If It Wasn’t Politcs, It Would Be Something Else

I have been quite vocal since the Kirk Assassination about the fact that the church must lead us out of this.  Mark Antonio Wright wrote a piece for National Review entitled “There’s Only One Way Back from the Brink.”  In it, he quotes, “‘Americans are not at war against each other,’ Benji Backer, a conservative activist and conservationist, wrote yesterday. ‘What we’re up against is a scary + rising minority of violent lunatics fueled by hate and division.’”  While that is absolutely true, I think it is still falling short of the mark.  Why is that minority rising and more active now?

Wright partially answers my question later in the piece when he writes, “Anger, however — if it is to be righteous — should not morph into hate. There’s too much hate out there right now.”  Something has allowed this growing lunatic left fringe to feel an unrighteous anger and to permit it to become hate.  The guardrails are gone.

I have been reflecting on the host’s Friday conversation with Matt Continetti in which Continetti presents the great debate as nihlism vs transcendence.  There is certainly an element of moral nihlism (there is no inherent right or wrong) in the thinking of this group.  But there is more – there is a strong streak of hedonistic thought as well.  And an undeniably enormous sense of self-righteousness.  The people that constitute this fringe group seek  what they seek for their own pleasure – whether that pleasure be sexual or otherwise.  The point is we are not even really fighting a group of people at all, even a fringy one.  We are fighting ideas that that have given these fringy people license.   Wright described them as “lunatics” which is accurate, but there have always been lunatics – these are empowered lunatics wishing to be recognized by society as normal and not afraid to rely on their lunacy to obtain that recognition.

In the end, Wright cautions against vengeance – which is right and proper.  But even righteously dealing with the fringe won’t solve the problem.  If the ideas are not killed, new people will come to take their place.  The ideas have a powerful, and addictive, appeal.  They have taken root among the non-lunatic as well – people who hold the ideas, but practice them more within the bounds of civility.

For most of my young life, this toxic ideological stew occurred to most of us.  If we dared speak it out loud we were told, simply, “We don’t go there.”  It was a hard boundary and crossing it was like sailing off the flat earth – you just disappeared.  Where did the authority for such a boundary come from?  From the shared sense that there was some transcendent reality.  People are correct when they say America was never a Christian country – strictly it was not.  Heck, if you gathered a bunch of Christians in a room, of various Christian expressions, they could not agree on what that would even mean.  Such a room would soon break down into some kinds of Christians telling other kinds of Christian that “they” weren’t really Christian.

But what they would all agree upon is that there is something beyond our current materialistic reality – something that helps us define those hard boundaries.  All the religious institutions in this nation are, at least in part, intended to define and preserve those boundaries and maintain within our culture the idea of transcendence.  The fact that we are here implies that those institutions have failed at their intended mission.  Many have lost their way in the fight over what it means to be “genuinely Christian.”  Others have bought into the hedonistic nihlism a bit too much on their own.  Still others have simply withdrawn into a shell.  Regardless, they have failed.

History has seen this before – it was called The Dark Ages.  The church retreated to Ireland only burst forth once again centuries later.  I am grateful for those Irish monks that kept faith alive, but I wonder.  Rod Dreher has called for the church to once again retreat to a safe space and to concentrate on preserving the faith for a time when the world is more receptive.  But I wonder.

Jesus do not charge us to hide, but to boldly go forth, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,”  God has got our back, “ What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?  He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?”  Thus I wonder.  Maybe retreat is not the answer, maybe revival is.  We got a lot of mistakes to learn from – if we are willing to do so.

I head to church this morning with the thought that it is not just another worship service.  I don’t have all the answers, but I do know it is a time for deliberateness and purposefulness – time to carefully consider the options before us, to chose one, and to act.  The time has come for the church to rise from its failures.  How it does that is an open question, but that it must is undeniable.