Titanic

Indian scholar Vishal Mangalwadi contends that the "secret" of the West's success is morality that allows people to trust one another with the kind of trust essential to business and politics. He says this kind of trust-producing morality is unique to societies having a belief in a rational God who has spoken to humanity through the Bible, clarified right and wrong, and to Whom everyone is equally accountable.

But Mangalwadi asks an important question: "If moral integrity is foundational to prosperity, why don't secular experts talk about it?"

His answer is: "Economists have lost the secret of the West's success because philosophers have lost the very idea of truth." How did this happen? "The truth was lost," he says, "because of an intellectual arrogance that rejected divine revelation and tried to discover truth with the human mind alone."

Mangalwadi traces the connections between failing economies and faulty worldviews. His book Truth and Transformation is particularly relevant because of the West's exchange of the Christian worldview for a much different view. A view that is as harmful to the economy of America as Hinduism is to the economy of India. Namely, the worldview of Secularism.

Through the philosophy of Western secularists such as David Hume (1711-1776), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), thought-leaders in the West accepted the notion that either the God of the Bible does not exist, or He is totally irrelevant. (One doesn't have to be an atheist to be a secularist. A Christian dualist is a practicing secularist.)

The effects of Secularism upon America have been titanic. Mangalwadi contends that Secularism is leading us down the same road to poverty that Hinduism led India.

Think it could never happen? The Titanic was thought to be unsinkable, too.

Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan both quoted John Winthrop, CEO of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who once declared: "...we shall be as a city upon a hill−the eyes of all people are upon us."

But they neglected to tell the American people what Winthrop said next: "So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake." 

John Winthrop (1588-1649) [Photo public domain; artist unknown.]