The Fading Christian

Christian kids, or others for that matter, leave the Christian faith gradually. They drift. As Eliot once put it, they go out not with a bang, but a whimper. I've spent a few years thinking about this process, and I now think I can generalize about the steps in the process of drift.

The Center...

My own kids show me what the center looks like. They love Christian school, Christian songs and Christian stories and Christmas with a passion unrivaled. They demand that we pray before bed and keep dad accountable to kind speech with their sisters. They write notes telling me how much they love God and Jesus and how they love Church. Their world is filled with the magic of belief. Christianity is their atmosphere, and their joy seems so full as they breathe it in.

They even talk about how bad it is that people say bad words or do unkind things. They confront their friends about these things with childlike exuberance. Even when something goes wrong and they do something that must be punished, they recognize the severity of it. It pains them to let daddy down, and more importantly, to let God down. They take sin seriously and feel it deeply when they do it.

One can only see their Christian experience as pure, even naive, authenticity and totality.

Step One... Commitment to Sin...

This is not meant to be a judgment, but a mere recognition of fact. We are all committed to our sinfulness. Since our sinful desires stay with us through life, we always struggle with them. The Christian is given assistance in resisting, but it is always a battle. And frankly, at times it seems that no assistance is being given at all.

A thought begins to germinate, ever so gradually, below the surface. "Perhaps it is really quite natural to desire these things. Perhaps it is unnatural to resist them..."

Step Two... Aesthetic exhaustion...

Put simply, the maturing church kid now is simply bored with Christian music and Christian preaching and Christian art of all kinds. He can't even say why. If you were to press him about why Christian art is bad, he couldn't tell you anything of substance. It is just a mood. His mood has shifted from Christian music, for example, to his own ephemeral preoccupations. Of course, this means that Christians don't get to speak into his heart or mind. He has removed his attention and tuned it to various decidedly non and even anti-Christian voices.

Step Three... Moral exhaustion...

He now moves from thinking that perhaps his sinful desires are natural, to being exhausted with the Christian message of moral resistance to them. He has made the attempt, however feebly, to resist his own sinful tendencies, and has not succeeded. His new influences have shown him a kind of audacious freedom in doing things he once knew were wrong. He is now able to laugh at these behaviors, often with his new friends.

Then he steps into his church to hear the pastor condemn his actions, and now he no longer feels conviction; instead, he feels exhaustion. He is simply tired of hearing this message. There is only one solution.

Step Four... Leave the Church...

He stops going to church. The art is boring and so is the message. He is put off by the constant moral badgering.

He is probably a freshman in college now, and free to sleep in on Sundays. No one on his dorm hall is interested in going to church, so it becomes the most natural thing in the world to have his "day of rest." He is taking a sabbath from sabbath.

Step Five... Circle of influence changed...

By systematic steps, he is no longer in any appreciable orbit around Christian things or people. He doesn't read Christian literature. He doesn't listen to sermons. He doesn't pray. He doesn't hang out with Christians. Church is irrelevant to him, though he would still claim at this point to be a Christian. He boldly asserts that "one need not go to Church to be a Christian." Other pious rebels affirm him in this, and they shuffle back to the kegger.

Where once his atmosphere was Christian art, themes, stories and people; he is now in a decidedly different atmosphere. His friends are, simply put, much cooler than Christians. They are authentic, bold, interesting and broad-minded people. They judge no one, except the judgmental. Jesus is literally totally undetectable in his new circle of influence, unless you count his hipster friend Jesus from Spain.

Step Six... Values assimilation...

He now thinks like everyone else on the campus. He affirms gay marriage, but can't say exactly why. He likes socialism, legalization of drugs and pacifism, but can't argue them with any rigor. He loves all the art, culture and general priorities of his contemporaries. He lives like them, talks like them, parties like them. He is a clone. All his uniqueness has been summarily beaten into conformity. Where once he embraced the foolishness of the cross as his wisdom, now he simply acknowledges the foolishness of the cross.

