What’s Wrong with the World

The smart money is on Christianity to be around and relevant for as long as the American republic endures. The even smarter money says the faith will outlast the republic just as it did the empire into which it was born. Hunter Baker

Bettors call that a lock.

Well that's easy to predict. I can also predict with confidence that my faith in ignorant obfuscation will outlast the Republic by a good many years as well.

These so-called measures are a bit thin, aren't they? Let's take another measure: how many women chose to have babies born out of wedlock (as in explicitly chose to get pregnant)? How many men chose to urge a woman to get an abortion? These are not measures of people calling themselves Christian, they are a measure of how truly people are actually being Christians. If these people are calling themselves Christians, it is because the word no longer means what it used to. (For at least some of these people, being a Christian means thinking that Christ was a noble man who, if he had lived in our times, would have had things to tell us about how to live. Too bad he lived way back when.)

On the political side (as if Christianity line up with politics, which it doesn't): John McCain holds a range of opinions that, 60 years ago, would have been called Left-leaning or liberal. Today he is called a moderate right-leaning politician. I am talking about the same positions, so the country itself has changed its stance. What really nails it down is that this Left-leaning or liberal could not get elected because he could not beat someone much, much farther leftwards. What does that say about where the country has changed?

If the kind of christianity Hunter Baker is talking about is alive and well, that does not do the least bit to reassure us that Christian America is well. And it does not begin to suggest that America herself is doing well, or even moderately poorly.

My take on the domestic failure of the Bush Administration is that in 8 years of a supposedly Christian president, he could not effect one clear lasting change to make America more livable to Christians or more conducive to living a Christian life. At best he simply slowed the progress of certain evils during his term, while others went on unabated. While that is better than Obama, of course, it is hardly something to hang one's hat on for the history books: I slowed evil a bit.

My take on the domestic failure of the Bush Administration is that in 8 years of a supposedly Christian president, he could not effect one clear lasting change to make America more livable to Christians or more conducive to living a Christian life.

Wow, your faith is misplaced if you're expecting a political leader to provide spiritual formation for a mass society.

Baker's correct when he says; From our birth as a republic, we have been a quasi-stable partnership of enlightenment modernism and vigorous Christian belief working together for the preservation of ordered liberty. Note; quasi-stable.

The partnership had a good run, but it is now expiring, yet if you had to bet on which one survives,would you choose; modernity or Christianity?

Not saying we aren't in a painful period of social dissolution, and that things won't get worse, before they get better, but do you really think a culture without a cult is possible, or that secular liberalism has more staying power than a host of other heresies, all of which appeared triumphant, but now lie buried in historical archives?

Step up and lay your money down. Peel the God is a Republican bumper-sticker off your car. And remember to recycle.

but do you really think a culture without a cult is possible, or that secular liberalism has more staying power than a host of other heresies, all of which appeared triumphant, but now lie buried in historical archives?

Excellent point. I would also add that the cult of faux-liberalism only exists so long as its opponent, popular Christianity, exists. That is what marks some of its specious success and following, and also what makes Christianity outliving the empire the smart money. The orgy of secular thought at the start of the twentieth century could unite behind the relished blasphemies only so long as the blasphemies were sacred (Chesterton). But in wiping popular Christianity from the public consciousness, the popular heresies consume themselves and their cult.

As for

Step up and lay your money down. Peel the God is a Republican bumper-sticker off your car. And remember to recycle.

Very nice : )

So does that mean that as soon as Christianity goes underground, and stops trying to be a visible force in the culture, the opposed-to-Christianity movements will shrivel up and go away? Sounds like it. Does that mean we can win the culture for Christ by no longer trying to win it for Christ?

And remember to recycle.

This is a joke, right?

Reminds me of what a friend of mine said about a certain Christian college which shall remain nameless: "These are people who think 'take up your cross' means 'have a green campus'."

Tony, I will answer "no" and "no" to your questions. In my opinion, in the new stage of the culture wars, they are determined to root us out of the catacombs. That doesn't mean I'm saying they will succeed. It does mean I'm saying that flying a white flag of surrender (and picking up on their issues, like recycling) is no way to get left alone. Rick ("the Rwandan genocide is much more important to me than homosexual marriage") Warren is an instructive instance here. They will never let up on him until he is crushed, no matter how much he grovels now, just because they remember when he had more of a witness to the truth in cultural areas about which the left foams at the mouth.

