NB. The Times-Picayune published this piece in their Friday newspaper, but they have yet to post it on-line. Not sure why. I had hoped to send some traffic their way. . .oh well. If they post it tomorrow, I'll add a link.
Tragically diminished without God
Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. – W.B.
Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919.
Though Christ has not
yet been chased completely out of the twenty-first century public
square, his presence and influence are quickly fading. And fading by
design. While Yeats watched Western Europe tear itself apart in the
first two decades of the twentieth-century, members of the
intelligentsia were still applauding Nietzsche's 1882 announcement
that “God is dead” and speculating on what western culture should
look like after His funeral. For the most part, they cheered the idea
that we were all better off without God. However, as modern history
has shown, western culture is tragically diminished in the absence of
God.
In Yeats' time and in
ours, things fall apart and the center does not hold. Those who
believe that things should fall apart and that the center
should never hold promote the “death of God” as the
greatest event in the history of human liberation. Without God to
inform and enforce objective standards of truth, goodness, and
beauty, we are free agents in the design and construction of our
fate. Ultimately responsible for every choice, each one of us is left
utterly alone in our freedom. Secularists argue that this is a good
thing. However, such freedom, understood as license, comes with a
high cultural and personal price: anxiety, desperation, and grief.
All too often our survivalist's instincts lead us toward nihilism
and, eventually, self-destruction.
And how can we look back
on the twentieth-century and fail to see ourselves committing
cultural suicide in the absence of God? World War I killed 37
million. WWII killed more than 60 million. Stalin murdered 20
million; Mao between 45-72 million. Add the death toll from other
secularist regimes and the total verges on the incomprehensible. But
it's not just wholly secularist nations that contribute to the
butcher's bill. In the U.S., since 1973, secularist ideology has
provided the legal framework for domestic genocide: 53 million
abortions and that number grows every year by 1.7 million. It's no
accident that 65% of these abortions occur outside the marriage bond.
Without the transcendent, without God, all we have left is our belief
in nothing and everything is permitted.
Over the decades many
secular thinkers have tried to replace God with a useful,
all-too-human idol. Nietzsche gave us the Übermensch, the
Super Man. Marx gave us The Worker in Class Struggle. And Freud gave
us the Neurotic, drowning in his sexually repressed unconscious. None
of these idols brought the human person to the fullness of true
freedom, nor can any of them bring us closer to the truth, goodness,
and beauty offered by classical western theism. What they did
bequeath to us is a severely diminished culture crippled by the
secularist myth that believers are little more than superstitious
primitives who are best ignored, if not outright eliminated. Why?
Because left alone to influence the shape and direction of a nation,
believers will inevitably turn a democracy into a theocratic gulag.
Or so the myth goes.
To better understand why
we need God, we need to think about why secularism wants Him out of
the cultural picture. Catholic philosopher, Charles Taylor, defines
culture in terms of the “social imaginary,” that is, culture is
more than just how we do things, it's how we imaginatively arrange
both our internal and social lives as the two interact. For the
Christian West, the social imaginary has always been rooted in the
reality and availability of the transcendent God who became flesh to
dwell among us. If the incarnation of Christ tells us how to think
about our ultimate end and we use this knowledge to organize our
social lives, then those virtues given to us by God (faith, hope,
love) become real, enforceable social norms. In other words, morality
is objective, knowable, and actionable. If the secularists are right
and God is dead, then so are the virtues He infuses into the human
person.
So, where does that
leave us? Exactly where we've been left time and again by secularist
ideology: the one with the most money and guns wins. And
there's no appeal to a higher authority if you are among the losers.
Fortunately, we don't have to stay here. Lent is that time of year
when Christians confront the difficult difference between living in
the world but not being of the world. Our graced task is
to stand among the ruins and reconstructions of our diminished
culture and show our neighbors – through word and deed – how the
world can be both a sign of God's love and a tool of devilish
temptation. We do this by digging into the hard work of charity, the
seriously earthy work of feeding the poor, clothing the naked,
praying for our enemies, and fasting in sacrificial love, all the
while keeping our hearts and minds stubbornly turned toward God's
promise of final rescue. If secularism has again unleashed “mere
anarchy” upon the world, then we who follow Christ must give our
lives upon the cross to show the world again that Christ is King.
_____________________
