The woman, whom I’ll call Traci, is due to deliver her first baby any day now. She answered that she wasn’t sure about the name yet but, “One thing we do know is that it won’t be a name from the BIble.”
I asked her why and she shrugged, as if it were a no-brainer. “Because, of course, we’re living in a post-Christian world.” I’d never heard that term before and it stunned me. I thought about it afterwards. A post-Christian world? What does that mean? And what are the implications here?
I suppose Traci means that she’s a postmodern girl, and has grown beyond any rules or definitions. She and other Post-Christians (PC’s) don’t need gender or anything else, like capitalism; they have no use for the traditional family. They don’t need God and His repressive morality. They don’t need anything but. . .well, what do they rely on actually?
Now this is where I got stuck. If the post-Christian generation doesn’t need anything, not even God, what do they need? What do they rely on; what comforts and nurtures them in the deepest, darkest night? Who do they turn to; who do they cry out to, when life becomes unbearable?
I suppose they’d say that they rely on “science,” but Darwin and Stephen Hawkings provide a minimal amount of solace when tragedy strikes. Perhaps they’ll point to social justice missions as their reason for being. However, they’d have to turn a blind’s eye to just what happens when countries play God, as in the old Soviet Union, the “People’s Republic” of China; and the truly oppressed souls in North Korea.
Perhaps the Post-Christians rely on their bodies, on pleasure. They bow to the god of the Kama Sutra, an Eastern spiritual guide to great sex. But again doesn’t this only goes so far? And the unbridled pursuit of pleasure leads to unforeseen consequences: STD’s that injure and even kill; one-night stands that damage the spirit and body.
Maybe the PC’ers would say that they rely solely on themselves. However, how would this work? There would be times they’d be vulnerable, such as that moment they’re blindsided by news of cancer, for themselves or a loved one. And if they choose to just depend on human beings, all of us will age and become ill and die someday. And that includes them, as well.
Perhaps the PC’s have constructed their own religion; they worship the Kabbalah, or the goddess, or Eastern deities, like Shiva or Krishna. Maybe their devotional practice is pagan; they bow to animals, nature.
But isn’t all of this goddess worship just a weak substitute, a way to fill what Pascal, mathematician-turned-believer, said was the vacuum-shaped hole in one’s heart without the one true God. I suppose it’s hard for the young ‘uns to look into the future. But eventually many older people have a thirst, a desperate hunger, for something real, something beyond the ego and the pleasures of the flesh.
While the PC’s think they’re creating a newer, better world, I have to wonder whether they’re doing something completely different: whether they are, in fact, dragging us backwards in time, to a pre-Christian world. They are forcing us back to a time before Christ came.
They may idealize the pagan years, but there were countless of sacrifices to the gods in the form of humans like children. There were many thousands of animals killed, which the eco-freakos and the animal rights advocates among us would not have liked one bit.
Women, and others, were routinely stoned back then for such infractions such as adultery. It was Christ who intervened and uttered his famous words about those without sin casting the first stone. He saved the woman’s life and he did so, significantly, without laying a hand on the persecutors.
And this latter point is essential; Christ’s teachings were about nonviolence and love. And yet we live in a world, similar to before Christ, when people are hankering for a military leader to save them. Many people consider Obama their savior, and are happily plastering Obama 2012 bumper stickers on their cars, regardless of new wars being launched, or the internal strife and violence that have escalated since his inauguration.
While Traci and her friends may believe that a post-Christian world is a superior one, just look around and see the wreckage: The left supports Radical Islam, with its honor killings and genital mutilation, and sexual abuse of children, and beheadings of gays. . . The postmodernists have set racial relations back to l960‘s levels; and more misogyny is being perpetuated by those in high places.
The PC’ers are operating under a delusion: that the world was superior before Christ. That people were happier, merrily loving each other, in a type of a Garden of Eden. It’s a similar myth that progressives of all ages embrace about the 60’s. The old timers look bad fondly at the “good old days.” The young ones erroneously believe that the hippie and radical movements were times of liberation and magic.
Conspicuously missing from the stories is how the Black Panthers created a reign of terror over the SF Bay Area; how innocent people were murdered in bombings; how women were raped in radical movements.
It’s an immature view of the world, isn’t it; one that is frozen in time, like in a sci fi movie where people never age. Where everything is about immediate gratification, whether it’s checking Facebook yet again, or procuring another quick fix, on a bong, with an anomymous partner, with a few clicks of Internet porn.
The PC’s are like starving people, standing knee-deep in a free water stream, with all kinds of succulent berries nearby. They need only bend down and drink and eat, and yet they are starving.
The succor is God, not the pagan one, not the god of nature nor the god of sex. There is only one God who satisfies, who fills the hunger, who offers solace when the worst of life happens and you find yourself devastatingly, frighteningly, alone.
I want to close with a passage by G.K. Chesterton from the end of his book, The Everlasting Man. It’s a beautiful description of what happened when time was transformed from BC to AD:
The madness has remained sane when everything else went mad. The madhouse has been a house to which, age after age, men are continually coming back as home.
That is the riddle that remains; that anything so abrupt and abnormal should still be found a habitable and hospitable thing. I care not if the sceptics say is it is a tall story; I cannot see how so toppling a tower could stand so long without foundation.
Still less can I see how it could become, as it has become, the home of man. Had it merely appeared and disappeared, it might possibly have been remembered or explained as the last leap of the rage of illusion. . But the mind did not break. It is the one mind that remains unbroken in the break-up of the world.
If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death, than the world outside. . .
Though we dared not look on His face we could look on His fruits; and His fruits we should know Him. The fruits are solid and the fruitfulness is much more than a metaphor; and nowhere in this sad world are boys happier in apple-trees, or men in more equal chorus singing as they tread the vine, than under the fixed flash of this instant and intolerant enlightenment; the lightning made eternal as the light.
Robin of Berkeley
Robin is a recovering liberal, and a licensed psychotherapist who lives in Berkeley, California. The above information is intended for entertainment and educational purposes, rather than to offer any kind of definitive diagnoses.Visit Robin’s blog.
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