As “Da Vinci Code” furor readies to brush through the nation’s movie theaters, Dan Brown writes, “almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.” The idea of Western Civilization, no less than the identity of the soul, is questionable upon Brown’s reassertion of the heretical Gnostic gospels. How falls the “Da Vinci Code” upon the minds of the rising generation?
The fact is, young Americans are starved for truth, for meaning in a confused world. That most young people would call truth a relative thing does not mean they disbelieve the existence of truth. Truth is the great heart-desire of our generation. Yet seek it though our generation does, truth is foreign. We await as Ninevites a lost voice of prophecy.
So when a prophet emerges from the New York Times best-seller list to Hollywood, we are dazzled. If we may as easily take for our personal truth the fictional texts of the “Da Vinci Code” as the Bible, arguments will fall on minds deprived of foundations.
The ideas, ancient and modern, that form our heritage are easily forsaken by the cult of postmodernism. Much good there is that bears not upon our age – much we have forgotten. We begin again as in a state of fallen nature, ideas at our distant disposal, love at our longing, truth abroad. The love and truth we need we feel as aliens. Our consciences are dull, yet our hearts ache to live. In such a state, we must choose, urgently, or die.
It is an age of choice. If we field ourselves in religion, we may become a Muslim or a Mormon or a Methodist; in drinks a Sobe or a Dr. Pepper, a Budweiser or a Coors; in musical culture Emo or Rap or Metal; in sexual orientation gay or straight or bi or trans. And who may judge which is better than another?
God may.
God bids us choose life that we might live. He shows us the one thing needful. Though choice is multitudinous in this moment, one eternal choice transcends. Though postmodern life is bewilderment, sense survives.
And dead though Dan Brown’s god is, the God of truth lives. Jesus Christ still reigns and offers His life to a dying world, His purpose to a lost world. As Robert Robinson penned in the 18th century, we are “prone to wander,” and we “feel it.” We feel our wounded condition in desperate hearts. We rummage among choices for something we can finally know, beyond the elementary sense of feeling.
There is, among the rising generation, whom Colleen Carroll has called “the new faithful.” A new survey of 1,200 randomly chosen college students by the Harvard Institute of Politics shows that 70 percent consider religion important or very important in their lives. Twenty-five percent claim to have become more spiritual since commencing higher education.
Spirituality is un-topical at the postmodern university. The professors despise the soul. But they cannot kill the spirit of a generation as easily as they once thought. The Baby Boomer elites who administer and teach in our universities move toward retirement. The cultural gurus who thought they would be forever young find themselves now old.
A generation gap gapes wider; young people desire faith despite the plans of our elders. Vanguards are shifting; instead of the secular Left that would kill our spirit and usher the age of anarchy had they chance, we see the rise of a generation desiring order in the soul and in the community.
For many parents, according to the Times of London this week, the faith of their children “creates a generational gulf as significant as that of the 1950s and 1960s, when rebellion was all about breaking boundaries. Now, it seems, the tables have thoroughly turned and there is a genuine thirst among many young people to establish strong moral codes and rules, to give up the alcohol, drug taking and casual sex synonymous with many of their parents’ Western culture.”
It is the rebellion of our generation. Myfanwy Franks, author of a book about choosing fundamentalist faith in the West, says, “more and more it seems that becoming highly religious is the ultimate form of rebellion, because secularity is really our society’s main religion now. A lot of people utterly despise religion, don’t they? To convert to Islam or Christianity is really the punk rock of the modern age.”
Real faith seems but a choice among the gods of the pagans. But the rebels are searching, and it is a moment for Christians.
For there is an advantage to the Christian faith above the others: grace. It is armament eternal, strength immeasurable. To grace we may appeal for all victory, knowing that victory is already won. We cannot risk sitting out of the adventure of our generation. We must resolve to love the postmoderns, to speak truth, to live a prayer.
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