MY NEW BOOK IS OUT! (Yes, you need to buy it!)

ANNOUNCEMENT: Today my new book, Christianity and the (R)evolution in Worldviews in Western Culture came out. It is available on Amazon.com. I thought I’d share a section from chapter 10.

On September 11^th 2001 the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda high-jacked four planes. The passengers on Flight 93 were able to overpower the high-jackers, but Flight 93 still went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The three other planes, though, hit their intended targets: one plane crashed into the Pentagon while the other two hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Within a few hours, the two towers came crashing down. All in all, almost 3,000 people were killed in those terrorist attacks.

In many ways, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center acted as a prophetic sign to the Western world. As we look back almost twenty years later, we can see that the image of those twin towers crashing down into the streets of Manhattan was a precursor to the upheaval in our current society that has been brought about by the crumbling foundations of American society and Western culture as a whole. It was a shock to the system to see what was once thought of as invincible to be shown to be immensely vulnerable.

Since 9/11, there have been a number of shocks to the system in Western society in general, and America in particular, that have caused people to fear that the very foundations of Western culture are crumbling: global terrorism, growing extremism in both American political parties, rising tensions over  a variety of social issues, as well as the impact that social media and cable news have had in heightening, and ultimately profiting from, stoking partisan passions and further inflaming societal rage. It seems that everywhere one looks in society today, one sees a frightening illustration of William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Indeed, it seems that things are falling apart, and angry people are more interested in picking up rocks from the rubble in order to throw them at their perceived enemies than they are in clearing away the rubble and trying to establish a more stable foundation upon which to build society. And so, the natural question facing Christians today is this: how are we to respond to and address the current state of Western society whose foundations seem to be crumbling before our eyes?

The Roman Bridge

Francis Schaeffer asked a similar question in 1976, in his book How Shall We Then Live? In it, he used the metaphor of a Roman bridge to explain his concept of worldview. In ancient Rome, Roman bridges were built strong enough to bear the weight of people, carts, and horses. If someone today was to drive a modern truck over those bridges, though, they would inevitably crumble under the weight. The foundations of those Roman bridges might have been strong enough in ancient Rome, but they simply are no longer strong enough for the larger and heavier vehicles of the modern world.

Schaeffer said that the same principle held true for the worldview of any given society. A worldview provides a basic philosophical foundation for a society, but the strength of that worldview will be seen in its ability to deal with the mounting pressures of life. If it is unable to address and deal with those pressures in life, then that foundation upon which that society was built will soon crack and crumble, and that culture will eventually collapse.

The analogy of the Roman bridge may seem to work well at first, but its inadequacy can be seen in Schaeffer’s flawed critique of modern, secular culture, as well as his understanding of the Protestant Reformation. Schaeffer argued that the Protestant Reformation was a reaction to the growing humanistic worldview within the Catholic Church and that it sought to establish a truly biblical worldview. Although Schaeffer said that the Protestant Reformation was no golden age, it is quite clear in his writings that in his view, it certainly was close to it.

Similarly, Schaeffer looked at Western society in the latter part of the 20^th century and saw secular humanism as destroying the “worldview base” that the Reformers had established. Therefore, Schaeffer (as well as Evangelicals for the past forty years) declared that there was a “battle of worldviews” between secular humanists and compromised Christians on one side and Bible-believing Evangelical Christians on the other. For Schaeffer, the answer to society’s ills was clear: we need to get back to a biblical worldview and base our culture on the Bible, and the Bible alone.

There are a number of problems with this, though. The first problem, as we saw in the chapter on the Protestant Revolution, is that the concept of Sola Scriptura is fraught with difficulties, none more glaring than the fact that people have different interpretations of the Bible and what it means to have a biblical worldview. All too often they mistake their own biases and selective reading of the Bible for “what the Bible clearly says.” The result, as the wars of religion and the well over 20,000 current Protestant denominations clearly show, is that claims of Sola Scriptura have led to more division and fragmentation than unity and stability.

