During the past three quarters of a century the world has witnessed the rise and breakdown of totalitarian governments and monolithic societies, that is, societies in which all are expected to share in the same ultimate loyalty. These are societies in which there is no room for diversity of conviction.

In this century the “new” trend in the West is the push for Christian values to govern all of a given society, irregardless of who makes up the warp and woof of that state.

I view this development with alarm.

My conviction is that for a person to be his proper self he must live in the presence of genuine options, must be able to exercise choice, must, in a word, be free to enjoy a measure of sovereignty. In order to be fully human, a person must be part of a composite society. This applies to Christian and non-Christian.

Moreover, it is my conviction that the composite society is to a large extent the product (albeit a by-product) of the world-view of authentic Christianity. Authentic Christianity is firmly committed to the idea of nonsameness, to the idea that people are never to be thought of as all being in the same category in the matter of ultimate convictions. Authentic Christianity sees human society as composite, consisting of people of diverse ways of thinking. It does not expect to encounter unanimity in human society; it expects to find some men stumbling at the very same cross in which other men glory.

Totalitarian systems, on the other hand, view all members of a given society as basically unanimous; such systems can thus arise only in a climate in which authentic Christianity has either lapsed or has never been. If this is correct, authentic Christianity is the only viable alternative to totalitarianism.

A word of explanation is necessary expression "authentic Christianity”. By it I mean Christianity that is true to the blueprints laid down in the entire Bible. "Historic Christianity" is not the same as "authentic Christianity"; indeed, "historic Christianity" is often a mixture in which the Christian world-view is mingled with non-Christian systems of thought. As a consequence of such mingling, history is the story of a constant fluctuation between a faith that feeds on compositism and a faith that fights it. As an illustration: consider the obvious isolationism of Europe for over a thousand years, labeled the Dark Ages, and the absolute rule of an entrenched “historical Christian” combine of state and church, centered firmly in the Vatican. Then turn the mind’s eye to early Puritan America, complete with banishments, burnings and politics centering on a Protestant world-view.

Granted, the later was a mere squeak next to the roar of papalism, yet the spirit, the methodology, the heart was still the same. Wrong methods can never justify even the purest of religious intentions, else scaffolds, drownings and death at the fiery stake are perfectly justifiable as purging the “body’ of heretical elements.

Therefore, as I see it, we have much to ponder when we see the resurrection of a society which sees uniformity, lurching about tentatively on theological legs, crying for “historical Christian values” to be recognized (as step one) by composite civilizations. I use the plural, as I do not see Europe and N. America as merely one culture, but as mother and daughter. Each owns a different “theological leg” yet their cries for solidarity, at any cost, to whatever they see as a Christian perspective for society, have always lead to serious trouble for all they live under those skirts.