What is good government?

Primarily a government by good men. Not necessarily deeply religious men, but good men ethically. Men who, as the psalmist says, “speak the truth in their heart,” who “swear to their own hurt and change not,” men who would not “take a reward against the innocent” (Ps. 15).

Where, or how, shall these men be obtained?

The United States is a republic, whose sovereignty, though residing in its citizens, is exercised by their representatives. Therefore, in the last analysis, the men to govern us must come up from among us. The people themselves are the source from which our magistrates, lawmakers and executives must arise.

But can a stream rise higher than its source? If the people are not good can their representatives be good? Can good representatives be chosen in the absence of good people to choose them?

To ask this question is to answer it. Therefore, how are the people to be made and to be kept good? Is there any other way than by religion? Have any of our wise men found any better way?

We talk about education, secular education, as a means to good citizenship, but is it always and necessarily so? …

No, religion only can make good people. And, of course, when I speak of religion, I am not speaking about any kind of religion — Confucianism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, not even Judaism, noble and divine as it is in its origin and its nature. I am speaking about our religion, the religion commonly spoken of as the religion of this country, the Christian religion only.

But what is it that gives value to the Christian religion, and efficacy in the making of good people? It is the Bible with its precepts and commands, its promises and hopes. And it is the personal God who is back of the Bible. The God who holds men accountable for their deeds, and who “will by no means clear the guilty,” though He keeps “mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin” (Exod. 34:7).

I am not dealing in platitudes when I say this, nor speaking merely in the interest of my craft. I am saying that which good men have always said. I am echoing the words of statesmen, of historians, of philosophers, of the great mass of the plain people, who have made our nation what it is.

The foundations of the United States were laid by the Pilgrim Fathers, and they were Bible readers. The men and women who transplanted the Pilgrim seed to the middle west were Bible readers. Their forbears dared the Atlantic, impelled by nobler motives than the instinct for trade, and in a like spirit many a “prairie schooner,” as it was called, carried the Bible in it side by side with the rifle and the plow….

Abraham Lincoln fed the springs of his life with six books only, and the first of these was the Bible. And no President has sat in the White House since his day, who has not at one time or another, borne testimony to the value of the Bible both in his own life and that of the nation over which the people called him to preside.

But Modernism, of which I speak, is opposed to the Bible. That is to say, it is opposed to the Bible as our fathers have always recognized it. Our fathers have always supposed the Bible to be God’s Word. They have understood it to be a divine revelation. They have not been troubled about theories of inspiration. They have not attempted to explain how the Bible came to men, but they have felt assured of its authority, and have been influenced by a godly fear in yielding submission to its precepts.

But Modernism will have none of this….

And yet this is by no means the whole of it, or the worst of it. For Protestants to have lost their Bible and their religion, means that they have lost their God….

Now the question arises, what effect will this democratizing of God, this neutralizing of the Bible, what effect will it have upon the moral condition of the people and the weakening of a democratic or a republican form of government?

There is no need to formulate the question in the future tense, What effect has it already had? …

(1) It is striking at our system of education. I may illustrate what I mean by saying, that just now there is a southern evangelist, T. T. Martin, who is engaged in a nation-wide crusade to influence our state legislators. He is delivering a lecture entitled, “Evolution or Christ, Christ or Hell? or, Shall the People of the United States Be Taxed to Damn Their Own Children?”

The title requires no interpretation. The crusader has come to see what William Jennings Bryan saw earlier, viz., that our state-supported institutions are robbing our boys and girls of a chance to believe in God as their Creator, Redeemer and Judge. They are doing this through the teaching of the evolutionary hypothesis camouflaged as scientific fact, and it is Modernism that has encouraged and opened the way for them to do it….

… How many decades would it take for such teaching to make another Soviet Russia out of the United States?

(2) Modernism is striking at our system of religion. By this I mean particularly, our creedal or denominational distinctions in religion. Modernism would do away with all denominations and what they stand for….

This religious unionism finds expression in the Federal Council of Churches. There are good men in that council, evangelical men too, and it accomplishes many good things, but … it is federated on the basis of a social creed rather than a religious one, and as a social creed, it is not distinctively Christian in character….

… How many decades would it take for this idea generally adopted, to make another Soviet Russia out of the United States? David Lloyd George is a good witness on such a theme, and he says, that “the doctrines taught by the churches,” by which he means the distinctive doctrines of the different Christian denominations, “are the only security against the triumph of human selfishness,” and he adds, “human selfishness, unchecked, will destroy any plans, however perfect, that the leaders of the state may devise.”

(3) Modernism is striking at our political system, particularly at our plans for national defense. The modernists, whose sincerity is not in question, are seeking to bring in a millennium after their own plan. The Bible tells us that we are in the midst of an awful spiritual conflict between the forces of light and darkness, Christ and Satan. And it tells us that this conflict will continue until God’s hour comes to strike. It tells us that there will be wars and rumors of wars. It tells us that Armageddon in which the conflict will be headed up, will be the most gigantic and terrible of wars, and that Satan at that time will be bound and that Christ and His saints shall reign upon the earth.

But Modernism will have none of this. It expects a millennium indeed, the coming of a golden age, but human endeavor shall bring it in. The will for peace, the social gospel, the league of nations, resolutions of conventions, laws of congress, the abolition of our army and navy, these are the things to be relied upon.

It is a sinister pacificism this. It is bringing into general practice the red doctrines of the Third International of Moscow, and if allowed to grow it can result in only one thing, and that is the overthrow of our government….

Circumscribe the evangel, lessen confidence in the divine revelation, democratize the Almighty, lower the Son of God to the level of other men, denude His life of the miraculous, rob the Cross of its sacrificial efficacy, leave the seal unbroken upon His tomb, spiritualize and refine away the promise of His return to earth in power and great glory, and you have done what Modernism does. You have driven light and hope from the hearts of men, you have made life not worth living, you have undermined all authority and you have made government a derision in the world.

Source: James M. Gray, Modernism a Foe to Good Government (Chicago: Moody Bible Institute, 1924), 11–19. Used by permission.