Yeats notwithstanding, we are not exactly slouching toward Bethlehem. Slouching toward Bedlam is more like it.
As the culture around us has gotten ever weirder, and as the leadership of our Reformed and evangelical subculture has done its level best to keep abreast of all the latest advances (lest we be dismissed for being what we in fact are), real conservatives in the church (who see what goeth on) are not surprisingly tempted to fall into the besetting sin of real conservatives everywhere. The only thing for it now, they reason, is to rummage in the tool box and come out with a particularly shrill jeremiad. What is wanted around here, it is thought, is for somebody to tell all these people that they are going to HELL.
Now that is where they are going, and it is not an incidental point. When our academics and scholars, filled with respectability lust (and the other kind of lust too), do their best to shovel as much damnation into the Church as they can, someone ought to call them on it. We do need more sermons where the minister of the Word spits on his hands before he starts in. We do need more sermons where the minister of the Word lays about him with enthusiasm.
But there is a tactical point to be made first. The whole confused pomo world, including its emo-Christian variants, is quite willing to be tagged by conservatives as “damned,” but only so long as they get to be Mephistopheles. That, by necessary implication, puts their critic in the role of a fundamentalist thug, and so they can dismiss the whole thing. They are quite confident that their hellfire buddy here has never read Derrida or Heidegger. What’s an urbane sophisticate to do when he encounters someone who comes off like a hotgospel graduate of Sioux City Bible College? The answer is that he chuckles and shakes his head knowingly. The fact that the fundamentalist fulminations are righteous (and right) does not make them effective.
There is nothing sinful about using a cudgel, but there is something tactically wrong-headed about using a weapon that they have fully prepared for, which they are hoping you will use, and which they have a ready defense for. This is why I prefer to attack them where they don’t want to be attacked, and to use weapons that they all loathe. I call my little dagger “Sting,” but the goblins under the mountain all call it “Hate Crime.”
Their Mephistopheles schtick is not just their emotional shield, it is their central idol. Shatter it. And how do you shatter these pretensions? You do it by attacking them in the first instance. If we are dealing with damnable pretensions, and we are, start with the noun before moving on to the adjective. If you decide to attack a city, you should deal with the defenses first.
So as all the lunacy of 2012 — with digital swiftness — fills up your inbox, computer screen, and flat screen, and as you see Christian leaders stroking their chins in response over some particularly fruity contributions from the homo hipsters, or the femmy flannery fanboys, or the dodgy darwinians, or the pomo poofters, or the vitalist vegans, or the loco localists, and so on, down the street and around the corner, always remember this. You can’t attack a gaudy show by becoming part of it. If your desire is to attack the circus, you won’t get anywhere by joining the circus.