Oh, My, things fall apart!

On Easter Sunday in the New York Times the columnist Ross Douthat had a column entitled "Divided by God." He suggest that in the 1960's there was a religious core center that acted as one of the bonds that held society together. We were all primarily mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. Now the country as a whole is much more religiously fluid, with more church-switching, more start-up sects, more do-it-yourself forms of faith. We are more and more a nation that is increasingly nondenominational and post-denominational. We are more and more "spiritual, but not religious." He calls us now a nation of heretics in which more people still want to claim the adjective Christian but want to give to that title their own definitions of the faith. Nobody can agree on what even the most basic definitions of what the Christian faith is all about. His conclusion is "The religious common ground has all but disappeared."

I suspect that is what has fueled so much of the fear and anxiety of the society today. There is a recognition that there is a dissolving of some of the bonds that held us together as a society, and people are very frightened about what might happen to us. There appears all these groups that are desperately fighting to put things back the way they were. Somebody says it all started to fall apart when they took prayer out of schools. Others say it started to crumble when gays came out of the closet. Some look at all the decisions that say government cannot support Christian calendar. No Christmas decorations in public places. No prayers that end in "Jesus' name."

When you add to this dissolving of the religious center, the dramatic changes in the economic world, where whole industries and manufacturing is now replaced with service industries, when you add the increasing number of other cultures and other ethnic groups coming into the country, the dramatic push of Jews and Muslims into places like the Bible Belt South, when you see what has been your whole way of life suddenly crumbling into pieces and you have no conception of what might replace it, you do become very frightened, very aggressive in trying to hold on to what you have, very angry at those who continue to push the programs and the trends that are threatening your little picture of life.

For me that is the great thing about the Christian faith. It has gone through these kinds of times before. The Early Church face many of the same kind of challenges. Augustine saw the collapse of the Roman Empire as a sad thing, and yet continued to believe that God would bring in a different and better way. The Reformation period saw very little religious unity and the complete reorganization of society, and yet Luther and Calvin were convince that all was in the hands of the great providence of God's love. I still think that at the core of the Christian faith is the unchanging conviction that things are never what they used to be, they are not what they are going to be, and thank God they are still in God's love. There is no fear in the changes because God is leading us always by His spirit into new trues and new ways. Rather than fight to preserve the old consensus which had a lot of problems and left out a lot of people, it would be a lot more faithful to try to help build a new social contract.