You’ve Heard of the Culture War, What About its Casualties? Reviewing the Reformation pt. 1
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states,
nor between classes, nor between political parties-
but right through every human heart.
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“My heart within me like a stone
Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul
Cast in the fire the perish'd thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King”
-Christina Rossetti
The paradox of the Christian religion is that it is simultaneously the cheapest and costliest religion. You’ve heard “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” The Christian life cannot be bought or bargained for; there are not enough hours in a thousand lifetimes to work for it. Its “cost” is giving back the broken heart inside each human chest to its rightful owner. In return we get a new heart, a new spirit; what was once damned, now flows freely; what was fractured, now loves fully.
The Christian vision of society has obvious undertones from this basic spiritual reality. God relates to His people as a Father. Jesus is the Son. We are organized within a spiritual family of the self-same Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, Sisters, Sons and Daughters. The Declaration, “It is not good for man to be alone,” is as much an obvious reality as it is the well from which supernatural love might spring. It is our species’ triumph and our tragedy that the purity of our heart depends almost entirely on the quality of the unity that arises from those sacred bonds. It is for this reason that truly malevolent forces in the world target the biological family as ground zero for its work. Marriage is the most tangible picture of God’s love for His people: “Husbands, love your wives, As Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it…” This profound mystery is the most complete human picture of unconditional love.
The corruption of marriage and family is the most powerful weapon against Christian people. Should you burn a Christian in broad daylight, they may sing to their fiery death hymns of praise; the faith of those watching is strengthened, as they grab their loved ones even tighter. But divorce? It condemns those affected to an understanding of love as only conditional. It is a generational curse that remains until someone greater reweaves the heartrift back together. The very idea of “Love” blurs itself in the mind as merely a myth from a more primitive time. As it is said, “fear not them which kill the body, but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body”
The American people are living in the spiritual fallout of some of these forces. Take the 60s: Mallory Millett records a “consciousness-raising meeting” her sister Kate hosted in 1969 as the fires of our cultural revolution kindled:
“Why are we here today?”
“To make revolution!”
“What kind of revolution?”
“The Cultural revolution!”
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?”
“By destroying the American family!”
“How do we destroy the family?”
“By destroying the American Patriarch!”
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?”
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do this?”
“By destroying monogamy!”
“How can we destroy monogamy?”
“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution…!”
Life After the Rubble
More than fifty years has gone by since Kate Millett’s crowning work was published: Sexual Politics. The mantra, “You might not have an interest in war, but war has an interest with you,” has proven true. If there be only one fact to assess the aftermath, let it be this: today, an American child is more likely to live with a dog than a father. Much of the American right is misguided in fighting the “culture” war entirely from the political level; the very things missing from many American homes are precisely what can never be voted upon.
The primary image of persecution in our minds continues to be related to Rome or the Reformation. We think of Nero’s human torches in the Roman gardens, Christians in the Colosseum, and the various Catholics or Protestants burned and beheaded for varying degrees of heresy. As America has maintained our steady flow of guns and trucks, we have nothing to fear from these bygone physical threats.
But surely, after watching the surge of revival in the face of persecution, the bold-faced courage shown by martyrs and the persecuted alike, it would take a single sentence, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” for any competent enemy to change his tune. Alexander Solzenitsyn writes of the horrors of gulag imprisonment with astonishing tenderness, saying:
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For it was there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
If prison, the threat of physical death, and the countless hours of silence would bring about those tender developments in the soul, wouldn’t it follow that a change in tactics is in the works? “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” might make for a good rebrand. We, living in our complacent state of comfort and assurance of freedom, have never been more in danger of losing a grip on the certainty of eternal truths than we are today.
There was, and still is, a legion of forces at war against the beauty of marriage, fidelity, and even friendship. Much the way children are now perceived as a hindrance to individual pursuits of pleasure, entertainment, and freedom from responsibility, so too are spouses increasingly intolerable to the self-fixation of today’s hyper-individualism. How can I expect to enjoy myself if I must continue to deny myself within my marriage?
Yet more important than the proclamation that these forces are waging war is the recognition that they are winning. Kate Millett’s war cries against the American family marked a turning point for western civilization. It would only take 50 years for the ideology of liberation to become pervasive enough to press heavily in on the mind of any conservative Christian. Thus, despite the tendency to commend traditional values intellectually, our own continued cultural backsliding and outsourcing of wisdom to the “spirits of the age” drowns out any sound council in a sea of varying platitudes of “putting ourselves first”, “discovering ourselves,” “knowing our true worth.” Our understanding of marriage becomes increasingly similar to the reality of divorce: that it is “a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided up.”
