It has been said that, in the Bible belt, everyone is a Christian until they get their drivers’ license. As soon as a child is old enough to leave his upbringing, he does so. And, after a time of wild living, he frequently comes back to the church so that his kids can go to …
The MulitCulti Schmooze
“By contrast, contemporary multiculturalism absolves one from knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 71).
Clutching at Novelty
“A dying civilization, Christendom, on a swiftly moving, ebbing tide, clutches at any novelty in art and literature, ready to accept and then almost at once reject whatever is new no matter how perverse or abnormal. We have a ‘weariness with striving to be men,’ as the American critic Leslie Fiedler put it” (Malcolm Muggeridge, …
Crisis of Faith
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, …
Living Like a Trinitarian
I recently told a class of tenth-graders that what our culture needed was a return to trinitarian bubble-gum commercials. They were a little nonplussed, and so I hastened to explain. Individuals with one set of ultimate commitments have the capacity to live in alien soil, that is, a culture with a different set of commitments. …
Soft Power, Aye
“‘Soft power’ is wielded by soft cultures, usually because they lack the will to maintain hard power. Can you remain a soft power for long? Maybe a generation or two. But a soft culture will, by its very nature, be unlikely to find the strength to stand up to a sustained assault by blunter, cruder …
His Canterburyness
“The last Archbishop of Canterbury but one, Dr. Ramsey, appeared not to realize this when, to my amazement, at the end of a performance of Godspell, he rose to his feet and shouted: ‘Long live God,’ which, as I reflected at the time, was like shouting, ‘Carry on eternity’ or ‘keep going infinity.’ The incident …
Good News and Bad News
A lawless culture is at war with more than just the “rules.” Antinomianism likes to posture and say that it is simply against tiresome restrictions. But the cultural effects of lawlessness touch far more than just the idea of law. When lawlessness has run its course, it has demolished the very idea of forgiveness. Of …
Why Statism Won’t Save Us from Islam
“A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, hundreds of movies at the video store, and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body he’s happy to have the choice taken out of …
Believing Skepticism
“Next to this genius of Pascal’s words I would draw your attention to the beautiful lucidity of his mind, the wonderful clarity of his thought. Like all true believers, he was deeply skeptical” (Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, p. 4).