-
A Reminder of What Happens “When Church Becomes Pointless”
One of the oldest posts on this blog–one that has survived platform changes over the years–is When Church Becomes Pointless. Written in 1997, it was primarily directed at the Episcopal Church, where I was raised, but as evident then and now it can happen to any church.
That time was an interesting one in Episcopal History. (What time has been boring the last half century?) The Episcopal Church took a major fall in its attendance since the tumultuous days of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and by the time I posted the original piece the downward trend had levelled off or even shown a small uptick. That didn’t last long: in 2003 the church opted to ordain V. Gene Robinson as bishop and that began an era of conflict and more downward trends that resulted in much litigation and the formation of the ACNA. The decline has continued, mostly now driven by the church’s aging demographics.
Driving the downward trend was the existence of serious unbelief in what the church traditionally taught, and few believed less and talked about it more than the bitter Southerner John Shelby Spong. So how would people react to being told this from the pulpit? In my original piece I set forth the following:
Let’s suppose that you really believe that a) the basic teachings of Christianity are false and b) that you’re idealistic enough to want to “do good” under the new rules. What’s the quickest way of getting going? Well, to start with you have the usual plethora of political groups, environmental organizations, the government, the United Nations, and countless other organizations that have nothing to do with the church but which propagate your message. All your church is succeeding in doing is to add one more organization to the confusion. It would be simpler to simply dispense with the church and proceed with the secular organizations.
So let’s take this a step further; suppose you are sitting in an Episcopal pew listening to John Shelby Spong go on about why the basic truths of Christianity have no basis in reality and that those who teach them are a bunch of morons. Suppose that you finally realize that you think that Spong is right; that all that you’ve said when you’re repeated the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed is false and that the life you have is all you’re expected to get. What should you do? You should first realize that life is short and that, if you’re going to live you’d better hurry. So the sensible thing for you to do is to get up, gather your family, walk out of the church, get into your Lexus or Mercedes, and head to Atlantic City or Las Vegas or South Florida or wherever you need to go to live it up while you still can.
That was based on the experience of the first drop, and the second, to use the BCP/KJV’s expression, was like unto it.
So how did this take place? The demographic of the Episcopal Church–and its Main Line counterparts–explains part of this, but another important factor was the introduction and propagation of modern Biblical criticism in Episcopal seminaries, starting in the last part of the nineteenth century. Although we’ve moved from modern to post-modern criticism where we shift from “the Bible isn’t reliable enough to say anything” to “the Bible says (a) but really means (b),” the corrosive influence remains the same. It starts with the academy but then filters down through the clergy to the laity, who are the last to get the memo but the first to wonder “what happened?” when things change.
So how to the people who brought us this justify their idea, both after the first drop and certainly after the second? There are two shared assumptions of left and right that underlie this, neither one of which hold water:
- People “need” church. Both left and right are right about this for a certain universe of people. However, as we say in the Church of God, I have come here to tell you today that for a wide swath of the populace this assumption is wrong, and that swath is getting wider. They may need church and they certainly need God, but they either don’t know it or don’t want to face it.
- The church needs to be “in sync” with the culture. One the left it involves adopting all of the causes of the secular left, which leaves us with the differentiation problem noted above. On the right the imperative to evangelise pushes the church to adopt the forms of the world, but eventually there comes the point where they “cross the line” and adopt the culture’s idea, and that’s where a good portion of Evangelicalism is at these days. What neither side understands is that, if the church is leading the culture, this works; when it’s following, it does not.
So what is to be done? With churches like the Episcopal, there isn’t much with the institutional inertia that can be done. With those churches who are “further upstream” from this process, they need to recognise two things: a) they don’t need to bend to every demand of the academy, which is trapped in a system designed for scientific pursuits but applied to non-scientific ones with poor results, and b) they need to figure out where to stop in moulding themselves to fit the culture, especially in the name of the income stream.
This is where we’re at after all these years; may God help us to discern his true will and do it.
-
When Two or Three Are Gathered Together…
The prayer above is a familiar one to those who recite the traditional Anglican liturgy. It comes at the end of our petitions (and not to forget the General Thanksgiving that goes with them) and is based on the following passage of Scripture:
Again, I tell you that, if but two of you on earth agree as to what they shall pray for, whatever it be, it will be granted them by my Father who is in Heaven. For where two or three have come together in my Name, I am present with them. (Mat 18:19-20)
Those who are church planters or rectors/pastors or smaller churches are grateful that Our Lord set such a low minimum for a gathering number. As enamoured as we are with big crowds and churches, we should remember that the most important thing about Christian gatherings is not their size but whether our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is there among us.
-
Connecting the Dots on Bill Ayers and the Democrats
In the wake of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Donald Trump for President, his siblings issued the above statement.
Evidently they in general and Chris Kennedy in particular have forgotten a few things. In 2010 Chris was involved in getting Bill Ayers denied emeritus status at the University of Illinois, and made this statement at the time:
But in an emotional statement, Kennedy discussed his reasons for voting against Ayers’ request.
“I am guided by my conscience and one which has been formed by a series of experiences, many of which have been shared with the people of our country and mark each of us in a profound way,” Kennedy said.
He said he could not confer the title “to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father.”
Kennedy was referring to a 1974 book co-authored by Ayers, “Prairie Fire,” which was dedicated to a long list of people including Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan and “all political prisoners in the U.S.”
