The greatest threat since Arianism

Is modern secular liberalism.  It turns the biblical model of reality on its head, calls good evil and evil good, and challenges the faith at its most fundamental levels.  Ross Douthat rightly pointed out that no Western theistic religion has attempted to compromise with this and come out ahead.  That’s because you can’t bake kosher ham.  You just can’t.  A viewpoint that assumes humans are but mere animals who invented religion as a way to cope, and who will either all go to some other dimension or rot in the ground, can’t really be compromised with.  

Neither, it should be clear, can many of the assumptions that arise from this.  The main assumption is that I am pretty much a superstar of my own story, and nothing has a right to supersede that, nor do I owe anything to anyone but for my choosing.  Therefore nothing I want or want to do should be hindered by anything, since nothing is greater than me.  Or at least nothing that matters. 

Square peg. Round hole. Despite the rather dismal track record of this view – the civilization that gave birth to it is dying, and in only a century of being driven by its ideals we’ve had more death and destruction than  at any time in history – despite all of this, compromise will be attempted.  And right now, this is no more apparent than in the Church’s attempts to walk that fine line between 2000 years of pretty clear traditional teachings, and the latest, hippest by this new phenomenon that will only be content once challengers to its assumptions have been eradicated from the human story.  

So all is buzzing about how the Church seeks to compromise with the divorce culture, one of the more recent benefits of this new ideal.  Of course the whole Annulment process and the Church’s dance with tradition vs. modernity has been one of the more convoluted dramas in Western religion over the last few decades.  And yet, as many see that compromising with the Culture of Me and its love for no fault divorce is a fool’s hope, many in the Church apparently feel taking a step toward compromise will accomplish something good. 

Granted, this is a complex issue, and I won’t pretend to be an expert who should be listened to about the details.  I can, however, notice the trends.  And right now, the trend is a Church trying desperately to keep one foot, however precariously, in the side of Tradition, while hoping that by somehow accepting at least some presumptions of the secular Left, it will appeal to a new generation without being changed beyond recognition by that generation.  If it can do this, it will be a miracle.  It will also be a first.