A second problem is that the concept of Sola Scriptura tends to lead people to assume that the Bible provides ready-made answers to all of life’s problems: if we just “get back to the Bible,” clear answers will be made evident, and all we will have to do is do what the Bible says. This way of viewing the Bible, though, essentially turns the Bible itself into an idol. It is a mentality that is eerily similar to what Nietzsche called the Will to Truth and Slave Morality, where people do not try to think for themselves, but rather look for some authoritative verdict that will simply tell them what to do.  In reality, this is true of all forms of idolatry. It demands slavish subservience to an imposed moral system and keeps people in a state of perpetual slavery and childishness, and thus impedes true growth and maturity of the individual.

This leads us to a third problem. An idol alone is ultimately powerless, and so what happens is that the “high priests” of any idolatrous system often seek political power to impose that system on others. This is what happened in the Protestant Revolution, when Protestant leaders appealed to secular governments for not only protection, but also to impose their particular version of Christianity on society as a whole. And this is what we have seen transpire over the past forty years in America. The “Religious Right” that Schaeffer was so instrumental in galvanizing has often mistaken a biblical worldview with the political platform of the Republican party. And more recently, the reaction to this politicization of Evangelicalism can be seen in a Christian progressivism that has largely come to mistake a biblical worldview with the political platform of the Democrat Party.

The Culture and Politics of Dehumanization

This brings us to the heart of the problem of the cultural crisis facing our society today. We must realize that as long as there is human history, there will always be new issues and challenges that face any culture or society. And the fact is that the answers to those new challenges will very rarely, if ever, be self-evident and simple. How a society goes about addressing those cultural challenges and problems, though, will determine whether or not the culture of that society continues to flourish or collapse. Simply put, it takes real human beings to be able to adequately address such challenges.

Too many people, though, fail to contemplate the complexities of the many social issues of our day, and thus show themselves to be, in fact, less than full human beings. Instead, they have opted for the over-simplistic answers that are doled out on social media and in the talking-points of both political parties. For all practical purposes, far too many people, Christians included, have made political ideology their new religion, and that has quickly taken on all the trappings of political idolatry. The result has been that instead of being salt and light in the world, instead of acting as society’s conscience, instead of being real human beings in the image of God, both Christian conservatives and Christian progressives have allowed themselves to become pawns and puppets to the talking points and power-plays of their respective political parties and now actually help hasten the crumbling of our society’s foundations and the destruction of Western culture.

This leads us to another point that Schaeffer made in his book: the power of the media to manipulate the truth by effectively choosing which images to display and what issues on which to focus. It could be for the purpose of selling shampoo, using products to advance a particular social agenda, or promoting a particular political party. What he warned about that could happen has become a reality in our society today. Advertisers craft images that depict a life of bliss if you only buy their product and a life of despair if you go without it. They also often attach their products to various social causes, all for the purpose of selling more stuff and increasing profits.

Opinion news and social media are also big business, and nothing generates interest and profits more than outrage and dire warnings of apocalyptic disaster if “the other side” gets power. When that passes for news, political parties are more than eager to use it, ironically, to amass power for themselves. The formula is fairly simple: generate hatred and paranoia of the other side while presenting the most attractive images of your own side. It is a successful formula for news media, politicians, and reality TV shows.

Paranoia of “them” is a seductive drug that news organizations, social media, and politicians readily peddle. Once they get you hooked, you find yourself gravitating to certain sites and networks that do nothing more than feed your own biases and stoke your fears. The result is that what was once a living, breathing, thinking human being is now a political and consumeristic idolater, an addict who has become brainwashed by partisan propaganda and clever marketing schemes—a mindless puppet easily swayed by a sensationalistic headline.

This is the state in which we now find ourselves: the mounting pressures in life are crushing us because we have chosen to look to advertising campaigns and political platforms to provide our foundational worldview and have allowed news organizations and social media to act as nothing more than propaganda arms for the party or product of our choice. The end result, as we are now seeing, is that people, Christians included, simply want their particular political ideology imposed on the rest of society, and they are willing to overlook even the most grievous of sins in their own party in the process. It seems we are willingly sacrificing our freedom for ideological tyranny—we are okay with it, as long as “our side” wins.

This is the consequence of our modern political idolatry: the belief that, given the right advertisers, a ready-made political system, put in place by any means necessary, can solve every societal problem. But such a system never produces freedom and fully mature men and women who bear the image of God. It always breeds the oppression of immature slaves who bear the image of the beasts they worship. In America, it is either an elephant or an ass.

***If you buy my book, I’d appreciate it if you also took the time to right a book review of the book on Amazon. Thanks!