It would appear that under Pope Francis, the Church is acknowledging that popular opinion in western society has become so alienated by the legalistic efforts of conservative churches and political authority to uphold traditional morality, that Christians now urgently need a whole new framework to engage a culture that is steadily becoming more and more hostile to their values and worldview.
This is really a bad time to be a rigid traditionalist with old-fashioned notions of "God, honor, and country." In a sense, the world has simply passed them by - the world they speak of preserving and reviving has, in very important ways, already ceased to exist.
In its place, we have a global market economy where everything and everyone is basically commoditized into some monetary value, where even longstanding national borders are being rendered largely irrelevant by the demands of corporate profits, and where governmental and official institutions may claim to represent the will of the people as much as they want, but in practice must resort to playing catch-up with a tiny professional/managerial elite on the payrolls of multinational conglomerates.
We all uphold this system far more than our misgivings about it allow us to recognize.
What is really happening, under the radar screen of experts, is that western Christendom's materialist heresy - ultimately borne out of the Protestant Reformation, which in turn spawned the secular tsunami of the Enlightenment - is reaching its logical 500-year conclusion. It has flourished for this past half-millennium because that's how long it has taken to spread worldwide to a degree that allowed it to both conquer the western hemisphere and also fundamentally shake up the venerable Asiatic civilizations of the eastern hemisphere.
The nihilism that an essentially materialist worldview - even one that has so successfully cloaked itself with Christian belief for so long - simply cannot be averted. Modern Christendom has become a victim of its own success: by liberating the sphere of human material activity so dramatically, it has unleashed a beast that, despite its constant efforts to restrain it, progressively and inexorably becomes less and less manageable to any degree whatsoever, to the point where it devours the master who created it.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Thursday, October 23, 2014
America's most urgent need? A sexual counterrevolution!
Speaking as one who has been miraculously delivered from a 14-year addiction to at least daily masturbation, I must say that what this country needs so desperately is a sexual counterrevolution.
There will be no renewal of the Judeo-Christian faith in America without a "re-Puritanization" of our sexual ethics. Traditionalists in this country who lament the inexorable advance of the general sexual anarchy in society since the Sixties would do well to consider just how badly they and their brethren have failed to stem the tide of corruption of sexuality within the church.
With levels of porn use (which is typically accompanied by masturbation) at shocking epidemic levels among Christian men (30-50 percent in one recent survey) and even mini-epidemic levels among Christian women (up to 20 percent), how in the world can we expect to witness to the virtue of chastity?
We Christians must take a long, hard look beyond the veneer of these problems to see the root cause: a general lack of faith in the sufficiency of God alone to satisfy our deepest relational needs and longings.
Few single Christians take their relationship with God deep enough in prayer and fasting to seriously consider lifelong celibacy as an option - even though Scripture itself testifies that this is in fact the most blessed lifestyle (St. Paul to the Corinthians). Many if not most young Christians marry at least in part to relieve and contain sexual urges that they're resigned to otherwise going wild.
While this difficulty of celibacy has always existed in the history of the church, it is deeply compounded today by a culture that glamorizes the image at the expense of the substance - a culture that is more at home in the church than we as Christians often realize. Our whole megachurch and Billy Graham crusade-style evangelical Christian culture - for all its value - is not conducive to encouraging young believers to walk slowly and silently with the Lord, as opposed to aggressively pursuing spectacular ministry success that would merit a Christianity Today or Relevant magazine article.
Young Christians have mastered the art of compelling persuasion, powerful worship experiences and spiritual encounters: they have not grasped that true sanctity can only be attained through constant fasting and self-denial of both physical and psychological appetites. And of course, of all these appetites, the desire for sexual intimacy is the crown.
We live in an age where you can get spiritual highs and good feelings from yoga for a monetary fee that seems so much lighter than the moral demands of Christianity. Until Christians figure out how to abandon their feel-good-about-oneself spirituality and replace it with an austere neo-Puritanism, epitomized by a new repression of sexual passions, we will continue to lose ground in the ongoing culture war.
There will be no renewal of the Judeo-Christian faith in America without a "re-Puritanization" of our sexual ethics. Traditionalists in this country who lament the inexorable advance of the general sexual anarchy in society since the Sixties would do well to consider just how badly they and their brethren have failed to stem the tide of corruption of sexuality within the church.
With levels of porn use (which is typically accompanied by masturbation) at shocking epidemic levels among Christian men (30-50 percent in one recent survey) and even mini-epidemic levels among Christian women (up to 20 percent), how in the world can we expect to witness to the virtue of chastity?
We Christians must take a long, hard look beyond the veneer of these problems to see the root cause: a general lack of faith in the sufficiency of God alone to satisfy our deepest relational needs and longings.
Few single Christians take their relationship with God deep enough in prayer and fasting to seriously consider lifelong celibacy as an option - even though Scripture itself testifies that this is in fact the most blessed lifestyle (St. Paul to the Corinthians). Many if not most young Christians marry at least in part to relieve and contain sexual urges that they're resigned to otherwise going wild.
While this difficulty of celibacy has always existed in the history of the church, it is deeply compounded today by a culture that glamorizes the image at the expense of the substance - a culture that is more at home in the church than we as Christians often realize. Our whole megachurch and Billy Graham crusade-style evangelical Christian culture - for all its value - is not conducive to encouraging young believers to walk slowly and silently with the Lord, as opposed to aggressively pursuing spectacular ministry success that would merit a Christianity Today or Relevant magazine article.
Young Christians have mastered the art of compelling persuasion, powerful worship experiences and spiritual encounters: they have not grasped that true sanctity can only be attained through constant fasting and self-denial of both physical and psychological appetites. And of course, of all these appetites, the desire for sexual intimacy is the crown.
We live in an age where you can get spiritual highs and good feelings from yoga for a monetary fee that seems so much lighter than the moral demands of Christianity. Until Christians figure out how to abandon their feel-good-about-oneself spirituality and replace it with an austere neo-Puritanism, epitomized by a new repression of sexual passions, we will continue to lose ground in the ongoing culture war.
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