In which our regular writers toss around
subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Between
1992 and 2014, the percentage of Americans who reject religious affiliation
soared from six to twenty-two — 35% for millennials. And yet partisan
clashes today are more brutal than at any time since Vietnam war protests and
racial tensions of the late sixties, and the sense of “us” vs. “them” in
America is only increasing.
Tom: Is this what happens when we seek peace
without the Prince of Peace, Immanuel Can?
That Crazy Fascist
Tom: Well, as you
know, I live in Canada. We Canadians did not vote in November’s U.S. election,
so you might think that by March of the next year, we’d be talking about
something else, right? Wrong. Every single restaurant I have gone to since last
year, the conversation at the table beside me has been about Donald Trump and
his “crazy, fascist” regime. Yesterday, three gay men at the table beside us
basically recited CNN’s morning anti-Trump talking points for anyone who could
overhear. And people I know who have spoken to progressives in the U.S. are
saying the same things about opinions there.
And
yet that crazy fascist was elected by what is likely a majority of U.S. voters.
You may not like their choice, but you have to recognize that a very
significant portion of that country is radically different in its thinking from
Canadians and American Leftists. That’s on questions of immigration, globalism,
the outsourcing of American jobs, neocon warmongering, social justice …
you name it, there are major issues.
IC: Well, and on the
flip side, what I’m seeing is that conservative-leaning people, particularly
young men, but also a fair number of young women, are becoming more overt about
contradicting that in public.
Enabled By Craziness
Tom: Yes, the social
justice narrative has taken a major credibility hit.
IC: A few years ago,
if you expressed a conservative opinion you could expect to be quietly murdered
or witch-hunted to death by all around; but right now, you can expect to draw
sizeable backing immediately, from people who probably always felt sympathetic
to your view but who would not formerly have had confidence to make it known.
Instantly, there are two pugnacious sides, each using its own strident and
overt rhetorical style to antagonize the other.
Leftists,
having been deprived of their sense of commanding the majority, are resorting
to rage, dramatics and violence. And on the Right, people are becoming cynical
provocateurs. Everybody’s polarized.
Tom: Yes. The media
says Trump provoked this outbreak of “fascistic” conservatism with his
inflammatory invective about immigration and so on, but I don’t think that’s
quite right. President Trump merely read the pulse of the nation and responded
accordingly. He didn’t change many minds. He simply gave the political Right a
live body to get behind at a time when people who had kept quiet for years were
beginning to recognize it was do-or-die for the Republican party. I’m sure many
who voted for him would have been much happier with somebody different to
coalesce behind.
Violence in the Streets
What
Trump HAS done, as you say, is made it okay to say what you already thought.
And there’s nothing fascistic about expressing personal opinions. It’s Leftists
that are beating people up in the streets and in restaurants, though invariably
some on the Right will feel justified in responding to violence with equal or
greater violence, and it’s bound to get even uglier.
So,
yes, it’s polarized out there, and there are not a lot of handshakes and hugs
coming anytime soon. But as The Atlantic
article points out, this level of hostility is occurring at a very secular time
in history, and that fact is really coming as a surprise to people who assumed
that it was religion that was primarily to blame for much of the cultural
conflict in the U.S.
IC: Well, that was always a silly view, wasn’t it? It was like the
“religion causes wars” meme that everybody believes but is statistically
ridiculous. However, I’m perplexed by the degree to which conservatives —
and many evangelicals as well — have jumped onto the Trump train or into
the Hillary handcart. Still others have become promoters of social justice
causes like #BlackLivesMatter instead of holding any particular Christian
perspective. That’s what the article is dealing with. And it suggests that the
reason that “religious” people on both the Left and Right are defining
themselves by political parties is that they have left church.
Lapsed Christians Get Political
What do you think of that observation, Tom?
Tom: Well, I think the writer, Peter Beinart, is missing a couple of
pieces of the puzzle, IC.
First, some of the people who have left
church in the last 20 years were probably neither believers nor
conservatives. They “did church” because that’s what people used to do, and
vague religiosity is not something people bother with in an individualistic
society that no longer expects church attendance from public figures. For those
people, political identification and church attendance are unrelated.
Second, a statistically significant number
of real Christians have stopped going to church because of the decadence and
hypocrisy of North American denominations. These folks are all over the
Internet, and I can tell you they’re numerous, conversant with scripture, and
looking for something more real than what their former churches
were offering. Evangelicals have left church because their churches compromised
on scripture by ordaining women, pandering to the gay and transgender lobbies,
and even some Catholics have stopped attending because of their social justice
pope and his pro-Muslim stand.
