Dear Friends,
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but things are pretty polarized out there. I say “out there” because I’m pretty much a homebody who hardly goes anywhere anymore—at least not anywhere where there might be a lot of people. I used to enjoy going out for an adult beverage at happy hour from time to time, but even the memory of sitting at a bar is starting to feel very distant. And my usual companion on such adventures moved away last year, so that dropped off anyway long before COVID. Now we just FaceTime and pretend to clink our glasses.
The other day I got “out there,” but that was just to my trout stream. I didn’t see another soul. I’m slowly becoming Ted Kaczynski, in more than just our shared geography. Thankfully, I’ve got a house full of girls and (for now) a baseball season to keep me from completely losing my mind.
All that is just to say: I generally get the feel of what’s “out there” by using digital portals to the thoughts and experiences of others: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I am well aware that this is dangerous because social media can wildly distort what average, normal people are thinking about. People screaming on Twitter all day about the latest outrage or pundits whose jobs depend on giving hot takes on the news of the day are not exactly representative of the body politic.
Having said that, social media increasingly does set the agenda for whatever national conversation we’re having, whether people are aware of it or not. I notice an awful lot of my “normal” friends participating in the daily circus online. And I recently witnessed a real world argument between ostensible friends that was pretty much what we’ve come to expect from the online versions—unhelpful, unfruitful, and unedifying.
Black & White, Gray…or Color?
Back when I was in college, postmodernism was all the rage—the radical deconstruction of meaning and its resulting fluidity of truth, aesthetics, and morals. It would be an interesting study for someone to go back and look at the catalogs for Christian publishing houses between, say, circa 1990 to 2001. I’d guess the vast majority of titles had something to do with Christianity and the threat of (or, sometimes they said, possibilities of) postmodernism.
My openly postmodern, progressive classmates were big into the color “gray.” That was the problem with Christians, you see. We see things in “black and white,” but the postmodernist sees through that: all truth is relative, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there are no ethical absolutes. Any attempt to say this is Truth (with a capital “T”) was dismissed as an arrogant attempt to gain power over others.
My, what a difference twenty-five years makes. All that talk about everything being a fuzzy gray area turns out to be very much not “As Advertised on TV.” The young revolutionary Jacobins now see the world exclusively in terms of “black and white”—when it comes to race I mean that literally, but it works as a metaphor for truth, beauty, and ethics, too. Step the least bit out of line with the new dogmatic orthodoxies (See: Weiss, Bari), and you’re going to be “canceled.” Just like the French revolution, with all its rah-rah about Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, the velvet glove contains an iron fist that signifies, “or else.”
Those decades ago I formed my own assessment of postmodernism, and I got the inspiration from something Jesus said in Matthew 12:
“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.”
Of course, Jesus was making a particular claim about the spiritual state of affairs among his own people in his own time (do you think it was a bit dismaying that one of his first experiences in his earthly ministry was to encounter a demon-possessed man in a synagogue?), but I feel it’s a kind of principle that can apply to more than just that one context.
Postmodernism was all about pouring the acid of skepticism on western civilization, critically dissolving its claims and bleaching out of existence its moral authority and pretensions, its bourgeois culture, its “foundationalist” intellectual vanities, and, most importantly, its Christian moorings. I’m not saying the West wasn’t in need of a spring cleaning—plenty of nonsense needed to be taken out to the trash. But postmodernism was all about sweeping the house clean from top to bottom and completely starting over: a “new dawn,” a “Year Zero,” the advent of a utopian universal brotherhood of man. For the postmoderns, earlier radicals (e.g., Marxists) hadn’t been radical enough: it isn’t just economic inequality that should be banished, but all inequalities—race, gender, sexual preferences, and so on. This is what “intersectionality” is all about: there is now a hierarchy of victimhood (well, actually, stature and social standing) based on the number of oppressed groups to which you belong.
But I had noticed that there wasn’t exactly a plan to replace all that cleaned-out civilizational furniture, not enough to make the place livable. Nietzsche’s raw “Will To Power” was really the only viable option at the end of the day—collectively we can destroy you and take power and therefore it is right and moral to do so. The cultural vacuum was going to be filled, and we are now starting to see with what. Seven other spirits more wicked than the original one.
What I mean is this: if you don’t like western civilization and its admittedly imperfect system of ordered liberty that always needs upkeep and reform and improvement, just wait until you see what replaces it. It isn’t free love and tolerance and gray areas: it’s the gestapo, the gulag, and the guillotine. We’re not there yet, thank God, but let’s be clear-eyed as to what is really going on here.
