gods have failed, they are beginning to view more traditional gods with anew curiosity."22 Yes, even the avowed secularist must admit that the secular "gods" have failed miserably. The Christian communicator can therefore boldly, confidently and unapologetically recommend Jesus to all who will listen, the secular person included.