The Lesson from 2020?

In preparing the liturgy for a service I recently led, I chose the classic Abide with Me as one of the hymns. To my surprise, the church secretary emailed back and suggested I leave out the last verse. Why? Because it’s so depressing, what with Covid and all. Funny, all along I had thought it a hymn of comfort and hope.

The offending stanza reads like this: “Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes; Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies; Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee; In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”

Then again, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve long believed that the unofficial religion of American is positive thinking. Just think good thoughts and everything will work out.

Even the churches seem to be playing along. While serving my first church, we held Bible study every Wednesday morning for all the clergy in town. Each week we would look at the four lectionary texts for the coming Sunday.

One morning, a member of the group commented on the way the lectionary routinely tends to skip over difficult passages, particularly those having to do with the wrath of God or those related to suffering.

One wag then suggested that the lectionary only deals with the “good parts” of the Bible. We all laughed at his perspicacious insight.

I’m reminded of the ironic quote from H. Richard Niebuhr, describing the weakened state of modern Christianity: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”

There’s another name attached to this sort of “Christianity.” It’s called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which also might be referred to as Christianity Lite, or just simply watered-down Christianity. Take your pick.

In general, MTD is the belief that God exists and wants nothing more from us than to be nice and to be happy, based on our subjective freedom of choice.

“In his landmark 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” writes Rod Dreher, “[Philip] Rieff said the death of God in the West had given birth to a new civilization devoted to liberating the individual to seek his own pleasures and to [manage] emerging anxieties.”

“Religious Man,” Dreher continues, “who lived according to belief in transcendent principles that ordered human life around communal purposes, had given way to Psychological Man, who believed that there was no transcendent order and that life’s purpose was to find one’s own way experimentally.”

“Man no longer understood himself to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who traveled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness his ultimate goal.”

The result has been a narrowing of the human personality into isolated, subjectivized beings pursuing their own self-defined fantasies, disconnected not just from the divine order but from others.

Into this vacuum has stepped forth a dangerous, if not wholly unanticipated alternative, a substitute god, if you will, what James Poulos calls the “Pink Police State.” This is, Dreher explains, “an informal arrangement in which people will surrender political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure.”

In other words, the burdens of citizenship, which require virtue and character and involve the struggle to attain genuine freedom, are mindlessly bequeathed to the burgeoning state which promises to take care of all our needs while we are left free to explore our own inner Self.

This phenomenon can be seen as the events of 2020 have unfolded. Increasingly, we are at the mercy of the “experts” and “science” to ensure our safety. We willingly forfeit our freedoms and responsibilities in deference to the “managerial class” which knows what we need and promises to take care of us. We needn’t worry our pretty little heads, in other words..

Roughly a hundred years ago, at the turn of the century, a new class of such managers emerged. The idea was that society had become too complex for the average citizen to understand, much less to navigate through.

The traditional notion of looking to God and faith to shape and order the individual and, thus, society, was seen as quaint. Science and the newly minted “social scientists” would study reality soberly and disinterestedly, and fairly apply “objective” rules of order to solve human problems. Forget all that subjective religious mumbo-jumbo. The “experts” would clear the path for problem-free, enlightened living.

As religion has faltered, especially over the last 50 years or so, and as society has been defined increasingly by our managerial class, (the so-called lumpenintelligensia who enforce the edicts of the ruling class), the lone individual is left free to pursue his or her own private life and personal pleasures, leaving all the important decisions to others.

One obvious result is the loss of personal freedom and responsibility. So that when the virus hit, the atomized individual was rendered helpless. Addicted to myopic pursuits, whether online or elsewhere, our society has found itself incapable of coping with genuine threats.

Among other things, what has been lost is the classic Christian understanding of the tragic, the knowledge that life has never been perfect and never will be. For Christians, perfection lies beyond this mortal coil. But because we’ve largely abandoned this timeless truism, we’ve defaulted to a new religion that promises to take care of our every need, including our “right” to safety.

That science, affluence, and technology (administered by our enlightened experts or “guardians”) has been able to address many of our needs has lulled us into thinking that all of life can be mastered and tamed; so much so that today it is not uncommon for people to demand safety as if it were a right. When our fears overtake us, only science and the benefactions of the state can save us.

Recently, the small town where we live asked for community input regarding their handling of the Covid threat. One woman phoned in to say that she was indignant that a local restaurant where several employees had contracted the virus had failed to put a sign on their door saying as much. Instead they had followed state guidelines by promptly informing town authorities.

What I noted was not so much her complaint but the way she expressed it, or, more to the point, the tone of voice she used.

Call me crazy, but my sense is that if she is so frightened of contracting the disease, maybe she ought to stay out of public restaurants for a while! Instead, her attitude betrayed a wholly unrealistic expectation that in the midst of a worldwide pandemic the town must create a completely safe, risk-free environment so that she can go outside.

In 2019, a New Orleans woman by the name of Danielle Weaver was looking for a persona to use during Mardi Gras, something topical. She found it in the pop culture internet meme that refers to “Karens.” Appropriately enough, she named her group the “Karen Krewe” (see two members of the Krewe pictured above).

A Karen is privileged and high-handed. She is, as local writer Doug MacCash puts it, “a certain type of self-assured, SUV-driving, sunglass-wearing suburban white woman who is often aggrieved about life’s inconveniences and imperfections.”

 “A woman is deemed a Karen,” Wheeler adds, “for her repeated attempts to demand to see the manager of an establishment, more often than not issuing a complaint that we might refer to as a ‘first-world problem.’”

Unfortunately, we seem to live increasingly in a world of Karens. And Kens for that matter (the male equivalent). Both expect to be taken care of. Both demand their right to a life free of aggravation and annoyance. Both are entitled, and indignant when confronted with anything less.

Perhaps, then, the lesson from 2020 is that we human beings are discovering that we are not entitled to a perfect world, that life is full of unavoidable problems, challenges, and, yes, even tragedies. That’s just the way it is. And always has been.

But as long as we’re unwilling to accept this basic fact of life, we are helpless against life’s vagaries. When confronted with a worldwide pandemic we can’t fully control, that even science and our esteemed experts can’t manage, we are effectively rendered helpless and afraid. And since we have no inner resources to confront such problems, we submit meekly to others.

In Dreher’s poignant new book, Live Not By Lies, he addresses the problem head-on. Unless Christians are willing to suffer, he assures, we shall forever be slaves to our fears.

“Accepting suffering,” wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn. imprisoned and tortured for years by Soviet authorities, “is the beginning of our liberation. Suffering can be the source of great strength. It gives us the power to resist. It is a gift from God that invites us to change.”

When we’re afraid to suffer, in other words, we become captive to our fears, as well as to those who would exploit them.