Merging Lanes

I believe that we live in a broken world, one whose natural inertia is decay. It is the indomitable human spirit that attempts to prevail against this massive momentum, a battle I believe God Himself equips His people to engage in, to accomplish some purpose of supernatural glory. Whether you are a Christian or whether you profess any other faith, it is this belief in what is higher that spurs us to be light shining into darkness.

But can it be that as we have taken collective steps away from the Source of that light, casting God out of our field of vision and seeing only our self-invented purposes, we have not only begun slipping into the trend of decay, but we are committing civilizational suicide?

In The Cube and the Cathedral, George Weigel (most famous for his biography of the late Pope John Paul II) writes about how civilizational morale in Europe has declined over the past 90 years or so. This decline was totally unexpected, as Europe was entering a veritable Golden Age and the 20th Century represented a leap forward, a historic advance in humanity. The question posed by the book is best quoted:

Why did a century that began with confident predictions about a maturing humanity reaching new heights of civilizational accomplishment accomplishment produce in Europe, within four decades, two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War threatening global catastrophe, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, Auschwitz and the Gulag? What happened? Why?

The topic that has gripped me the most is this concept of atheistic humanism. It is a concept that in order for humanity to succeed, it must be rid of the Judeo-Christian Biblical God. He considers the dominant philosophies of the 20th century: Comte’s positivism (empirical science is humanity’s only reliable tutor); Feuerbach’s subjectivitsm (”God” is a mythical projection of human aspiration); Marx’s materialism (there is no spiritual world); and the radical wilfullness of Nietzche (the will to power is the index of greatness). De Lubac, a primary influence in Weigel’s book, makes a powerful case that these philosophies were the underpinnings of communism, facism, and Nazism.

Enough with waxing philosophic. Weigel’s book is not an exercise in purely academic intellectualism, so I shouldn’t portray it as such. Instead, he considers some of these problems as indicators of low “civilizational morale” (I’ll paraphrase):

* Why do Europeans defend certain fictions in global politics, clinging to empty shells with hollow promises of global unity (i.e. the Hague Conventions and the Kyoto Protocols of the world)?

* Why do 1 in every 5 Germans believe that the United States was responsible for 9/11?

* Why is European productivity dwindling? Why does Germany, the economic stronghold of the EU, have a per capita GDP equivalent to Arkansas?

* Why are so many European intellectuals “Christophobic”, and Christianity mocked in a way that Judaism and Islam never would be?

* Most of all, why is the entire continent systematically depopulating itself in what is called the greatest “sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death”? At the present birthrate in various countries, Germany may lose the equivalent of the population of former East Germany halfway through the 21st century (and in the same span, Spain will lose almost 25% of it’s population)!

These are really serious issues, issues that Weigel posits are linked to a godless culture. It freaked me out altogether.

The question that occurred to me was this (and something I think Weigel is going to address in the book, once I get there): how is this “atheistic humanism” affecting us today? Not only in Europe, who is still rising from the ashes of the 20th century with hesitant attitudes towards religion altogether, but in the United States and globally? Is there a powerful force pushing out society away from God, and thereby tearing the collective fabric of humanity in various societies?

One other thing: Weigel makes compelling arguments for Christianity in particular, but also notes that this is NOT paganism (a topic we touched on briefly in this blog in discussing the Otherkin). This is spiritual no-man’s-land, atheistic humanism, a secular society where any notion of God is absent and with no goal greater than satiating itself. In your own personal culture, have you observed this? Are there areas in our own lives, in our own culture, that are not simply non-Christian and professing a different faith, but completely devoid of any concept of God altogether?

Weigel claims that the disaster of the 20th century in Europe was the result of machinations in human philosophy that repelled notions of God altogether. Can we begin to understand that secularism, especially in this form of atheistic humanism, is a poison to human advancement on any level? Is this an area where faiths can connect?Speaking to the life of an American, is not one of the most important traditions of this country that of religious freedom? Have we taken for granted that which many oppressed persons would bleed for, the fundamental liberty of engaging with our God in the public forum? And do we stand in danger of slipping into the idolatry of secularism separated from the concept of not just Christianity, but any religion at all?

This is not only the fight to claim our own faith freely. It’s not merely the right to have a church or to play sacred music or read holy texts in the public square, without fear of persecution. It is a battle of life and death, of suicide or redemption, of the anti-purpose and hope.

Whether we know it or not, I believe that now more than ever, we are entrenched in the fight for our own civilizational morale.