Christmas and the Secular New Year: 2015 was a Bad Year, 2016 will be Better

2015 cannot end fast enough.

The old order declined all over the world. Life can be sweet in the last few years of a dying regime, decadence mixes with opulence to produce a beautiful twilight. We had bread in the form of cheaper gasoline and our circuses hit Imax regularly, but the vitality seemed gone. Voters in both parties looked at their candidates for higher office with aversion: no transformational Reagan or Obama in sight.

2015 was a year when Christians all over the globe died under atheist persecution in North Korea and China and radical Islamic terror in the Middle East.

And yet for a Christian, the signs could not be better for 2016.

Partly this is because, as always, Jesus remains Lord of history. There is no place on the globe where the Faith does not matter. Pope Francis remains in secular Europe and the Ecumenical Patriarch is not leaving the Middle East. The secular parts of the world are dying out and those areas that embrace traditional values are growing in numbers.

Those things are true, but since it is enjoyable to make guesses about what will happen, here are mine. Unlike the existence of God, these might be true in a possible world, but not in this one!

The Church of the 2016 will remain global and that means more than ever: not European or North American. India matters more to the future than England and Nigeria than France. Look for an odd change of roles. American Christians will remain patriots but develop a global support system and help our friends fight moral colonialism. Western people who left Christianity for a “new and improved’ religion,  the Church of Now, will find themselves in an older, whiter, dying corner of the globe and will take up the “leftist’s burden” to enlighten the world.

Christians will send missionaries to the dying West while the Church of Now can only hope to poach Evangelical’s children. At least one Western European country will experience a serious revival in Christianity obvious enough to be reported with loathing by American media. My bet is France. Pope Francis will disappoint everyone by talking more and doing nothing much new.

As for the election, conservatives will not put their trust in princes, but will show up to give the Republican nominee a victory. The nominee will be Cruz or Rubio. Cruz will defeat Clinton in a tight Bush over Kerry race while Rubio will win an Obama size mandate. Trump will not run on a third party because Cruz and Rubio will both listen to his concerns. A wave of euphoria will not sweep the nation.

Just the fear of a Cruz or Rubio administration will put pressure on accrediting agencies to open up to new ideas and begin to end the ‘regional accreditation monopoly.’ “Competency” based education will be the new rage and administrations will find themselves under pressure to cut their own salaries and numbers. After the election, the forming GOP administration will push schools getting government money to advertise actual costs and not use “tuition discounting” to make parents think they are getting more money than they receive. Christian colleges will face intense recruiting problems with more schools smaller than four thousand at risk of closing. A “name brand” school will close in 2016 or merge with another school to save face.  Numerous presidents (double digits) of historically Christian colleges will retire to avoid the new world coming.

In foreign policy, Daesh and other extremist Islamic groups will be faced down in Syria, but will spread to new regions. Eastern Europe will close borders and turn to the populist right. Britain will narrowly stay in the Eurozone only by getting concessions that will deeply weaken the Euro. France, newly nationalist, will want a better deal.

India will begin to assert herself as an economic and regional power. China will show the strain of her unworkable government as the generation that did not know Mao moves into power. Japan will continue to move into twilight as a power as her population ages. Sub-Saharan Africa will continue to stew in post-colonial problems for another year.

In news neither good nor bad: Apple will continue to slide in a Jobless time. Microsoft will find a hit in the Surface 4 and begin to rebound. The cool factor will be back in Redmond. Blackberry will not rebound, but stories will keep promising it will as the generation that knew Blackberry still has a voice in mainstream media. Oil will drop further. Disney will continue to grow as a brand by buying up other products, particularly in interactive media.

Whatever happens, here is hoping for a better 2016 than 2015 . . . with a Church still vibrant in the Middle East and a revival here in the West.