Does that mean we can win the culture for Christ by no longer trying to win it for Christ?

hmmm, tough question. My sanguine heart would like to say yes we can win the culture war for Christ, but my eyes tell me that a mass cultural conversion to orthodoxy is unlikely. I believe that in quarters the orthodox awakening is very strong, and this will outlast the popular sentiment. But the popular suicidal instinct might be strong enough to destroy the empire before all is said and done--it will certainly bankrupt it.

I think that the question is a bit deceptive as well. I'm not entirely sure that the culture war of an en masse sort is ours to win. As people every day docilely trade in their rights for the popular paternalism, I grow frustrated with yelling at the deaf. The sort of "winning for Christ" I am presently occupied with only concerns me. And I certainly don't mean this in a despairing way, only that I don't think it is the case that Christiantity will rise or fall on the shoulders of America. We all know the case to be the opposite, and we also know that losing America's culture war would be a great tragedy, but nothing in my creed precludes the possibility.

Lydia,

I took Kevin's remark about recycling as a good riddance sort of joke. I'm not entirely sure he had the "Christ lived GREEN!" sort of mentality about it.

Brett:

As for "Step up and lay your money down. Peel the God is a Republican bumper-sticker off your car. And remember to recycle." Very nice : )

Kevin:

The partnership had a good run, but it is now expiring, yet if you had to bet on which one survives,would you choose; modernity or Christianity?

"They both will survive...But Christianity will certainly survive the collapse."

Albert, so you're betting on Christianity to outlive its latest, most durable rival. Wise choice.

you silly man-child

I would wear that as a badge, but I don't suppose you meant me. I think you're right Albert, Kevin is a bit unproductive isn't he. I repent of my previous smiley, and Lydia I'm with you: I think Kevin must be blogging from a treehouse.

The nation-state is an institution of modernity, after all.

Concerning the nation-state, its propagation has been arm-and-arm with modernity, and it is a useful vehicle for secularism; but I think its true mother was the Reformation. You decide if the Reformation and the birth of modernity are one and the same, I haven't made up my mind on that. No thread-hijacking intentions (promise).

And Kevin,

I hope you know that the previous post was perfectly sarcastic. I hold all of your posts, even in my short patronage of this site, in the highest esteem.

Brett, no problem. Before anyone gets to wear the title "silly man-child" they have to wrest it from me first. I am afraid though you may have opened up a hornets nest by bringing up the Reformation.

Kevin,

Step up and lay your money down. Peel the God is a Republican bumper-sticker off your car. And remember to recycle.

This coming from the man whose very efforts (along with others) had wrought for us the current administration and this New Age for an ever more notorious (globalized) Culture of Death?

At least, Fr. Corapi himself knows the very nature of the man who now unfortunately holds the reins to the highest office in the land:

EXCERPT:

"...He is the first to be so honored, however, who has such a public and pernicious anti-life and anti-Catholic Christian bias... No president in the course of history has been so damaging to the Cause for the Respect for Life than this one -- and he's only just begun!"

SOURCE:
http://stlouiscatholic.blogspot.com/2009/05/video-father-corapi-on-notre-dame.html

The nation-state is an institution of modernity, after all.

It is an institution that continued to develop during the era of modern thinking, I grant you. But I believe that its foundation lie elsewhere than in modernism, or even in that departure from right thinking that started with Descartes. Both the Brittanic and the French states were well along the path of nation-state before Descartes, and before the height of the Renaissance, having been given a major push by Joan of Arc in France, for example. Hispanic states were trending in the same direction, though I am fuzzy on that. Certainly Russia did not need modernism to become a vast nation.

I think that in large part the nation-states came to be primarily because of the shortening of (effective) distances for communication and transport. Similarly, I think that the only plausible place to go from the current nation-state is a world government, which has me shaking in my boots. Not because it means loss of the American sovereign state of itself (though that too is an issue), but because of the only foreseeable way that world gov. can take shape: as a tyranny of the secular humanist over all other systems of thought. If the development of a world gov took place under an umbrella of subsidiarity, I would be much more at peace with the notion that the American state is dissolving - but it won't. Without subsidiarity, no larger entity can possibly avoid being a tyranny. And secular humanism has shown during the 20th century what kind of teeth it can develop in a short 10 years to deal with competing thought systems.

So, while I don't lament the loss of this now secular America in itself, I lament the coming change to a still worse state of affairs.

Christianity will certainly survive, but I doubt it will in its current American style, much of which seems to be superstition with a Christian flavor (I'm thinking Prayer of Jabez, Joel Osteen, etc.).