Who Sees Color?
Looking back, the real irony to me is that it is Christians all along who (in principle, at least) see color instead of just black, white, and gray, who understand the true complexities of life in a fallen world. There’s the complexity already involved with that all-important word: “fallen.” We understand that life is not as it should be. There’s something wrong; there is real scarcity, real injustice, real futility. “Vanity, vanity” the Preacher of Ecclesiastes called it. Things don’t work right, and when they do it is through frustration, the “sweat of the brow.” We understand the concept of tradeoffs and that nothing comes easily or without cost in life under the sun.
And we know why. It’s not at root a physical reason, like God created it this way (though obviously the fall has physical effects). It’s not intractably embedded in the structures of creation. It’s an ethical reason—created image bearers stopped imaging the Creator and they betrayed their native calling. All of us, of every race and color. Normatively, sin—falling short of God’s black and white standards—cuts directly through every human heart. That means that fixing everything and restoring Eden is not a task to which we are equipped; we are the problem! It brings to mind Milton Friedman’s immortal quote about socialist enterprises: “Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?” The fallen world, even with all the resources provided by God’s continued forbearance, requires divine intervention (Friedman might not have agreed; but economic freedom is an eventual fruit of Christian thought). Nietzsche said that, having killed God, we need to become gods ourselves; but that is just a doubling down of the sinful futility that got us into this mess.
Following the fall and banishment of its caretakers, the creation itself was subjected to futility (Rom 8), but—it must be appreciated—not absolutely. God continued to allow the ground to produce its harvest and human effort to bear fruit. Situationally, God “lets his sun shine on both the good and the evil, his rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45). How’s that for a wider color spectrum than simple “black and white”?
Christians understand the complexities of the human heart, that even an evil man doesn’t give his child a stone when he asks for bread, or a snake instead of a fish (Matt. 7:8-10). And that even the righteous wrestle and struggle to mortify internal, indwelling ungodliness and sin. Life is not existentially divvied up nicely into “black and white” boxes. That’s a full-spectrum spiritual dynamic.
Moreover, our Bibles contain an entire collection of writings called “Wisdom Literature.” This should lead us to expect that applying God’s standards to the messy realities of life is not a simple, straightforward matter: it requires a great deal of wisdom. Proverbs exists because life is full of complexity. Yes, there’s black and white—the “wise” and the “fool”—but the whole point is that it is not always obvious which is which. Hence, the need for wisdom and discernment.
The church lectionary reading recently contained Jesus’ parable about the wheat and the tares—a world thoroughly mixed with righteous and unrighteous, good and evil. The salient point? They won’t be separated until the final harvest. Christians know that “black and white,” the ultimate discrimination and separation between good and evil, is not something to expect or to be attempted in the here and now; rather, that belongs to Christ, who will judge then and there.
We know better than anyone else, in other words, that history is complicated. Complicated by sin, frailty, and the Spirit’s mysterious wind of grace that does not blow when and where we tell him to (Jn 3).
Oh, but the little revolutionaries have it all figured out! Yes, the ones who are so smugly self-satisfied with their own grasp of “nuance” and their tolerance and broad-mindedness and commitment to gray are going to separate the wheat from the chaff right here and right now. They’ve pulled out their melodramatic black hats and white hats (or, better, virtue-signaling merit badges) and they’re busy placing them on the bad guys and good guys.
Here’s the latest example: Flannery O’Connor, the celebrated American novelist. Loyola University Maryland has removed her name from the residence hall named after her. This is of a piece, of course, with the recent surge of tearing down and destroying all monuments to people we now deem unworthy (Destroy the past—Year Zero!). In her case, it turns out that she was an average white woman living in the Deep South during a time of racism and segregation. Unsurprisingly, in her unguarded moments she had more than a few loathsome things to say about African-Americans.
You know what, though? They’ve picked on the wrong woman. Rod Dreher has a long post explaining just why this is so, so wrong, and it is worth taking the time to read the whole thing. I found it profoundly moving, particularly his description of his own upbringing in the Deep South. The takeaway for me is that, unlike the self-righteous cancel-culture warriors, Christians like Dreher (and Flannery O’Connor!) have the ability to really examine the depths and complexity of things like cultural and structural racism. It’s because they see color—I’m not talking about racial color; I’m talking about seeing a moral universe vastly more textured than cartoonish cardboard cutouts of “good guys” and “bad guys.”
