Crisis of Faith

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Christians still have to get used to the idea that non-believers are the establishment. And once they are accustomed to that notion, they have to come to realize that it is at bottom good news.

In the last century, when the orthodox Christian establishment capitulated to the incoming waves of modernism, liberalism, Darwinism, and collectivism, they did so as beleaguered defenders of a great city with weak-willed leaders. They were not at all sure that they really needed to fight, and, when the need became obvious, they were not sure that they wanted to. Because there had been an antecedent complacency mixed with failure of nerve, the Christian resistance to the urbane mockery of modernity amounted to nothing more than a respectable growling, followed immediately by a discrete retreat to the ghettoes of evangelicaldom. And there, ever since, we have quietly occupied ourselves, building our very own radio stations, printing up our very own tee-shirts and bumperstickers, and publishing our very own books for our very own bookstores. In every way, believing Christianity has accepted her exile to the cultural periphery. And as the historical chapter of our century has been written by non-believers, we have been nothing more than some kind of sub-cultural marginalia, scribbled absently off to the side.

But this happened to us for a reason. The establishment orthodoxy (whatever that “orthodoxy” happens to be) always tends to get fat and sleek, and, once its position is secure, unaccustomed to fighting. The “orthodoxy” of today is epitomized by evolutionary, relativistic, sixties radicals who are now university presidents with a cushy salary, and it must be said that at least some Christians outside have an increasingly lean and hungry look. What happened to us a century ago is happening to them now.

The unbelieving worldview is unraveling. For a time inertia could keep the whole thing going. For a time, necessary consequences might be postponed. A good juggler can keep twenty plates spinning on the end of twenty sticks for a good while. But make him try it with one hundred and twenty plates, and bad things start to happen.

Nothing can hide the obvious hollowness of modernity, and even the most trenchant of cultural critics cannot escape from the vanity of it. For example, in his fine book Technopoly, Neil Postman carefully shows how the idol of technology has failed us. It has shaped our thinking, as all cultures do, but in this case it has shaped our thinking in such a way that we don’t feel the need even to think anymore. But having shown that our stainless steel culture has no concept of real transcendence, he concludes with a call for . . . comparative religion courses in the public schools. Having thoughtfully analyzed our culture’s famine, a famine of the Word of God, resulting in a people starving for genuine transcendence, his solution is to offer some scratch n’ sniff form of transcendence. Postman believes that a sense of transcendence can be recovered if one simply respects those who have the real thing. But no sense of eternal purpose can be derived from seeing what the temporal value of such a purpose would be if we had it, but we don’t anyway so never mind.

Maybe science can save us. But in many different ways, we can now see that great priesthood of modernity, our global college of scientists, confessing that their gods no longer deliver. In his fascinating book The End of Science, science reporter John Horgan walks away from a lecture by Stephen Hawking with an odd respect tempered with . . . disbelief. “On the other hand, what he was saying struck me as being utterly preposterous. Wormholes? Baby universes? Infinite dimensional superspace of string theory? This seemed more science fiction than science.”

Science used to be thought of by many as the last academic refuge for fixed standards. But it has now become a haven for fads and fashions every bit as silly as those which afflict the Paris dress industry. Autonomous science used to be built on the foundation of the fact, not theory, of evolution. Adding insult to the whole thing, in recent years some in the science establishment have taken to insulting Darwinism with loud whoops, and quite a few people don’t know what to do now. When Dr. Behe opened Darwin’s Black Box, all he found in there were the emperor’s clothes.

Of course the humanities gave up the ghost long ago. Our literature has veered in the direction it always does when cultures fall apart — into the direction of lasciviousness and pornography. No vague hand-wringing appeal to traditional values can bring it back to propriety again. The arts of sculpture and painting have degenerated into chaos. Our popular forms of entertainment continue to pursue a mindlessness with an incredible devotional zeal. The airwaves, cables, and satellite dishes are filled with eye and ear candy.

What this all means is that our failure of nerve last century is being imitated by those who replaced us. No culture can stand if it does not know what standing is. No society can survive if none of her wise men can give one good reason why it should. No civilization can last if her philosophers think it shouldn’t. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

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