So Beinart might have it wrong way round
here. I don’t think it’s that people are identifying politically because they
are really secularized former believers. Rather, I think to some extent, people
have left their churches because their churches have internalized Leftist
politics, and they’re repulsed.
Let the Games Begin
IC: The reasons
people have left the major denominations is an important topic, but I’m not
sure we can do it justice here. It’s been noted for some time.
More
interestingly, it seems that as nominal (not actual) Christianity and
nominal church identification have dropped, identification with political
causes and parties has become more radical and unprincipled. And I think that
does bear some examination. For even nominal involvement with church does
entail people giving a nod to traditional Protestant moral and ethical values,
and these have traditionally suffused certain aspects of the culture and
influenced the tone of public discourse. It seems their stock is running out,
but the appetite of people for identification with causes is as strong as it
ever was. Except now their ideological impulses are unrestrained by
quasi-Christian moral values. Let the games begin.
Tom: Yes, I think
that’s fair. We’re in for a crazy time, and the Lord’s name is going to be
tacked on to some pretty questionable causes, as is already occurring. And it’s
not going to be simple to sort out the players. You have atheists on both
sides. You have real, live pagans on both sides. (I won’t take time to prove
this, but I’m not kidding: a small group of hyper-nationalists actually
advocate Odin-worship as a substitute for Christianity, which they believe has
had its day in Western culture and failed. But there are pagans on the Left as
well, in the form of Wiccans and so on.) Then you have the irreligious
ideologues on both sides. You also have religious hypocrites on both sides.
Finally, you have real Christians on both sides, some of whom are doing things
they probably shouldn’t because they have little real understanding of the
believer’s heavenly calling or his role in this world.
In
short, it’s a mess.
All the Bad News
IC: Nice summary. Is
there an opportunity in this new, contentious political atmosphere, Tom, or is
it all bad news?
Tom: I think there may
be, actually. People are really shaken up at the moment. And they’re asking a
lot of questions, and they are not asking idly. They really want answers. The
trick, I think, is to concentrate on dealing with the questions that really
matter. Which is tough.
Take
me, for instance. I’m convinced the globalist agenda is the work of Satan, the
rebooted Tower of Babel, and that it cannot possibly work the way its advocates
insist. I believe the people who push it are impoverishing my neighbours and
hurting my friends and co-workers, because they are. I believe globalism ends
in issuing in the Antichrist and all that he stands for, and I’m totally not in
a rush to do that. I have people I want to talk to about the Lord first.
That said, dedicating my life to the cause of exposing political untruth is not
what I’m here for. Putting Band-Aids on the ailing World Order is not the job
of believers. Preaching the gospel is.
So
I think there is opportunity if we don’t get caught up in the here
and now.
Believing the Word of God
IC: That’s maybe one of the messages the church needs to be sending out …
that we know what prophecy says, and that being a Christian means believing
that rather than the advertisements of the globalists.
I’ve got another one: that no political solution is
God’s solution. And another: that disagreements must not be handled in a media
circus, but rather by firmly, gently and reverently giving an answer for the
hope we have. What else, Tom?
Tom: Well, I do think the writer of The
Atlantic article has a point, though he may not have quite registered it
himself, and that is that increased secularism is not the answer to the world’s
problems. Secularists don’t get along any better than the worst, most bigoted
sorts of archaic religious people so frequently maligned in the media. The
evidence is right in front of our eyes.
Morality-Free Rule
IC: That’s a hard sell to secularists, but it’s absolutely true.
Secular wars killed 148 million people in just the last century alone. The
problem with secularism is that it is morality-free. Once you’ve decided on
your political project, you feel justified in doing anything to anyone in order
to bring it about. You believe that the only thing standing between the human
race and utopia is those people who still refuse to believe in your solution …
and because they are standing between you and your “heaven”, you feel
completely justified in hating them and reviling them, then in rounding them up
and incarcerating, “re-educating”, torturing and eliminating them. The time
comes when you think you’re doing the human race a favour by killing some.
Tom: We’re there.
IC: I don’t see that ultimately, there’s more hope for Christians in
the secular Right than in the secular Left, do you?
Tom: No, because the “rightness” of either can shift on a dime,
depending on what’s actually going on in the world around us. Neither political
perspective is moored in eternal values. We need to fix our perspective on the
things that matter to God, not the things that reflect the values of our generation.
IC: That’s a good way to put it.
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