And it’s in color and more textured because Christians see the transcendent, vertical dimension of our relationship with God and his standards—the very thing the postmodern lovers of gray rejected. I mean, on postmodern terms, Flannery O’Connor should get a complete pardon because she is a “product of her environment.” Isn’t morality a “social construct”? It’s all so confusing. But Rod explains how O’Connor, as a professing Christian, didn’t let herself off the hook! Two of her novels are indirectly rebukes of herself. She realized the sin in her own heart, and she challenged herself powerfully through her stories.
One Flannery O’Connor — a true artist who knew the human heart, and who knew the refining fire of God’s mercy — is worth ten thousand moralists for whom Goodness and Evil are simple, easy, and abstract. We are all blind, every one of us — blinded by our families, blinded by our cultures, blinded by time and place, blinded by the human condition. None of us can escape it. It takes a lot of repentance to know how little you really know about yourself. It takes a mighty surrender to grace to gain the ability to see ourselves in the mirror just a little less darkly than we otherwise would. The journey through life is a journey into regaining our sight. Artists like Flannery O’Connor bring the light, though it may come cloaked in superficial darkness.
And that is something to which Woke World is entirely blind: that there is, because of literal divine intervention, a journey of grace and redemption.
Be patient with each other, brothers and sisters. A polarized dynamic such as we are seeing today on both sides of the political aisle, whether it be about policing, race relations, or wearing masks, is why the Apostle Paul felt the need to tell us: “bear with one another.” He knew we would need to.
As Christians we ought to know the complexities of all this upheaval, that there is no “easy button,” that there is no simple explanation for sin and dysfunction and all our travails, and by the look of things right now we might be alone in not seeing things in black and white. That’s a witness all its own. This is not a call to be squishy relativists—not by a long shot. We are black and white when it comes to the divine standards to which we are responsible. I’m not calling us to see in “gray,” but rather in color. It’s a call to understand what the Bible teaches us about the depths and causes of our problems, our need for divine grace, the limitations of our own human efforts, to have gratitude for God’s blessings for improvements along the journey of our past, and, of course, hope through the gospel of the one who conquered the Devil, his minions (even the seven “more wicked” ones), sin, and death.
Trust me: by comparison the revolutionaries aren’t offering anything remotely as interesting or exciting.
Miscellany
Is the American Dream dead? Do giant corporations just crush the little guy? A lot of people think so, and the villain at the top of the list is Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. He is the richest man in the world, and he was summoned to Capitol Hill do give an account of himself and explain why the government shouldn’t just bust his company up. You might be surprised at what he had to say. He’s got quite the life story, and his success seems nothing short of miraculous. I’m sure that Amazon has its negatives, but, like I say, the world is much too complicated for cartoon villains.
Along those lines, I’m not nearly as worried as some people about the invincibility of these giant corporations. Yes, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are titans of industry at the moment. But I also remember Sears, Montgomery Wards, AOL, Yahoo, Netscape, and MySpace. So maybe we should just chill for a bit and see what happens.
I don’t know if you’ve followed the drama about the National Basketball Association and its sycophantic relationship to China, but this was spot on:
The latest meeting of our little “Culture Club” discussed this Peter Robinson interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The interview starts slow, but it picks up steam and provided a lot of fodder for fruitful discussion. In the end, we all decided that the need of the hour is courage.
On that note, this image moved me:
The guy standing, Sam Coonrod, explained that as a Christian, he doesn’t want to kneel to anything but God, and that he also couldn’t endorse some things the BLM organization stands for (e.g., “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—by the way, the breakdown of that family structure has hurt the black community more than almost anything else). This is the kind of courage we all need.
On that note, a few weeks ago I highlighted the band Petra, particularly in its 1980s iteration with the vocals of Greg X. Volz. I usually try not to lean too heavily on one artist or another for my weekly music video, but one of their songs has been running in my head for the past week: “Beat The System.” In fact, I think it was prompted by that photo of Sam Coonrod. Check out these lyrics:
Caught in the undertow being swept downstream
Going against the flow seems like such a dream
Trying to hold your ground when you start to slide
Pressure to compromise comes from every side
Wise up, rise upWise up, and rise up. That’s what Sam did, quite literally. I’ll close it out this week with the live performance of the whole thing, bad fashion choices and all!