A few days after New Year’s I visited a dentist who cheerfully announced how he thought 2020 had ‘a nice ring to it’ and that it no doubt would be a great year.
Oops.
Though I’ve never had any real interest in space travel, aside from cheering it on from the couch, I am now downright envious of those astronauts who recently, at supersonic speeds, were catapulted away from earth and into outer space. Oh, to be in orbit in the spring!
As a corollary to the cartoon above, I once saw one showing God, also with the requisite long white beard, sitting on a cloud, and pointing his TV remote at a distant earth frantically trying to change the channel.
St. Augustine once wrote a prayer in which he famously offered, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in thee.”
This means what it says. God made us to worship and adore Him, our Creator. We can never know rest or inward peace unless we seek Him and strive to live accordingly.
In the same vein, Blaise Pascal wrote: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”
But rather than fill that vacuum with God, we tend to fill it with junk.
When I was young, I loved to go to McDonald’s and order a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke. That special sauce was the bomb!
Nowadays, when choosing what to eat, I mostly consider how I’m going to feel afterward. Having experienced the leaden, sluggish feeling following such ill-considered binges, junk food has now lost its appeal. I just feel better eating healthy, nutritious food.
It’s the same with the things of the spirit. We can stuff our souls with moral and spiritual rot, which, though perhaps outwardly appealing, ends up as nothing more than empty calories. Our hearts remain restless still.
Which is to say we never lose our desire for God. For we cannot. It’s how we were made. And no amount of wishful thinking can alter this. But we can attempt to satisfy this constant longing with pale substitutes, otherwise known as idols.
For years, my personal working definition of an idol is anything that promises to provide that which only God can provide.
Idolatry leads to disordered desire. Because the object of our desire is intrinsically false, we end up deceived by the fallacious and the untrustworthy. All our energy is directed toward that which fails us, leaving us unhappy and unfulfilled.
Worse still, the root cause of our God problem is obscured, making it impossible to fix. We want what we do not want.
It’s hardly a secret that over the last 50 or 60 years, American religion has faltered. Every major Christian denomination has hemorrhaged numbers. Today they are a skeleton of what they once were. The culture has moved steadily away and towards a secular, even pagan, worldview, rejecting traditional, confessional Christian belief out of hand.
But, as Pascal reminds us, nature abhors a vacuum. Our need for religion doesn’t just disappear, because it can’t. So we search for new (or old) forms of religious belief and community, something that offers us meaning and helps tie together the various strands of our bewildering world.
Over the decades what has emerged is a new(ish) secular progressive religion that mimics the old, albeit unwittingly, even exaggerating the very characteristics its detractors claim to hate.
There is an ironclad set of dogmatic assertions that are collectively held and rigorously enforced. It is a community of true believers within which one hopes for a sense of belonging amid an otherwise impersonal world. Non-believers are shunned as heretics.
What about morals? These are not nihilists, as we might suppose. Rather, they profess a hyper-strict moralism enforced with puritanical zeal. Their stridency and self-righteousness rivals, in fact, that of the old New England Puritans, who probably would be green with envy. Of course, that’s where the self-righteousness mostly comes from; it’s Protestantism without the baggage of Christianity.
In a recent article entitled, America in the Aftermath of George Floyd: Between Paganism and Christianity, Joshua Mitchell argues that what we may be seeing in America today is a toxic admixture of paganism and Christianity.
Paganism, he maintains, is the default religion of humankind, one that has existed for most of human history. Until, that is, Christianity emerged.
“The pagan world,” he explains, “was the world of many gods, each associated with a people who made payments and sacrifices to their gods. Rousseau wrote…that when pagan nations battled other pagan cultures, soldiers did not battle soldiers; rather, gods battled gods. Hence, the cathartic rage of pagan wars.”
“Christianity toppled the pagan world. The cathartic rage of war, Christians argued, in which one nation purged another, could not solve the problem of man’s stain, which was original.”
Blood rage against another people or nation, in other words, can never expunge or expiate the stain of individual sin that exists prior to membership in any nation or peoples. “The sins of my people,” he notes, “can no longer be purged by cathartic rage toward your people.”
It is only in Christ that one finds a remedy for personal sin; only in Christ are we properly deemed righteous. With paganism, on the other hand, guilt or sin is assuaged by annihilating the enemy, and its god, who is the cause of all evils.
Contrasting the pagan and Christian worldviews, he writes: “What counts in the pagan world of blood is not me, the ‘person,’ but the people of which I am but a representative. What counts in Christianity is the Adam, whose stain I present; and Christ’s sacrifice through which I am represented to God as righteous.”
“The distance between these two understandings,” he concludes, “is infinite and unbridgeable.”
He goes on to stress that liberal society is wholly dependent on the basic Christian tenet that views each individual as an individual. In such a society, the law applies to each and every person equally, if not always perfectly (we’re human after all).
The pagan view does not see individuals as individuals but as groups, the modern equivalent being ‘race, class, and gender,’ things over which we have absolutely no control.
Thus, the pagan proposition, Mitchell writes, “holds that a black man, George Floyd, and the white police officer responsible for his death, are representatives of the collective murder of one people by the other.”
“American law cannot bring about justice,” he warns, “because each blood nation has its own justice…American law becomes white law. Street vengeance, therefore, is the only recourse – whether we call them protests or riots. White people must die, as a just exchange for the black people who have died.”
He then adds a wrinkle to this scenario. The blood purge of paganism seems to have blended with the Christian belief in deep, personal guilt. This is impossible in paganism, which rejects outright the idea that the individual, rather than the collective or the group, is guilty. For the pagan, once blood sacrifice has been paid by one’s enemies, the score is settled and guilt disappears.
In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, Mitchell continues, we are seeing “the mix of pagan blood accounting and Christian guilt, which has taken the form of a kind of racial contrition, in which apologies are offered to members of the black nation by whites for their complicity in murder, because they are members of a white nation.”
How, then, shall we proceed in the future? he asks. Onward toward a more defined and lived Christianity or backwards toward a regressive paganism?
“A return to paganism would spare us from the embarrassing Christian postulate that all the guilty-before-God descendants of Adam are persons, to be treated equally before the law.”
“Pagan blood vengeance, we would contentedly conclude, is the primordial truth of man – therefore let us unleash the cathartic rage that dwells in every heart. If a man of one race is killed, blood payment is due; the score must be settled, persons must be sacrificed so that the idol of bloodline – of ‘identity,’ can be appeased.”
When Christianity moved away from the center of American life, religion did not disappear. What has taken its place is a strange, unholy blend of old and new, repackaged as forward-looking, as, indeed, “progressive.”
Rather than instilling virtues such as personal responsibility, mercy, forgiveness, temperance, prudence, moderation, and self-control, we have embraced a confused jumble of fractured and competing moralities where critical thinking and love’s sacrificial demands have given way to the blunt, incoherent mob, to, that is, anarchy, rage, and, yes, hatred.
May God have mercy on us all.