“One True God has been the most revolutionary and consequential idea ever to have confronted the human mind.” American Agonistes: America’s 250th and the Restoration of a Nation in Conflict with Itself and Its Past (2025), Os Guinness (page 114)
“God creates order, and sin creates disorder. So, God acts into a disordered world and in turning the world upside down, God’s revolution turns the world the right way up again.” American Agonistes (page 119)
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!” 2 Corinthians 5:17
The Source of Conflict in America and the West Today
In last week’s post, we described the fundamental problem facing America and the West today “for which there is no name.” However, now it has a name: The Creator God Narrative (CGN) versus the Man God Narrative (MGN). This global struggle involves worldview conflict that often results in violence to the point of national or civil war. America’s last, uncontrollable breakout on a mass scale, perhaps a sign of the future, occurred in 2020.
We also described Arizona Christian University’s (ACU’s) annual survey of worldview, and Praxis Circle Contributor Os Guinness‘ necessary simplification of all human worldviews into only three: Christian, Secular, and Eastern. The CGN vs. the MGN primarily involves the conflict between the Christian and Secular worldviews. There are many definitions of worldview, and Praxis Circle has featured most in its videos, posts, podcasts, eBooks, and courses. ACU’s worldview definition is “the multi-dimensional intellectual, moral, emotional, and spiritual filter through which you make every decision.”
Finally, as introduction from last time: We linked to our Ten Worldview Pillars and explained that worldview metanarrative determines how each individual or group (operating from similar or allied worldviews) makes decisions and behaves. It’s been said religion is the key to history and “the master narrative of master narratives” (Wilfred McClay, as cited by Os). We contend that secular worldviews today are an equally strong faith or religion, and we believe most worldview experts would agree on this. Atheistic religion is ancient and extremely strong; nothing new.
We sometimes substitute the word “story” for “narrative.” Clearly, whenever human beings move beyond instinct and begin speaking, they engage in story, no matter how simple the language. Language in various forms is 100% necessary for humans to communicate well. “Zog (subject) clobbered (verb) the big lizard (object, triceratops)” is a story just as much as “Babe cold-cocked the baseball.” Human beings cannot think without story as image-bearing “being in time.” The problem with the word “story” today is that it suggests total or a strong element of fiction.
We think today’s worldview conflict is a serious and dangerous topic, if not murderous. (Os Guinness would say “decisive”.) As a result, it seems to us that in describing our great worldview conflict, the more formal word “narrative” is better than story. If you are a postmodernist you would not be bothered by the word story at all because there is no truth. Postmodernists see everything communicated as fiction, including reality, human dignity, and the sacredness of life itself. In other words, they do not present a joyful or purposeful scenario, scheme, story, narrative, faith, or worldview (but we digress).
To prove we’re well-versed on the topic, most of Praxis Circle’s reading for 2026, done before America’s 250th anniversary this weekend (Go Red, White, and Blue Team . . . with Stars and Bars!), has centered on the CGN vs. MGN conflict at various fundamental, hierarchical levels. Immediately below is a picture of the books related to Praxis Circle and its mission read in 2024, 2025, and 2026. The far right stack of ten books is our 2026 reading up to this point. (To get a list of links to the ten books, go to the bottom of this post.)
The stack to the immediate left is 2025, and the stack to the left of that is 2024. You can see the Praxis Circle Librarian, the refuge related to St. Jerome from New York City’s haunted public library on Fifth Avenue, reads at a steady pace.
Three stacks of Praxis Circle-related books read by our team within the past three years, totaling 44 books.
The Key Worldview Issue Between the CGN and MGN
If all worldviews involve near equal amounts of faith and emotional commitment, what is the real issue between them? We would contend the pragmatic issue is one of sovereignty. (The actual issue is one of truth versus error, often approaching true evil, but, again, we digress.)
In other words, is your sovereign—as a deciding and, we hope, intelligent and caring person—God, yourself, or another? Perhaps your sovereign is even more than one person, operating as some sort of power-wielding or significantly unified group?
