Denying Personal Responsibility and A Word To My Evangelical Brethren
The World Turned Upside Down
An AP story out of Salt Lake City Monday tried to make the case that, and I emphasize “tried” to make the case, that recent suicides of people self-identifying as gay are the responsibility of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. There have been a couple of good face-value take-downs of the piece by Maggie Gallagher and Bobby at GetReligion. I don’t see a need to revisit the contention on that level.
What I am forced to reflect upon, however, is how utterly bizarre the contention is on a philosophical level: Suicide is nothing if not the ultimate personal choice. If this “argument” gets any traction then it can lead to only one conclusion – no one is ever responsible for anything they have ever done or ever will do.
What is almost beyond me is that people who would deny that there is an Almighty, in large part because they do not want to think their life “controlled” by some supernatural force or deity, or who claim a deity so full of “grace” that standards of behavior simply do not exist, would so readily claim that they are so easily bandied about to such extraordinary behavioral extremes by mere emotional manipulation and social pressure. Somehow believing themselves free of the forces of God, they believe themselves subject to forces with far less power or authority.
Yet, such oxymoronic contentions seem commonplace and widely accepted in our world today. How have we come to the point that simple commonsense seems so uncommon?
At least part of the answer, I believe, lies with Evangelicals such as myself and our obsession with establishing TRUTH as if it were an object instead of a destination.
Let me set this up for you just a bit. In recent months as POTUS ’12 talk has begun to become the stuff of dinner table conversation, at least among the politically observant, I have heard uttered at more dinners than not, “I wish we had someone as captivating and good as Ronald Reagan this time.” But at this point in his political development, two years before he actually won the presidency, we had no idea that Reagan would be what he eventually became.
Reagan became REAGAN in no small degree because he was presented with a unique set of circumstances that permitted him to act in ways that were not available to others. Others faced Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, not Gorbachev. I have heard it argued, and it makes sense, that information about Chernobyl, being the overwhelming event that it was, could not be contained by the Soviet mechanisms and that flow of information severely weakened its control. Reagan had the strongest, most determined, and most capable allies in Thatcher and John Paul II that any POTUS enjoyed during the Cold War.
I have been reflecting on that a great deal as I have enjoyed these several dinner time conversations and it has set me to thinking about the question I asked a few paragraphs ago.
You see, there was something of a spiritual awakening in the nation in the 1970′s – counter to, but also part of, the more liberal youth movements of the late 60′s and early 70′s. Many of us with religious roots and commitments to Christ rose up and decried the “weak” Christianity of our parents. The nightly cocktails and other minor “sins” of our parents (*SHUTTER* most of their generation — smoked cigarettes) seemed to say they did not take their faith seriously. Worst of all was the tepid, non-theological, only vaguely Christ-mentioning civil religion that was bandied about in the Pledge of Allegiance and other civic settings like prayer at the beginning of the school day.
We demanded a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and faces that glowed like Moses descending from Sinai. And with this movement we did not rise to the defense of the civil religion because in our youthful enthusiasm and “wisdom” we did not think it worthy of defense for it was not “the gospel.”
We were idiots.
A Word to My Evangelical Brethren
People do not come to something like the TRUTH of Jesus Christ all at once – it is a process. Jesus told a parable of planting seed in good and bad soil. C.S. Lewis believed his work was as a “pre-evangelist” that is to say someone who established the ground in a person in such a way that the gospel could take hold.
I would argue that the civil religion of the United States was a large part of the “good soil” that has allowed Christianity to flourish in America for the last 200 or so years. In our efforts to rush to the TRUTH of the gospel, while counting as unworthy of defense the pre-evangelism provided by the civil religion we have turned fertile ground into weedy rocky soil. Just as the liberalism of the late 60′s and early 70′ ignored the base principles on which decent liberal thought, like that of Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., laid and has turned into something bizarre; so the Christianity we have today has fractured into a 1000 little pieces fighting for turf on a field that should define what unites them.
Christianity is waning in our nation and much of the blame belongs to us. Our efforts to set down TRUTH, rather than reason for it, have resulted mostly in the loss of reason, and hence very oxymoronic claims like what this post opened with can capture public attention instead of the ridicule it deserves.
Which brings me back to Ronald Reagan. I am convinced that history may put him in the pantheon of greats with Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson. But only if his legacy lasts. The fracturing within the coalition that he built, either along religious lines, or lines over who most resembles Ronaldus Maximus (to borrow a phrase from Rush Limbaugh) is what will prevent his legacy from lasting.
Now is the moment to return to basics and unite around them. In doing so we will save the nation politically and renew the pre-evangelistic playing field which has allowed our faith to flourish. That’s the ultimate win-win.
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sewinglady on 29 Oct 2010 at 9:27 am #
I really enjoy your posts, John, although I don’t always comment on them. I am completely disgusted with the media and their coverage of the CJCLDS and gays. This one about suicide is simply not supportable by any statistical measure available at this time. I read some of the comments on Bobby’s post, and I agree that the press (and the gay activists) are angry about the Church’s obvious involvement in Prop 8 and are determined to create the idea that the CJCLDS are all things anti-gay. It is easier to do this with a small cohesive minority such as our church, than it would be to go after Catholics or Evangelicals in the same way. While I am not trying to compare the situations, it’s what happened to the Jews over and over again in Europe and Russia. Blame the problems on a minority, make it a commonly accepted idea, and annihilate the minority. Again, I’m not saying that they are trying to kill us, but the pattern of isolation and annihilation (in a political, emotional sense) exists. If they can successfully create in people’s minds that our church are the anti-gays, they can dismiss anything that is said about gays in our church to being “Just those anti-gay people.” Don’t worry, Catholics and Evangelicals, I’m sure that you’re on the list once they have managed to reduce us to the level where they want us. I’m sure that they also feel that many of those who should be our brethren in the civil religion dislike us to the point that they won’t stand up to defend us. Thank you, thank you, thank you to those who do! Thank you, John.
About the civil religion points you make. Absolutely. The more time I have spent reading the comment boards on some of the conservative political threads, the more convinced I am that you are right. The ones about abortion have been the most enlightening ones of all. I consider myself very pro-life. In fact, I have four children and they are all still alive, which says something, right? (lol) To many of these so-cons, I can see that I will never, never meet their pro-life standards. One actually said that if a woman is raped, it’s God’s will for her, and that if she is pregnant, she should have the baby because it’s what God wants. Now, I have a respect for his faith, but I don’t share his view of how God interacts with His children. In talking about the civil religion, this is one place where it fractures. For some of us, believing that abortion is a second holocaust and desiring to put a stop to the wholesale slaughtering of our babies, is not enough. We must believe that there is never any case for it to be legal. I personally know a family who had a young toddler. The mother was expecting another baby when they found she had cancer, which needed to be treated immediately. The baby could not survive the treatments. The mother had her cancer treatments, remained cancer free, and has since had at least 3 more children. I don’t think the American public, at large, will go for my so-con friend’s belief that rape is the “will of God.” However, I do believe that many of the public have become disgusted at the wholesale slaughter of babies going on in our country and are or can be persuaded to change to policies that discourage abortion, if not largely ban it. Civil religion is needed and must be defended. Another woman said that she couldn’t support Meg Whitman because she is pro-choice. Of course, Jerry Brown is, too, but this woman apparently won’t sully her hands by voting for a pro-choice candidate, and thereby risks having the winner be the one that won’t defend anything she believes in. Kind of like what we got with our current President, the most pro-abortion President we’ve ever had. Very sad.