Secularism's Inability to Deal with Shame and Guilt. No Grace

by Aaron Shafovaloff

Secular freedom circumvents guilt and shame. Its gospel: "You're not bad. You shouldn't feel ashamed. Guilt is only exploitative and oppressive. Conviction always comes with condemnation. Free yourself of the shackles of morality." This is desperation: For them freedom from feelings of moral conviction is the only way to escape condemnation.

But these same advocates of secular freedom use public shaming as a mechanism of social change. Ruthlessly. Because hey, "Conviction never comes without condemnation", right? So they condemn. Brutally. There is no true grace or mercy or forgiveness in the religion of secularism. No prisoners. No parole. No restoration. No substitutionary atonement.

These same people suffer from incurable shame and guilt and condemnation. So they suppress and dissociate from it. They drown it out with passion for righteous causes. Progressive activism makes people suppress their own unresolved moral failure. It is a soulish effort to satisfy a yearning to belong to a moral community and have a moral identity. This ends up being very little different from religion, where religiosity is used to mute one's own conscience over personal moral failure, and give a false sense of one's own righteousness.

Christianity is explosively unique here: It faces guilt and shame head-on. Stares it in the face. Yes, we are moral failures. Yes, we are worthy of condemnation -- from God. No one else's condemnation ultimately matters. But we utterly reject the secular assumption of, "Conviction always comes with condemnation." Conviction of the Holy Spirit comes with repentance and restoration and forgiveness and renewal. Conviction and true confession comes with love and security and safety and adoption and hope. We are not righteous. Jesus is righteous. And he loves us.

The brutality of secular public shaming and secular "freedom" from moral restraints is hopeless and hypocritical. It is a false gospel. It has no cross, no savior, no resurrection, no true forgiveness, and no true reconciliation between enemies. It practices what it condemns. It condemns those it claims to rescue. It uses what it claims to have rejected.

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Note:  I received this post from Aaron after I had posted the following meme online which covers similar grounds

from johnpauldickson HT: Sam Allberry

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