Step Seven... Ridicule those "Christians"...

He is now the "new" kind of Christian, which is to say that he is totally secularized. He has now almost completely forgotten the Bible. Occasionally he quotes it, but only to mangle its teaching. He is a vague "theist," still clinging to his childhood emotional connections to the Christian faith. But when he becomes honest, he will realize that he is no longer a Christian, and perhaps never really was. What he has always done is to adjust to the climate. When that culture was Christian, he was a Christian. When it became secular, he became secular. He is a product of his environment, and nothing more. The curious thing is that all the while he claims a vigorous autonomy. He is his own man. He is not owned by anyone.

But when his friends come around and mock the Christian faith in various ways, he joins right in. We Christians are, according to his new friends, backward, unscientific and hypocritical. We caused the bloodshed of the world. We fought against scientific development. We live in the ideological fog of "white privilege." If we could have our way, we would take peoples rights from them and slavery would return. We believe in a dusty old book that encourages polygamy, genocide, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, fantasy and simple-mindedness. He has made a complete journey away from Christianity. He has become worse while thinking that he is getting better.

(Note: While a person is in the process of drift, there needs to be an intellectual justification for it. In my experience, most reach for the "search for truth," or "search for self," or "disillusionment" paradigm. And they use this paradigm because it gives them the assurance that they are in control of the drift. But I want to suggest here that most people have their thinking on this inverted. They think that their search or disillusionment is the cause of the drift. I think it is quite the opposite. My convictions on this come from my theology and my own experience. Convoluted intellectual rationalizations often come after moral compromise. Romans 1 would agree with me here!)

The Great Divorce... And Mine

A friend recently called my attention back to Lewis' great book, The Great Divorce. He wanted me to pay special attention to chapters 12 and 13.

In those chapters, there is this amazing story of a woman, a spirit from heaven who is passing through hell, where she meets her husband for the first time in the afterlife. Their interaction is worth the price of the book. I will here summarize the broad strokes of the conversation, and then quote key exchanges therein.

It begins with this resplendent woman, Sarah Smith by name, who is accompanied to a reunion with her husband in this fantastic afterlife by a phalanx of angels and "sons and daughters." We are told that any person whose life was touched by this woman in life became her son or daughter. She is a woman who radiates, through her words and gestures and even clothing, joy and love with palpable density. We are told simply that she is "one of the great ones."

Since this is a story about heaven and hell, these are ghosts in the afterlife. Sarah died much earlier than her husband, and her husband, upon his death, is grotesquely transformed into two beings chained together, a small dwarfish ghost holding the chain of a tall actor-like ghost Lewis calls the "Tragedian."

The dwarfish husband tells Sarah that he has been deeply concerned for her well being without him in the afterlife. He says in the first lines of their dialogue, "It is not myself I'm thinking about. It is you. That is what has been continually on my mind--all these years. The thought of you--you here alone, breaking your heart about me."

Sarah assures him that she has been perfectly happy, perfectly content and perfectly joyful all this time.

"What needs could I have... now that I have all? I am full now, not empty. I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. Come and see. We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly."

At this point, the dwarf and the Tragedian vehemently recoil at the thought of their not being needed, for that is their understanding of love. They are appalled at the prospect that this woman is apparently unaffected by their misery. They were looking to her for the same self-inflicted misery in which they had languished since the bitter parting of her death. But she has found something better, something higher than their love. It is an ocean into which he can come, but it is not an ocean that can be poured into their puny earthly love. And this he cannot tolerate.

The formula for this tragic man seems to be simple. They once loved each other. She seems to have found something that, from his perspective, is an assault on their love. She no longer needs him. But this makes him miserable. Therefore, if she loved him and he is miserable, then she should be miserable too. Moreover, if she is a Christian, and sees one suffering in this hell, she should feel sympathetic misery with him.