To illustrate the sovereignty issue imbedded in the CGN vs. MGN conflict, let’s examine in the next few sections two historical incidents in Western history since Christ that trace its steady historical progression. We will conclude with a short note highlighting how since about the 19th century the conflict has accelerated to move the West to the brink of destruction, and why the United States of America is so important to sustain and improve upon a good and happy pathway. (We’re not kidding about worldview here, right before our nation’s 250th anniversary. This is our job.)
God as God
The West’s Creator God Narrative developed from the first line of the Bible’s book of Genesis cited many times by Praxis Circle: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) Truth or lucky guess on the part of Moses? From what most Westerners can tell, given our dominant worldview and notion of time and space and what we observe going on in every moment, things have to and are starting somehow, somewhere in every experienced or observed instance.
Furthermore, somewhere there exists a divine person in a supernatural world outside time and space called God. That God is a highly personal, caring God, which distinguishes that God from the god or gods of Eastern worldviews. “God” goes by many names and manifests Itself to human beings in many ways. The issue of “who created God?” is a red herring because the God of the Bible is the Omni God, a logical or philosophical necessity. God needs no creation or creatures, and only created and sustains the universe and humankind in time and space out of love.
In several places in American Agonistes, Os offers summaries of the CGN, but particularly at the bottom pages 113 and the top of page 114. Please buy the book to read it; it’s well worth your time and money. The book centers the American Creed or America’s central idea on being “covenantal freedom” and Israel’s Exodus experience in the Old Testament:
“These defining features of covenantal freedom all stem from the same source—faith in the transcendent God of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and the understanding of social and political life under God. They flow from the biblical understanding of God as the creator of humanity and the ultimate author of human dignity, freedom, and justice.” American Agonistes (page 110)
In the early European Middle Ages, it was generally understood that God is the world’s Creator, man is created in God’s image but is not God and never will be, and God is the ruler of the universe and man. Members of the basic Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) regard this as perhaps the central truth requiring recognition and worship via personal experience and faith.
That’s why Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, in 800 A.D. traveled to Rome and had Pope Leo III crown him on Christmas Day, rather than in his empire’s capital in Achen, Germany (near the border of France and Germany). Charles recognized that God was sovereign, he was God’s representative on earth but not and never would be God, and Providence would determine his fate as he freely acted as God’s chosen king.
God had created the universe as reported in Genesis. Most important, only approximately 800 years prior, via covenant, God had initiated His new creation (see St. Paul’s quote at top) with the birth of Christ. Through the life and resurrection of Christ, God himself had entered history, changed it, and revealed humankind’s supernatural future.
As depicted in Friederich Kaulbach’s painting (1861), “The Coronation of Charlemagne” was certainly among the most important events in human history recognizing the CGN.
Man as God
Of course, the MGN is totally different than the CGN. The latest science is that the universe began in the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago and that chance resulted in the creation of life on earth. Once life began, it further evolved by chance to the point where evolution would take over via necessity and survival of the fittest into producing early humans and our species today.
Human beings are no different from plants and other animals except that we have different attributes, particularly more intelligence. There is no creator, and all of the natural world consists of material matter and energy existing without purpose or meaning. If desired, it’s up to man to create purpose and meaning. When push comes to shove in the game of power struggle among humans and nature, however, there is no morality and human dignity in the MGN to govern justly. Os summarizes this well here:
“To the extent that the West was Christian, with its views of humanity, truth, words, freedom, justice, covenant, and peace rooted in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures—however imperfectly, inconsistently, and hypocritically—to that same extent it matters if the West shifts to a secular . . . basis . . . [Quoting John Locke] ‘Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of a human society, can have no hold on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.'” American Agonistes (Page 111)
Centuries after Charlemagne, atheism would become popular in the West. Today, many intellectual historians blame Christians themselves and Christianity itself for the result. Fair enough.