Today the Democrat Party is de facto the party of Bill Ayers, and has been so since Barack Obama rose to prominence. Their tactics–from the way they booted Joe Biden (after years of covering for his decline) and squeezed RFK Jr. himself (and Bernie Sanders, in his case twice) out of the nominating process show a party with a decidedly “politburo” mentality. Their weaponisation of the justice system (which they laughably project on Trump) is of a piece of people who have figured out at last that you can’t control society without the “pigs” (to use the Sixties lingo.)
But those who have caved–even going against your own family–cannot see reality.
-
Why can’t the Church say ‘church’?—Unherd
Remember Consignia — that disastrous rebrand of the Post Office? It sounded more like a sexually transmitted disease or an obscure Roman battle than …
Why can’t the Church say ‘church’? -
Lights Out, Comrades
In 1988 my brother and I visited what was then the Soviet Union. Our intent was to sell them pile driving equipment for their offshore oil exploration, but before it was all over we acquired some valuable technology from them that has been useful both before and after my time in the family business. We (well, I, it was his only trip to the place, he usually got to go to Singapore and Italy) learned quite a lot about the country; had our rulers not been so boorishly provincial and more observant, they might have learned something too and avoided some of the mistakes they have made with the country.
To get there we took an overnight train from Moscow to Leningrad. We had a two-bed (first class) compartment, but as we lumbered away from Moscow the conductor threw the master switch and the lights went out. We looked at each other. We knew. “Lights out, comrades.”
This election cycle I get the feeling that, barring a real miracle, we’ve reached a “lights out, comrades” moment in our own history. I’ve been saying for a long time that you cannot run a country the way we have and expect it to go on in the same way. That’s especially true with an elite whose own new articles of faith have taken hold with the ascent of the Boomers, who have been beating the same drum since the 1960’s:
- The central purpose of life is to get laid, high, or drunk. It is also important to beat down people who think otherwise, which is a big reason they hate Christianity so much. They have succeeded in propagating this idea to the population at large. A major evidence of that has been the serious pushback on abortion that has taken place since the Dobbs decision. The right thought it was over with this decision, but they were wrong. The reason for this is simple: it wasn’t about the babies (as they thought) but the idea that people weren’t fully human unless they were sexually active, and abortion is a necessary tool in the toolbox of such a mentality. (I noted that the transgender movement is a tacit admission that the sexual revolution was a failure, but Boomers aren’t much in admitting their mistakes.) Failing to recognise this in advance is a major–and potentially fatal–fault in their strategy, but it is typically American to be totally incapable of understanding the motivation of one’s opponents.
- There are too many people on the planet, thus we must reduce their number. Getting volunteers to get the ball rolling is difficult, as I noted in We’re Looking for a Volunteer, Ted, so we may have been seeing calls for draftees. All of this in the face of declining fertility rates, but we still hear calls for fewer people, as noted in Should My Students Be Here?
- The suburbs are full of phonies who take up too much space and consume too much. The homeless are truly “authentic,” although no one wants to answer the question “authentically what?” So, I suppose, are those who vote for this agenda, which is why we see so much appeal to suburban women this time in the election cycle. Authenticity and self-actualisation have been the hallmarks of the modern and post-modern world, but as Modris Ekstiens shows in The Rites of Spring, such quests lead to disaster. In the meanwhile getting suburbanites to lower their standards of living to suit their “betters” has been a tough sell for half a century.
So much for the legacy of the Sixties and Seventies. Have these people come up with anything else since then? There are two things that have turned in their favour, mostly in the last decade.
The first is that the security apparatus has flipped to the left. I don’t think anyone really saw this coming, although there have been signs of this out there for a long time. But such is understandable when you consider that the Right has adopted an anti-government agenda; what else did we expect bureaucrats to do?
The second is the whole “equity” business. Now the call for equity–which really means that everyone who works (or doesn’t) has the same income and lives in the same circumstances–does have Marxist roots, although the American Left has never been up to a Marxist standard. This is evidenced by contrasting classical Marxism with what’s going on these days. Classical Marxism tells us that, as capitalists centralise more of the wealth and the working class is driven to the margins, same working class will revolt and establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the current equity movement same will be enforced via DEI and other race and preferred group rearrangements. But who will enforce all of this? The capitalists who have centralised the wealth in our own time, of course!
A push towards equity is also a push against personal achievement. Why work hard when there is no forward movement for you? That push against personal achievement is the major reason why the Jews are so unpopular these days, all of the other things they throw up at you notwithstanding.
So what is to be done? A long time ago I realised that fixing thus broken system of ours will never come from within but from without. The Right has tried to convince me otherwise but they have had 40+ years to finish the job and have not. The Left has the upper hand at this point (had they not taken 20% out of everyone’s wallet with inflation, this election wouldn’t be a contest) but they have neither the inclination nor the expertise to make the productive sector of the country the “Arsenal of Democracy” again, even to help their pet projects such as the war in Ukraine and keeping Taiwan from slipping into the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Even the lights are in danger. Our masters are so unscientific and fixated on lowering our standard of living that they have embraced “renewables” as our only hope to lower our carbon footprint. These aren’t really ready for prime time yet; nuclear power is the only technology at hand to insure a base-load source of electricity until these get up to speed down the road. In the meanwhile we can expect blackouts, either scheduled or unscheduled.
Lights out, comrades.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 