No Competition
By definition, idolatry is totalizing. As there is a God who claims dominion and lordship and crown rights over every particle of His creation, idols do the same. The state has been deformed from its proper (God ordained and restricted) sphere by human reasoning, which is in opposition to God’s revealed Word, and has become a powerful idol. It is an idol that seeks to define right from wrong, truth from error, beauty from ugliness. It has usurped these powers in unrighteousness, crudely affirming that what is true and right and beautiful is what it has legislated to be so. This is immediately evident in many governments’ attack on the family, the unborn, the disabled, and the heterosexual. It is evident in the creation of fictions such as same sex marriage, multiple genders (transgenderism), euthanasia as compassion, and abortion as birth control.
God has ordained government, but government is not God.
A pietistic Christianity is what the state demands, and what no Christian can offer. Pietism limits the role of the Christian faith to the private and personal, seeking personal salvation in the future, but severely restricts its practise in the present. It is a limitation to private worship, Bible reading, and prayer, as long as these do not result in acting upon the claims of Scripture. The state seeks to drive the actual living out of the Christian faith further into the private sphere, knowing full well that as the state expands its powers and influence, that sphere becomes smaller and smaller, and much less relevant to daily life. In this way, many leaders in the state hope to virtually eliminate the Christian faith, not by mere oppression, but by relegating it out of normal life. As the Christian faith is co-opted by the state for its own purposes, with the cooperation of apostate denominations (largely liberal mainline denominations), the Christian faith becomes a showpiece of state intervention into areas outside its rightful sphere.
Idolatry of this sort accepts no competition from church, family, education or business. This is why those representing the state, and many in popular culture, demand that the Christian faith be re-formed to accommodate the demands of culture. The Christian is faced with the choice (Acts 5:29) of obeying God or the idol makers.
One such idol maker is Hillary Clinton. She now demands that the Christian faith surrender to her legislative powers over truth. Video here.