As it happened, secularization inched along in intellectual circles during the Middle Ages from start-to-finish. Finally, the MGN took visible and accepted roots in the High Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ironically, the MGN burst forth just before the Protestant Reformation among theologians, philosophers, rulers, and revolutionaries alike. The worldview chaos Europe experienced then was much like it exists in the West today. Bloody wars among Catholic and Protestant nations and groups accelerated secularization in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the West entered the period known today as modernity.
Similar to the coronation of Charlemagne, perhaps the great symbolic act instantiating modernity’s MGN was Napoleon’s crowning on December 2, 1804 (obviously, just 1,000 years after Charlemagne) as the French Revolution ended. The atheistic French Revolution had destroyed France, and Napoleon offered stability. Jacques-Louis David’s rendering of “The Coronation of Napoleon,” shown below and completed in 1807, presents stark contrast between the CGN and MGN. Napoleon made no house call to Rome, invited Pope Pius VII to Notre-Dame in Paris for his coronation, then snatched the crown from the Pope to declare himself sovereign before Josephine, the people of France, and, implicitly, God.
Via the largely atheistic French philosophies and the French Revolution (and their predecessors from all over Europe, including Britain, since the Renaissance), man was sovereign now. Talk about a Napoleon complex.
The Coronation of Napoleon,” Jacques-Louis David, 1807
To move today’s discussion along with a summary history you’re likely quite familiar with, Napoleon had embraced a culturally Christian-based secular humanism that’s grown in acceptance today. As the era of the American and French Revolutions progressed, philosophers David Hume, Emanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Hegel advanced the foundations of MGN’s secular metanarrative. (Ironically, Kant and Hegel were both likely theists; at least cultural, moral, or philosophical Christians, though not orthodox.)
As the early ideas of capitalism and socialism developed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Karl Marx then “turned Hegel on his head” and applied his narrative in a purely materialistic way, creating his six basic stages of history (Pre-History, Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism). Obviously, the MGN was still relying on the West’s fundamental idea of objective truth.
The progression of the MGN from a truth-based narrative in the early 1800s to a relativistic, nihilistic narrative today is summarized in the bullet points below.
- Power-based secular humanism (Napoleon)
- Marxism
- Moral therapeutic deism
- Postmodernism
- Expressive individualism all the way to transhumanism
- Power-based nihilism (the Democratic Party’s fundamental syncretism today)
In the 1800s, Deism, Kant/Hegel, Marxism, scientism, romanticism (a reaction to developing modernity), Darwin’s theory of evolution, and, eventually, Freud set the West on the course of what we would call now a “moral therapeutic deism,” accepted in many loosely Christian or New Age circles.
Postmodernism grew out of the likes of Frederick Nietzsche in the late 1800s to deconstruct narrative and relativize truth in the 20th century. The consequence of this today is that the MGN places sovereignty either in state totalitarianism or personal authenticity and “expressive individualism.” (See Carl Trueman’s last two books on the latter.) Os Guinness outlines this well in much of his writings, and we offer the two video clips at top and at bottom here as summary and July 4th weekend entertainment.
Before ending on a completely patriotic note, we should highlight that devout Jewish and Christian theists, including many of our Praxis Circle associates, would say that the MGN is a story and utter fiction, while the CGN is truth. As our best evidence, we submit all of known history. Indeed, thousands of American patriots who have died for it since the inception of our nation would agree. Naturally, that’s our CGN worldview.
The Consequences of God vs. Man as God
Now that we’re nearing the end of our two-part series on the Creator God versus Man God, we can have satisfaction knowing the “problem that has no name,” as we noted above to start, now does have one. Indeed, we should credit this characterization to Betty Friedan. Come to think of it, an alternate title for this post might be “The Masculine Mystique,” given that the Bible and Christ characterize God as God the Father. The existence and nature of God is definitely a mystery God only reveals in His own time and space—i.e., ours.
