Don’t Get Overwhelmed

Reading the news can be discouraging if you care about reality.

You do not need me to tell you the West is falling into moral decadence at an increasing rate. The rich will survive this plunge and even enjoy it in the early stages. Things will not fall apart, immediately, but the libertine values promoted will clobber the poor and the poor will not long remain compliant. In a libertine America, the center will not hold.

And yet the situation will not get better if I panic and see doom everywhere. Millions of Americans, young and old, still believe God created humankind male and female. No social institution has been proposed to replace marriage for raising the next generation of citizens. The parts of the world that still have babies (count out Western Europe) look on us in horror. Americans are becoming the freak show for the normal parts of the globe.

Part of the pattern to decadence is to convince the normal folk that normalcy is fading and impossible. We see the failures highlighted and tiny minorities of the population promoted. Let’s be plain: nobody is perfect. We all fall short of the ideal. We are all quirky and abnormal. A healthy society teaches us to maximize our mainstream, normal selves and to aspire to our ideals.

Christianity teaches that if all our lives were known, then nobody would be “good.” We are all broken. The solution to this failure isn’t to wish the failure away by calling it success or to hide it by lies. We cannot pretend our “mistakes” do not cost those around us or the culture. Our individual failures can, if they overlap enough with our neighbors, begin to destroy a civilization.

So it is with marriage: ideally it is between a man and a woman for life. Marriage exists to produce children, create civilization, and to reflect the full image of God in the union of the male and female. Most married people fail the ideal in some way or another: in word, thought, or deed. We must be honest about this failure and press forward toward the idea.

We have made a foolish mistake. If all of us deviate from the norm a bit in some places, often very different places, we question whether the norm exists. We do this with morality all the time. Look at the globe and most people at most times and it is perfectly possible to discover a moral law that humankind has discovered and followed. Each society will deviate from that law, make mistakes or have blind spots, but usually in different places. The existence of the law is not challenged by this failure, but confirmed.

American Christians are being bombarded with stories and images that make holiness and the good life seem impossible. While acknowledging and dealing with sin, we must also not be “rushed” into changing our goals or aspirations. We desire goodness, truth, and beauty. We long to be right with God and fight the normal pattern for His Creation. Instead, we maim, murder, distort, and deceive. We are born that way.

Being born again gives us a chance at redemption, but the normal does not come easily to us. We are too warped. Society does not help us when it declares “all is over” and that our cause is lost. Our own odious hypocrites dismay us . . . and when we look at ourselves . . . we see so much that is bad.

Do not despair. God has lost nothing. He is not shaken or moved. His Church has survived far worse than a libertine period in a fading West.  Be glad we do not face Hitler, Stalin, and the materialism of an elite. I rejoice that elites no longer pretend to believe Christianity as they did in the 1950’s, confusing our witness. Thank God the open racism of the American church, as abhorrent as our modern sexual deviance to the rest of global Christendom, has faded.

The worst thing we can do is to hide in little authoritarian groups and focus on “the other people’s sin.” This is bound to lead to spiritual abuse and a toxic form of religion. The next worst thing would be to give up on our ideals and stop seeking the purity of Mary, the clarity of Paul, or the redemption of Peter.

We can neither retreat to our own private Idaho or give up on moral reality. And nobody is making us do so. We do not have to be cool to survive. Thank God we are still free to dissent and work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. We can mind our own business and become examples of love. We cannot retreat and isolate ourselves without peril and we cannot surrender to the culture without damning our souls. Instead, we will keep calm and carry on loving our neighbor as ourselves and God with all our heart, soul, and mind.

All is well in Heaven and I pray that His will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.