A New Perspective
There’s a humorous image found in the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer during WWII. Near the war’s end, he fled for the Philippines and was never made aware of any Japanese surrender. In his mind, he continued “fighting the Americans'' until he was formally told of the war’s end in 1974. A similar impulse flares up every now and then within Christendom. Today, I’m hard pressed to find Catholic media companies planting subliminal messages in shows / films convincing the protestant youth to leave their Bible for an Ave Maria or The Real Presence, or handing out rosaries on Halloween, or blasting Bach’s Magnificat in every public space. The popes of today are not pronouncing anathemas against Protestant teachers (though a tract or two against some of the many prosperity teachers, mature protestants might not mind so much). Rehashing public arguments over whether or not icons are idols is not the fight of the hour given that more than half of Protestant-Catholic youth are watching some form of porn on their “forbidden fruit”. The phone issue alone, with its infinite scroll of iconography, would probably be enough to turn Calvin into a jihadist against modern Christendom.
While stressing theological distinctions will always have a needed home within the church, antagonizing potential allies is akin to two kids throwing sand at each other while a bulldozer is inching ever closer, ready to demolish the whole playground. The battles of the early councils, the battles over the Great Schism, and the battles of the Reformation, are not the same battles of today. The lingering disagreements from the most recent schisms have not disappeared, and honest discussion of those disagreements should always be soberly discussed. It only seems that because such little courage is required to speak of those opinions, that they are not the battle of our hour.
Behold, the hour is at hand…
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!
You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous.
And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors’…”
The worst temptation with heroism is to ride the coattails of greater men who lived nobly in their times, while we remain impotent or silent to the problems of our own. It is stolen valor. As needed as the courage of Luther, Calvin, Spurgeon, or Chesterton was in their time, their battles are not our own. It is a siren's song, to courageously speak of yesteryear’s battles, or to boldly declare only the Christian principles that the world nods its approval to, while the thunderous issues that challenge cultural currents are met with a cowardly whisper or a damning silence.
Many of our Christian leaders have surely pondered how they might walk boldly, but the ominous specter that one courageous moment of conviction in the public eye would result in a significant reduction in living standards with his wife and kids. The enemy has been at his craft far longer than we’ve even been alive, and the nature of our economy shows how craftily he pits our virtues against each other. Love of God and love of family? For most American Christians, you need not kill them; taking their job or even a 50% reduction in income would be enough to sink them. The fruits of this are evident: we are a Christian people who keep their heads down, hoping “somebody else” has the courage or the wherewithal to enforce some level of cultural normalcy. And there is our problem, it must always be someone else but never us…and how has that been working out?
The general strategy of Satan is largely the same from the very beginning. Get Human beings to blur what is of God and what is not; the gravity of their hearts will fall the rest of the way. You need not kill what can be compromised with. Generations of subtle whispers keep cracking away against the bedrock of Christian civilization. Martyrdom of the body strengthens convictions. The war on the heart of Western Christians is craftier. Christ assured us that all of The Law and the Prophets hang on two commandments “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself” The spirit of the age pits these against each other. What happens when we are told and accused within our hearts: “Your Christian ancestors were evil. Your Christian beliefs are evil. They are so evil that more than a handful of Christian leaders are updating them to be more accommodating to me. You’re a Christian, you should love your neighbor; the best way you can be my neighbor is to stop being Christian.
Mending the Heart
It was mentioned earlier, that marriage was the clearest picture of God’s love. We’ve surrendered on the redefinition of divorce to include “irreconcilable differences” as a valid reason. It only takes a simple syllogism to see the severity: Marriage is the mirror angled up towards God’s love for us. We were given the right to crack the mirror. Many among us want to break it entirely. We are living in the emotional and cultural fallout from such subtle cracks. Worse than harming our body, they harm, nearly irreparably, our ability to give our hearts to God and to each other.
For Luther, the line was drawn at indulgences. For Chesterton and Spurgeon, it was the influx of theological modernism. Hindsight might tell us who will draw the line of our big cultural challenges today, but for our sake, the “big picture” line is redundant. As we finish this piece in our room, as our heart beats on, by no conscious effort of our own, what will we do with it?
The question we must each have an answer to within our souls… where will our line be drawn?