This leads to one of the most profound statements from the angelic Sarah Smith:

"No, Frank, not here," said the Lady. "Listen to reason. Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know that now. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. No, no, no. Come to us. We will not go to you. Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?"

And then, from the narrator, this striking passage:

"All the loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itching that hell contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell's miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird (a bird in heaven) on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule."

And now a few comments about how I must try to ingest all this profundity.

I am recently divorced. It is a thing of great sorrow to me, and I am, I think, working through the grief and sorrow daily. I may not even be quite ready for Lewis' words here. But they resound to me like an anthem, like the call of freedom and joy and love and holiness. And I must answer that call.

I will not let the misery of others hold me captive even in this life. I recall the joy of my salvation, and to it I return, for it is enough. It is an infinite ocean, and in it I will find my strength and my identity, as I always have. My marriage had become the shrinking world of the dwarf ghost and the Tragedian. We were trying to pour the infinite into the finite instead of pouring the finite into the infinite. And, of course, when you pour the infinite into the finite, the finite splits.

I will not hold on to my own misery either, as if the world will crouch to that misery and placate me, or allow me to manipulate others into pitying me. No, there must be grief at the loss of the opportunity for a particular union to express the joy of Christ, but not grief at the loss of the joy of Christ.

Indeed the joy of Christ will swallow up all my misery just as yon yellow bird could swallow up all the misery of hell.

And, I pledge myself wholly to the joy of Christ and not to merely bibulously outgoing people in all the proper social gatherings. I seek the authentic joy of Christ, grounded forever in the gospel, and not the artificial economic charisma of men.

In the end, I will seek out those like that great lady in Lewis powerful allegory, and I pledge to be like her. Of course we are not perfect in this life, but, as Lewis states elsewhere, we must see the first beginnings of His joy in us, or no joy will make us happy in the end.

Moral Fragmentation

America's major problem is a progressive loss of moral unity.

I keep reading posts on social media and news stories from exasperated individuals. There is rarely any kind of argument in their words, but only apocalyptic emotional splutterings about Trump or global warming or the evils of socialism. People on the left of the political spectrum are fed up, with racism, classism, inequality and, well, conservatives. People on the right are fed up with radical Islam, the attack on gun rights, taxes and, well, Obama. And these two groups have lost the ability to dialogue meaningfully. They now merely shout at or past each other. Our democracy has devolved into mob rule and an endless cacophony of opinion without moral authority.

It seems clear that the American experiment in democracy is on the verge of failure, but not because some other system has shown itself to be better. The reason for the collapse of America will not come from any army, but it will come from our inability to argue towards the truth with each other. Our democracy, though many would deny this, was built on a particular set of moral assumptions. They came from a robust ethical system. All one needs to do to be convinced of this is to read the various founding documents. These were profoundly religious people, and the religion was Christianity. Of course there were a handful of deists and even an atheist here and there, but all held that a democracy cannot function without moral unity, which is just good philosophical sense given the often polarizing nature of democracy. And they could think of nothing better than the various values afforded to them by the Christian religion. Now, the devastating critique of this rather obvious observation is something like, "well, yeah, but they also had slaves and drove out the Indians." Mic drop. End of conversation. This is sufficient to tear down the Judeo-Christian Ethic and atomize all moral continuity and all moral authority. In its place we have the utter moral insanity of relativism. The real question I want to ask the leftist self-congratulatory critic of early American moral authority is this: What moral authority would you put in the place of Christianity? Human reason? That has given us the gulags, Hitler, the French Revolution, Mao, utilitarianism and the modern insanity of political correctness, where moral offense is judged by the subjective feelings of a vocal minority.

How can America survive when it no longer affirms a defining set of moral presuppositions? The current running thesis appears to be a kind of unexpressed positive law theory. We no longer affirm a perspicuous natural law as the foundation of our laws. We now tacitly affirm democracy itself as the foundation of not just our laws but our values as well. And that is precisely why we are in regression. This moral regression will precede economic and political regression. The glory of America is, and will remain, in our past, at lease so far as I can see.

