fact that religion can’t do a thing about the world’s problems – that
it never did work and it never will...” 3Failing to recognize the grace of God in Jesus Christ,
Christian religion marches on to garner its forces for a
particular cause celebre in order to create a social
movement to attempt to fix the ills and woes of the world.
Rather than explaining the victory won by Christ over all
evil, they seek to expunge the perceived evils in the world,
often by socio-political and religious reform movements
that offer a pseudo-salvation. This is ever so close to the
Marxist objectives to “change the world” through socio-
economic transformation. Commenting on this tendency of
Christian religion to become involved in socio-political
transformationism, that he terms “the false presence of the
kingdom” in a book so entitled, Jacques Ellul observes that
“every time the Church has gotten into the political game, no
matter what the manner of her entry, no matter what her opinion or
opposing choices in a political situation with regard to an
institution, she has been drawn every time into a betrayal, either of
revealed truth or of the incarnate love. She has become involved
every time in apostasy. ...Politics is the Church’s worst problem. It
is her constant temptation, the occasion of her greatest disasters,
the trap continually set for her by the Prince of this world.” 4When religion engages in social problem-solving,
especially in alliance with the secular governmental
structures which have succumbed to the evil of fallen men