I used to visit Shirley often. She was an elderly church member who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Yet her mind remained sharp, vibrant, and probing. I always looked forward to talking with her.
One day, sitting in her living room, we got onto the subject of church attendance. A lifelong churchgoer herself, she expressed concern that neither of her two children had any interest, despite attending regularly growing up.
When questioned, her son told her he thought himself a highly moral person who always tries to live a good life. As such, he didn’t really see the need to go to church. Unsure how to counter his argument, she asked me what I would say.
There are any number of ways to approach this, not least that Christianity is not solely about ethics and that our salvation is a spiritual not an earthly matter (“natural man” is destined not for a natural but a supernatural end).
But sticking to the question at hand, I suggested that ethics, if not reinforced, devolves over time. If we assume her son’s character was shaped at least in part by Christian formation, what about his unchurched children and grandchildren living as they do in a culture that has moved steadily away from the kinds of ethical values their father and grandfather assumes, rather naively, will go on forever?
If we learned nothing from the recent elections, it’s that our culture is sick. As I see it, this corresponds directly to the loss of God as a guiding force in our individual and corporate lives (not a particularly original thought, I admit).
By removing God, as one writer recently put it, we’ve unleashed the Furies, those underworld goddesses of Greek mythology whose sole purpose is to exact terrifying vengeance.
So rather than living in an ordered world, we have blindly chosen experimental chaos. By worshipping a multiplicity of foreign gods, as the prophet Jeremiah warns Judah, we risk reaping the ill winds of God’s inexorable judgment.
So how did we get here? How did we move so far from the Puritans’ “errand in the wilderness” that sought to embody John Winthrop’s inspired words in his 1630 sermon, A Modell of Christian Charity, delivered shortly before or during his journey to the New World.
There he envisioned a new “city upon a hill,” a “holy community,” one where the faithful would “bear one another’s burdens” and understand themselves as part of a “Company of Christ, bound together by Love.” It would be a city where, above all, the worship of God would be preeminent.
A fish, as the old saying goes, rots from the head. And today’s ruling elites have morphed into something that would be unrecognizable to our nation’s earlier leaders, not least the Pilgrims. I personally consider our current ruling class the worst in American history.
The change picked up speed in the most unlikely of places. No one at the time paid much attention to it (though it is often the case that social movements start small and over-time gain steam).
Historian Fred Siegel calls this place “lyrical Greenwich Village,” an avant-garde assemblage of artists, writers, and intellectuals. For these aspiring elitists, American culture was embarrassingly déclassé. Famously, H.L. Mencken later would label most Americans as the “booboisie,” that is, the hopelessly bourgeois, law-abiding citizen who betrays traditional middle-class values and, horror of horrors, even holds religious beliefs. Seemingly worst of all, they had lowbrow tastes.
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, migration into the cities, and the preeminence of mechanization, American society had become, according to these garrulous aesthetes, a mass culture devoid of education, refinement, and distinction.
Lost in their mute, sheep-like existence, living in their small, quotidian world of family and church, of money-making, narrow conformism, petty ethnic squabbling, and unseemly politicking, these lacked the requisite skill and insight to attain the progress evident just beyond the rainbow.
It is easy to chalk this up to the overheated optimism at the turn of the century – and it was that. But more specifically, many of these elitists were besotted with our old friend, Friedrich Nietzsche, and with German Idealism in general. So devoted were these artists and intellectuals, in fact, that many opposed America’s entry into WWI out of deference to Germany. Perhaps the most outspoken of these was none other than H.L. Mencken.
Germany was seen as the new hope for humanity, the new city upon a hill. It rejected the old paradigm of Anglo-American, Western Civilization with its outdated emphasis on tradition, law, religion, and, yes, democracy. What was now called for to lead society forward was a “new” man with a new outlook, the “Übermensch,” otherwise known as the “overman,” “beyond-man,” or “superman.”
These supermen could see far beyond the mundane, which had conspired to keep humanity trapped in an outmoded and indefensible past. This new breed of beings, superior in intellect, wisdom, and grasping a higher morality, saw themselves as giants needlessly constrained by the Lilliputian keepers of tradition and culture.
In the aftermath of WWI, America went through a lot of soul-searching. The Great War, in some sense, had become a referendum on the efficacy of Western Civilization. Despite the “return to normalcy” during the twenties, this new elite cadre had no doubt as to where it stood.
American democracy had failed. The voting public could not be trusted with the future of the nation, for their narrow and selfish interests, not to mention their self-satisfied ignorance, were no match in meeting the demands of a new and complex brave new world.
Thus the call went out to the “experts,” those enlightened creatures who would harness the nascent powers of “science” and “objective truth.” The future of the nation could not be left to the know-nothings but must enlist the best and the brightest, those who would eschew self-interest and apply the latest “objective” insights of political and social science. The sky was the limit.
Lyrical Greenwich Village and its successors celebrated what was in effect an updated version of Plato’s “Guardians,” those of superior breeding and accomplishment who possessed the necessary moral and intellectual foresight to guide the great unwashed toward the Promised Land (whether they liked it or not).
Or, to bring it more up to date, one could also say it was a retrieval of Coleridge’s “clerisy,” comprised of the educated elite which, at the time, also included religious leaders and clergy.
Our updated version retains the same sense of entitlement born of class and privilege but is now not only contemptuous of religion but also those it would seek to lead, i.e. the middle class – the booboisie.
It is this new elite class that has brought us to where we are today, along with an air of superiority that belies its merits.
This was inevitable, of course, given that no human being who’s ever existed can claim the mantle of being “unbiased,” “objective” or “disinterested.” So as the unchecked power of this new elite class has grown, which can be seen in virtually every institution within American culture today, they have dutifully wielded their considerable power to benefit mostly themselves, as is the wont of every ruling class that’s ever existed. But minus checks and balances.
Absent the constraints of Christianity with its doctrine of original sin (which tempers any and all utopian social or political fantasies), with its moral boundaries, its claim to transcendent truth, and, above all, its holy deference to the God of all creation, absent these, human power invariably bends toward corruption.
In the end, worship of the false gods proffered by our secular overlords has seemingly unleashed the Furies, if not the inexorable judgment of God.