A crumbling cultural foundation

“… for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as
they were from the beginning of the creation.”

–The Apostle Peter

In the grand scheme of things, human beings have a pretty
short-term window on “life, the universe, and everything,” as Douglas
Adams so aptly phrased it. Especially here in the West, we tend to
believe that our children will live in much the same world that we
inhabit. Oh, their world will be a bit faster because of the Internet.
They will live a bit longer and be a bit healthier because of medical
advances. They will probably even earn more money because of a better
education and a little inflation. And their children will be born, grow
up and have it better, too.

But lurking underneath the changes we see is another crumbling
structure supporting our window on the world, although few are aware of
it. Like the lights that always come on, the tap water we never think
about, the school our kids have always attended — it’s always been
there — for as long as any of us can remember. Three brief reports will
illustrate:

On Sunday, Sept. 17, a Muslim sharia court in Nigeria sentenced a
pregnant 17-year-old girl to 180 strokes of the cane. She will be
flogged publicly 40 days after she gives birth, for having pre-marital
sex.

In Britain, the Aug. 17 London Express reports that children as young
as 11 are being treated for sexually transmitted diseases. The report
quoted Dr. Richard Slack as explaining that “the vast majority of young
sufferers were participating in active sexual relationships — and were
not the victims of abuse or attack.”

On Sept. 19, the Ashville Citizen-Times reported that pagans from
around the United States are flocking to Reynolds High School to conduct
a copycat “we still pray” rally around the flagpole. “You can’t have
only the Christian religion in the schools,” said the Appalachian Pagan
Alliance.

Taken by themselves, each of these reports are disturbing or
upsetting in their own right. But they are not occurring by themselves.
They are clustered around the fissures opening amidst the crumbling
Christian consensus upon which our culture has been erected. Like the
tap water and electricity, our underlying Christian worldview has always
been there — throughout our lifetime and indeed through the lifetimes
of our parents and their parents. It has defined who and what we are,
both as individuals and a nation, indeed, the whole of Western
civilization: It is our system of justice, our moral expectations and
the God we worship. We could not be more wrong than to assume this
Christian culture — already a crumbling edifice — will be there for
our children or our children’s children.

As the Christian structure we have always known decays, perhaps we
will become a Muslim society. They have a different standard of justice,
one in which mercy and forgiveness play a lesser role. Or perhaps we
shall become a godless society — they have a different view of
children. We might even become a pagan society: driven and controlled by
gods of wood and stone, to match our hearts.

The medical advances we so eagerly anticipate were made possible by
science. But science would not have developed without a Christian
worldview. Without a view of God as the creator of all that is —
reliable and unchanging — what is the point of discovering today’s laws
when tomorrow they may be different? Witness the growth of alternative
medical treatments as science topples from the crumbling Christian
edifice upon which it was built. Do you enjoy the individual liberty
that our Western culture provides? Without God as the final judge of
both the great and the small, the law of the jungle prevails, and might
makes right. Goodbye “liberty and justice for all,” and your
“inalienable rights.”

If you recognized my opening quote from the Apostle Peter, you also
noticed that I’d left off the first part. In so doing, I twisted its
meaning backwards. Peter was in fact chastising “scoffers” who believed
things had always been — and would always be — as they now are. It
took 12 centuries of Christian thought — and a good deal of bloodshed
— for humanity to claw its way to the Magna Carta. It took another five
centuries to produce “We the people. …”

Jesus’ favorite book was Deuteronomy in the Old Testament. In chapter
5, verse 9, God reveals one element of His character to humanity,
quoting the Second Commandment as He gave it to Moses:

“Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them [other gods], nor serve
them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of
the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of
them that hate me. …”

Yes, you can have a Muslim or an atheist or a pagan society. But
recognize that 11-year-old girls, pregnant teenagers and their parents
are treated differently inside those worldviews. The window that you
are so comfortably living behind and looking out through, thinking that
you can pick and choose from among the delights you see, is built on a
Christian foundation — even for all the fissures and cracks that have
accumulated during the last 150 years of disrepair. You can step off of
it, but don’t expect your sons or daughters to thank you for what you
have bequeathed them.