David does a book review: 03
For Christmas of 2025, I received Al Mohler’s, The Gathering Storm, from my oldest niece and her husband. Because of my admiration for Mohler and my niece, this book needed to be moved up on the list so it could quickly be reviewed on davidjosephriley.com.
The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church, written by R. Albert Mohler Jr. in 2020, takes on the pressing issue of secularization and its impact on the church. And thus, there is overlap with ideas and themes presentd in Christless Christianity and Twilight of the American Enlightenment in their consideration of the influence of American culture on religious life. But whereas Michael Horton and George Marsden have very specific audiences in mind, Mohler comes to the pen and writes to the layman inside the church.
In polemic form, Mohler borrows the title of his book from Winston Churchill’s first of a six volume chronicle on World War 2, and in “The Gathering Storm,” Churchill describes the denial by the European Allies to the Nazi threat. In like manner, a gathering storm is brewing that “already presents itself as a tremendous challenge to the faithfulness of the Christian church.” It is the “storm of the secular age.”
In the first chapter, “The Gathering Storm over Western Civilization,” Mohler carefully identifies the formation and trajectory of the storm that has been brewing over the last several centuries. The fire that engulfed Notre Dame in Paris provides a picture. “The cathedral stood as an essential monolith of Western civilization, signifying the central role of Christianity in the development of European identity.” The values that helped shape that unique identity were already under flames for some time, and the actual burning of the cathedral is emblematic of a greater reality.
Mohler points to the sociological process known as secularization as having engulfed Western civilization. But in making the claim of the gathering storm of secularism and secularization as its pattern of destruction, a thoughtful and well-informed overview of the historical process is analyzed and supported with insightful scholarship from voices like Peter Berger and Charles Taylor. And in highlighting secularization, Mohler identifies it as a “moral revolution.” It is a revolution that must be met with a “theological protest.”
As secularization has removed from societies “the binding authority” that once held them together with a “common morality, a common understanding of the world, and a common concept of what it means to be human,” there is no longer any stability. Using the decimation of Western civilization as the preamble, Mohler brings to focus the main emphasis of the book: “The Gathering Storm in the Church.” And while Christ’s church cannot be destroyed as declared in Matthew 16:18—“On this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”— it is pointed out the threat is on the church’s faithfulness.
Theological liberalism has been a means of “active secularism,” and the collapsing state of the mainline denominations tells the story. But Mohler distinguishes the active form with the introduction of “passive secularism,” which “infiltrates churches, inadvertently exerting a liberalizing pressure on Christians and denominations.” Through subtle and constant influence, the secular age slowly replaces orthodox belief with a version that fits the times.
Passive secularism is a force that is soft, quiet and gentle enough not to feel too overbearing or nagging, but assimilation happens in orthodox circles as well. Mohler applies the words of Stephen Carter, a law professor at Yale, that in a secular age, “God became a hobby, with fewer and fewer serious hobbyists.”
How does this happen? How does Christianity move from a place of moral authority and then morph into a hobby and a game plan for a successful life?
Christianity and religion in general were transformed in twentieth-century America. According to Peter Berger, it became something “non-cognitive and optional.” As beliefs and doctrine became less important, “the binding authority of the Christian moral tradition or any religious tradition was lost.” Similarly, Mohler points to Charles Taylor and his important work on The Secular Age: “The way people hold to theological convictions and religious principles in the modern era is fundamentally different from how people believed in the past." Because choice is a central part of belief on this side of modernity, “For many people, belief is now nothing more than an exercise of personal autonomy.” It is part of the quest for the good-life.
The form of Christian belief that has emerged consists of “some god who exists and created the world, who wants people to be simply congenial and kind, and the goal of life is happiness and self-fulfillment.”
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, first identified by sociologist Christian Smith in 2005, describes the secularized belief of many of those who consider themselves to be faithful Christians. And Mohler affirms it as a belief system that “replaces the sovereignty of God with the sovereignty of the self” and resembles the kind of individualism that undergirds the secular culture. As a consequence, this generation “has difficulty imagining any objective reality beyond the self” and fits into a “soft form of postmodern antirealism” that has become part of the mainstream culture.
Far from a reality just threatening the upcoming generation, Mohler identifies Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as deeply embedded in the church. “All this means is that teenagers have been listening. They have been observing their parents in the larger culture with diligence and insight. They understand just how little their parents really believe and just how much many of their churches and religious institutions have accommodated themselves to the dominant culture." He continues, “They sense the degree to which theological conviction has been sacrificed on the altar of individualism and a relativistic understanding of truth. They have learned from their elders that self-improvement is one of the greatest moral imperatives.” Thus, it is a multi-generational storm that appears to have gained intensity.
In borrowing the title of “The Gathering Storm” from Winston Churchill, Al Mohler is purposely evoking a military metaphor. He wants his Christian readers to grasp that there is a battle to be fought with the secular age, and it is the war of ideas. “The dechristianization of the culture—the severing of modernity from a biblical worldview—has dehumanized babies in the womb, redefined marriage, fractured the family unit, and promoted a radical sexual revolution, which fundamentally alters not only the way human beings live but even our understanding of what it means to be human.”
Thus, Mohler provides a concerted effort to identifying the belief systems competing for dominance in our society. And it is the church’s faithfulness that is on the line. Because if the church looses the ability to be faithful witnesses to the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, they can no longer shine as lights in a dark world. “Much of what we have seen in our secular moment is a battle between revolution and revelation.” Christians must protest and fight “revolution with revelation.”
