The 20th century is over. On the face of it, this seems pretty obvious. Very few are unaware of this fact. But do we really think and act as if it is?
In 1844, James Russell Lowell wrote a poem entitled, “The Present Crisis,” itself an argument against slavery. It later inspired the hymn, “Once to Every Man and Nation.” The poem reads as follows:
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her campfires? We ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.
In case you haven’t noticed (though I’m sure you have!), I frequently object to the mainline church’s embrace of the Social Gospel, a movement that began in the mid to late 19th century but hit its stride in the early 20th. Its effects are with us still.
My opposition to it – to its obsessive focus on fixing the nation’s ills – has often prompted others to ask, “So, is the church supposed to do nothing?”
My answer, in part, is that what made sense in 1920 doesn’t necessarily make sense today. New occasions, after all, teach new duties.
In the early part of the 20th century, fueled by the industrial revolution (among other things), mass migration, both foreign and domestic, brought a huge influx into America’s urban areas. The Protestant mainline churches, the erstwhile conscience of the nation, responded by seeking to apply Christian solutions to these dramatic social dislocations.
The problem, however, is that over time the church seemed to shift its entire focus away from making disciples to promoting and applying social and political stratagems. The assumption became, as discussed in my last post, Fairy Tales, that the church had its act together and was now tasked with fixing all the nation’s ills.
As a result, the stubborn, timeless spiritual matters of sin, redemption, and salvation became secondary, if meaningful at all. As Christian author Tony Robinson puts it, the church came to “assume” the goods rather than “deliver” them.
A once-spiritually alert mainline church thus made the tragic, albeit well-intentioned, mistake of assuming the spiritual strength of the church would continue forever unabated. Such things wouldn’t need to be continually reinforced.
What seemed to make sense in 1919 doesn’t necessarily in 2019. It’s not that “works,” in and of themselves, are bad and shouldn’t be pursued. It’s that works must proceed from faith. The focus of the church should always be on the things of the Spirit. All else flows from that. Without it, secular reasoning eventually replaces spiritual reasoning, and leads the church away from its core purpose.
2019 demands that we in the church refocus on the Gospel. As our country drowns in secular battles, the church ought to be doing its part to draw people back into God’s orbit. Only then can the salient effects of the church, at one time pronounced, once again influence not just the lives of individuals but the broader body politic as well.
This is especially important given the increasingly dysfunctional social and political realities of 21st century America.
Since the 1990s, our culture has developed a bizarre sort of consensus. After two world wars fought against totalitarianism, and after much gnashing of teeth over the presumably impersonal, soulless conformity of the 50’s and the “bigness” of American society in general, the insistence on individualism, or social deregulation, took hold.
Everyone was urged to move to the beat of their own drum, to reject the life-sapping dictates of the “organizational man,” and, generally, to free themselves from stultifying tradition. This liberation movement would set us free.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, along with the emergence of the tech boom in the 90s, a new kind of economic deregulation took place as well. With the world freed from the Cold War, new markets opened, and an expanding global economy promised to shower wealth upon every corner of the world. And in some respects, it did.
However, in the pursuit of global markets, a new form of economic libertarianism emerged, pursued, curiously, by both “conservatives” and “liberals.” Everyone seemed to benefit from increased trade and expanding world markets.
Despite the loudly perceived rancor between liberals and conservatives today, those in positions of power, on both sides, form a remarkable consensus. When I was growing up, for instance, my home town (known for its wealth) was solidly Republican, the party most associated with business. Today it’s just the opposite.
The battle is not so much between liberals and conservatives as between the elite and those left behind by this new economic deregulation. Money goes where it will, impersonally. The stated hope is that pursuing this economic ideology will take care of itself. Everyone will benefit.
The evidence, however, is just not there. There are whole swaths of this country (thoroughly documented by Charles Murray’s Coming Apart) that once were strong but now face significant economic depression, drug addiction, and increasing rates of suicide. (Check the statistics.)
What our “new occasion” demands, it seems to me, is a renewed sense of solidarity, not further social and economic deregulation and dislocation. At one time such solidarity was a staple, along with the sense that our society was a community with shared values and commitments. There was such a thing as a social contract.
With a decrease in church participation and an overall loss of common pursuit, we have fractured into social and economic divisions, and race, class, and gender sub-groupings, with no agreed upon focus for the future.
New occasions teach new duties. Of course, the elites of our age, as in every age, strive to maintain the status quo. It works for them. Increasingly, this cannot be said for a lot of others.
Recently, in the town where I live, there was a major firestorm over a letter-to-the-editor in the town paper. A summer resident complained that her tax dollars were being spent to keep lower income people from moving out of town. For Cape Cod in general, this has been a growing problem due to its limited seasonal economy and high cost of living.
Though I found her letter less malevolent than many, I did think it betrayed a certain cluelessness, yet one hardly unique to her.
Again, as Charles Murray’s exhaustive study shows, economic and social stratification exists all over the country. Where once the elite WASPs honored a kind of noblesse oblige attitude, where the elites felt a responsibility to the town in which they lived, today our country is segregated between the haves and the have-nots in ways unthinkable just 30 years ago, before deregulation took hold.
Today elites live in “superZips” (Murray) and have almost no contact with those economically or socially different than they. In fact, they likely have more in common with those living in distant placed like Silicon Valley, the Upper East Side, or even London or Hong Kong than those living just a few towns away.
Contributing mightily to this phenomenon is the emergence of a new system of meritocracy, which replaced the old system of entry into the elite class. Before, entry was based on family, wealth, and connections. Eventually this gave way to a system that, at least in theory, considers only performance, rather than money or background.
Though well intended, this system has two things working against it. One, it fails to consider how this new elite class has managed over time to maintain its dominance. Much like the old system, it also honors money, influence, and connections. It just pretends it doesn’t.
Worse still, and in the same vein, the meritocratic system convinces those who “make it,” those who get into the top schools and end up working, say, on Wall St., that they EARNED it. (You could have gotten into Harvard, too, or so the argument goes, if only you had worked as hard as I did!) This, of course, is a dangerous fallacy. Anyone who’s followed the habits and dispositions of this new elite class knows that the presumption of a level playing field simply doesn’t exist.
New occasions teach new duties. And time makes ancient (and not so ancient) good uncouth. This goes for the church as well as society at large.
In short, our time demands a recalibration of our priorities. There’s lots of evidence that the status quo no longer works. Yet do we have eyes and ears to perceive it? Or will we remain deaf and blind to what’s going on around us, and continue to live in the past?
All the evidence, or so it seems, is right there in front of our noses.