When that which previously stood on the bedrock of the Christian ethic now stands merely on its own, it can only collapse under its own weight.

Examples of this lack of moral unity:

1. Marriage:

The important question here is this: On whose authority should we accept definition X? All the cultural noise is irrelevant until this question is answered. Why define marriage the way we have chosen to define it? Is it up to us to define it? There are many who tacitly accept materialistic nominalism--namely, that we make up the realities around us and assign the meanings and the words. Reality is not independent of our mental activity. If that is true, then of course marriage is whatever we want it to be. But surely we can see where such a conclusion leads logically. For one, if human mental activity is the source of realities like marriage, then it can radically rearrange reality in the future. Marriage, and everything else, becomes infinitely malleable as a concept and we are left with an invincible relativism. If there is any system of ethics conceived by the mind of man that utterly destroys moral unity, it is relativism.

2. Islamic migration:

Here is an important question: Is America, the great "melting pot," capable of ingesting any and all worldviews? Are all worldviews compatible with western democratic values? And the answer is an unequivocal no! All it takes is a brief survey of Islamic history and theology to understand quickly that Islam as a religion can never be content to be "added" to a democracy. So then, the question becomes, "If Islam can never be content with assimilation into democratic societies, how then can faithful Muslims be content with such a thing?"

Here again we see that some people would say that Islam is perfectly compatible with democracy, that Muslims, taken as individuals, may be fine with assimilation. Many Muslims would agree here. And on the other side of this you have voices saying that Islam as a religion is incompatible with America, and many of them are Muslims as well. As a thought experiment, imagine what things would have been like if even 20% of the framers of the constitution were Muslims. How much progress would have been made? If you think there would have been no problem, then you clearly don't understand Islam, or Christianity.

Theodore Dalrymple discusses this point in his fine work, Life at the Bottom. In that work, he asserts that not all people groups can be compatible with a country like Great Britain. They bring with them worldviews that are inherently incompatible with western values. He discusses various groups who won't permit their daughters to go to English schools because they learn too much about freedom for women in English society within the schools. The problem with the melting pot is that clearly some things don't melt! And that leads to radical moral disunity.

3. Political correctness on college campuses:

I find this movement among the most interesting in modern history. In the first universities in America and in Europe, there was a prevailing moral code that governed student behavior, and indeed informed educators and administrators. Again that moral code was Christianity, and could almost be taken for granted. Students entered their education with this code firmly etched upon their minds.

Today, there is no appreciable influence of Christian teaching in the university setting, even among many Christian colleges. This seems to me to be merely the sober truth of the matter, though at this point I confess only experiential and anecdotal evidence. But I submit this assertion to the experiences of those who read it and my guess is that you will find it true as well.

The problem is that, as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum. One can't simply remove Christian ethics from university life without something occupying the void. Today that void is filled with enlightened intellectuals, the artisans of the political correctness movement. Christianity was jettisoned ages ago in the name of the free search for knowledge and personal expression, but then it became apparent that others want to assert themselves as well. Some form of regulation (a term much preferred to morality by liberal intellectuals) had to be invented.

The problem with these "regulations" is that no student takes them all that seriously, because they are only backed by feeble human intelligence, which can always be doubted, or at the very least re-examined. The only thing that this enlightened godless generation of young people has learned from all of this is that anything and everyone can be questioned. There is no moral authority.

There are other examples, but that will do for now. A final thought here: If atheism is true, then the pattern of nature is toward fragmentation. Nature can perhaps stitch various things together into accidental arrangements, but always promises to break them down into constituent parts again and then leave them in that condition. Is it any wonder that the more a godless worldview captivates the hearts and minds of people, the more a society trends toward fragmentation?