If you have ever traveled to a foreign country whose culture is far different from our own, you may have thought that religion played a big part in the country’s culture. One spring my former church had a missionary emphasis week, and we housed one of the missionaries from Japan. This man loved the outdoors, but he refrained himself from venturing too far, and for too long in the beautiful outdoors in America while on furlough here. When I inquired into his reasoning, he informed me that in Japan, one cannot go into any part of the outdoors, on a hike, mountain climbing, etc. without running into pagan idolatry, i.e. some statue of Buddha. The idolatry is everywhere, and it stifles the pleasure from enjoying God’s pristine creation. So while in America, this man kept himself from enjoying too much the great outdoors of America, lest he be tempted not to go back to the field to which God had called him. The culture of Japan, which extended into every corridor of the outdoors, was discouraging to this man because of the perversion of their religion.

We often think that a people’s religion is a part of their culture, but that is wrong thinking. When we think like that, it makes religion a subset, or a particular part of the cultural whole. And while religion and culture are inseparable from each other, religion is not a part of culture, culture is the outward expression of one’s religion.

In fact, man’s service to God, which we call religion, finds expression in cultural activity, and this cultural activity expresses one’s religious faith. The idea that there exists a secular realm separate from the sacred is a false one. Secularism believes there are aspects of life that can be maintained apart from one’s religion, but this false dichotomy cannot be maintained. There is no such thing as neutrality. A man’s religion is the spring head from which all of life, thought, and activity flow.

As Henry VanTill said, “The total character of man’s religion, then determines his cultus [worship] and culture. Thus man’s morality and economics, his jurisprudence and his aesthetics, are all religiously oriented and determined. This is why apostasy produces, not only a false religion, but also a false culture, namely a culture that does not seek God and serve Him as the highest good.” Every culture is animated by religion.

T. S. Eliot once said, “However, bigoted the announcement may sound, the Christian cannot be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organization of society . . . which is not the same thing as a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians.” This is very much the mind of the founding fathers of America. While they were not all Christians, they sought to establish a unified religious social code of behavior and education that was directed by a Christian worldview. In other words, they did not compel people to become Christian, for that work is the work of God, but they did seek to establish the culture of society that was governed by Christian ideals and principles.

Van Til provides an apt summary, “It is folly for God’s people to think that they can live in two separate worlds, one for their religious life and devotional exercises, and the other usurping all other time, energy, money – an area in which the priests of secularism are calling the numbers. One cannot keep on evangelizing the world without interfering with the world’s culture. It devolves upon God’s people, therefore, to contend for such a ‘condition of society which will give the maximum of opportunity for us to lead wholly Christian lives and the maximum of opportunity for others to become Christians.’ To divide life into areas of sacred and secular, letting our devotions take care of the former while becoming secular reformers during the week, is to fail to understand the true end of man.”