Speaking of biblical characters, we offer at top a highlighted version of Charles Vincent Peale’s young George Washington (see the new movie) painted in 1772, when Washington was only 40-years-old. It signifies the beginning of another whole chapter of the CGN and Christ’s new creation. The new chapter of history officially declared in 1776 was a natural historical progression via human praxis since Christ, Constantine, Charlemagne, and Napoleon.
In this CGN twist, there are no monarchs or aristocracy. As the Bible says, every person is in the image of God with inalienable rights and, therefore, duties. Every person is charged by God in life to live virtuously as Christ demonstrated best, all dedicated to God’s truth, goodness, beauty, glory, and honor. Os asks the critical, related question for America today, as we celebrate 250 years since America’s founding:
“Where are the faiths and worldviews that speak to both the high worth of the human person and a profound realism about humanity, which . . . could even begin to compare with the Jewish and Christian view of humanity?” American Agonistes (page 95)
The answer? There are none outside CJC given the truth via the One True God. Truth is one, and there are no others. Truth doesn’t change; it happens. America’s version of the CGN requires every citizen and government by the people to act virtuously, necessitating a self-limiting character. Ironically, this is the way positive freedom (freedom to do what one ought) works. That’s the type God endowed humankind with, and it maximizes freedom and human flourishing for all and the common good in this life.
Os describes the consequences we’ve seen in the West and America via the MGN:
“With its threadbare basis for human worth, human equality, and human freedom, secular forms of liberalism can no longer justify liberalism as they need to. They are one form of a cut-flower civilization.” American Agonistes (page 95)
The MGN places America on a slippery slope from Christian morality-light to chaos and spiritual death. Negative freedom (freedom to do what one can) produces a war of all against all.
In summary, if chapters of the Bible were still being written (which they are, of course, because God lives and reigns—they just aren’t being written down), then George Washington would clearly be our Moses who lead the people of a New Israel out of British Egypt into a New World for the good of the entire world. This is not story or metaphor; it’s fact. One would have to “disregard that Oz behind the curtain” in the Land of Oz to see anything else.
America’s providential and unparalleled group of Founders clearly saw this and wrote it down, starting with Thomas Jefferson’s famous lines in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
We offer the portrait of the Young Washington above because it shows Washington before he became the leader most responsible for the creation of the most consequential nation on earth, so far. That portrait is in contrast to the stereotypical version of President Washington on each dollar bill.
Up until 1772 at age 40, Washington had only been responsible for starting the “first world war,” the Seven Years War between Britain and France (or the French and Indian War, as we call it in the U.S.). Like Moses, he would make his choices knowing he should do his best at all times, relying on God’s Providence. With the dedication of all patriots, he succeeded, and, like Moses, he died in December 1799, just before America entered the Promised Land of the 19th century. It was then America became fully one via Western expansion and its Civil War.
Who could doubt this was God’s intention since before time for the good of the world, given all the history since?
As will be stated countless times between now and Saturday, God Bless America, our nation under God, of the people, by the people, and for the people. America’s success is vital to the world because it is the longest running, self-created, national experiment in republican constitutional democracy in the known history of mankind. It is the one country best living and supporting Classical Judeo-Christianity, the Creator God Narrative, and the New Creation. God’s truth and will. This was our Founder’s intention since 1607.
We’re all patriotic sustainers now. Our best from Praxis Circle to you and your family and friends, wherever they may be.
We have so much from God to be grateful for.
_____
2026’s Praxis Circle Reading So Far:
- American Agonistes: America’s 250th and the Restoration of a Nation in Conflict with Itself and Its Past (2025), Os Guinness
- The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity (2026), Carl Trueman
- Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution (2026), Jonathan Turley
- Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (2025), Paul Kingsnorth
- The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (2025), Leah Libresco Sargeant
- Feminism Against Progress (2023), Mary Harrington
- Creation as an Introduction to Christian Thought (2025), Henry Vander Goot
- The New Conservatives: Restoring America’s Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry (2025), Edited by Oren Cass
- The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995), Christopher Lash
- The Logic That God Exists: A Handbook on Belief in God through Simple Reason to Bring You Peace (2024), Robert Trussell
