When Critics Fail
When Critics Fail
Until this time in our history, our faith, our convictions, and our basis for decision making in the West were implicitly or explicitly provided by the Judeo-Christian worldview. That is not by any stretch to say that America was a Christian nation. Certainly not. But the Judeo-Christian worldview provided the essential definitions for the founding of America, beginning with the conviction expressed by our founders that at its core life is sacred and that our legitimate rights as human beings have been endowed to us by our Creator. Which other worldview could provide that categorical statement? Naturalism? Pantheism? Islam? No Islamic nation in the world operates with a belief in the inalienable right of liberty. Naturalism does not acknowledge a Creator who could endow us with inalienable rights. And pantheism, with its karmic bequest, does not see us as being created equal; instead, pantheism assumes that we are born to a life of karmic repayment until the debt is paid. Please understand that this is not a reference to the caste system. This refers to the fact that according to pantheism, my present station is at a level determined by a previous life and is something that those who promote the New Spirituality conveniently ignore.
The critics of Christianity often missed the mark in this quest for spirituality that came to be called New Age. Within the New Ager’s mind, there was obviously some legitimacy for his New Spirituality. But the critic of the status quo did not readily sense the error in New Age thinking that lay much deeper than was evident on the surface. There were really three layers to their thinking. Some realized only the most superficial layer; others were able to comprehend the middle layer of New Age thought. Few grasped the most meaningful substratum of New Age thinking.
On the surface New Age thinking was simply a reflection of the distrust many had in the old ways and a conviction that they were being oppressed. The young were tired of being told how to think, how to feel, how to love. Why should they listen to a generation that had dragged its young into a conflict for which the very reasons were so blurred? So, along with the eviction of conservative politics, the eviction of the religious worldview was not far behind. They were tired of preachers who moralized and of church people who, at their core, were no better than anybody else. They were tired of the pursuit of materialism they saw in Western culture, often seeing it as the plunder of older traditions. Ivy League professors left their posts and smoked pot, instead. Some went on spiritual pilgrimages.
But there was more to it than just disaffection. As the American military reached its zenith and technological advances created dizzying changes in the world, there were deeply felt resentments and a strange irony in the rejection of our own values. “What makes us think we are better than anyone else?” was their entreaty, and the West became the target of attack by the young from within the West itself and, yes, from the intellectual liberals who felt that the West had succeeded on the backs of weaker nations. All of a sudden causes were addressed that became aligned with New Age and New Spirituality.
There are those who insist that New Age and New Spirituality are not identical. That may be so in terms of their building blocks, but it is not so in their epistemological starting points. From the environment to the institutions of government, learning, religion, and the family, a new day of revolutionary thinking began. The irony lay in the fact that it was the same technological knowledge that made possible both the advances that were being seen as detrimental to human potential and their alternatives.
There were layers beneath layers in this cultural and religious revolution. Sexual liberation, gender conflicts, and abortion rights all hit the fan at the same time. Someone has said, “Any stigma can lick a good dogma.” For several reasons, church and state were both called into question, and anything that argued for coherence in moral reasoning was deemed oppressive and was generally placed in the lap of Christendom at large.
I will never forget a particular scene that ought to have signaled to me, as a young man, what was happening. I was a newcomer to Christ. A friend of mine, who was the president of our youth group at church, caught everyone off guard when he let it be known that he was “gay,” a new meaning for the word at that time. For the youth at the infancy of that movement, processing it was a challenge, including the one with that disposition. But we were friends and we would sit late into the night talking about these things. Who determines right and wrong? Isn’t love the only thing that counts? he would say. Why does it matter to anybody else what my private life is like? I turned these questions back on him, and his answers were no more convincing than the ones he was attacking. There was no rancor, no anger, but a deep struggle that I sensed but found hard to process and express, as I listened. It was truly turning the world upside down.
When word of his lifestyle got back to the church leaders, he was summoned by the board of elders to face some serious questioning. As I recall being in the room, also serving on the youth committee, the very setting was symbolic. The silence as he entered the room was quite pronounced. The leadership were all dressed in dark suits, while he sat in his casual attire and defended his position and his practice. He smiled his way through the meeting. They grimaced under the strain. I little knew then how the setting itself portended the future and represented the backstage of life. There were no harsh words. There was no condemnation, which one might have expected. But it was obvious that he felt, This is me against the church. Naturally, he was relieved of his responsibilities as a leader among the youth. It was fascinating to see how he used the religious terminology and doctrines of Christianity that he had learned at Bible college to defend his new lifestyle and choices. He still saw himself as a “Christian”… he just didn’t see himself as a “churchman” anymore.
What none of the leaders or, for that matter, he himself knew was the heartbreak that awaited him. I befriended his partner as well, even though culturally and in belief we were worlds apart. I spent hours listening to their emotionally hard-hitting responses to traditional morality. Until the fateful Saturday morning that I received a call from his partner. The call caught me by surprise, as I realized that something life-threatening was happening. I dashed off and drove the several miles to their apartment, but when I knocked on the door there was no response. The door was unlocked, so I opened it and found a scene I will never forget. It appeared as though the house had been ravaged the night before. Broken bottles of liquor and clothes were strewn all over the place and there was leftover food on the floor and on the furniture. I walked in carefully, feeling that I was entering a crime scene. Frankly, I was afraid. I heard a groaning sound from upstairs and ran up to find the partner in a stupor. I called for help and he was taken to the hospital, his last journey in this life, as it turned out. The power of an idea had overtaken his life and left it in shambles.
This, I dare suggest, is the substrata of all that lies beneath: One simply cannot live without boundaries. The question is, whose boundaries? This was what the self-appointed critics of established society didn’t quite know how to deal with: If we are going to dismantle the boundaries set by society, which boundaries are we going to promote? For we cannot live as a society without boundaries. These cultural revolutionists never paused to think of our infinite capacity for destruction. Anti-absolutist thinkers seldom come to terms with the fact that freedom is not destroyed only by its retraction; it is devastated by its abuse.
The three layers that made up the rebellion against the status quo of Western society were, first, the disillusionment with materialism and the status quo; second, the shallowness and, at times, hypocrisy of the Church, or of those who claimed to be Christians; and third, and perhaps most compelling, a desire for liberation from all restraint, especially in matters of sexuality. Those rebelling wanted the foundations of society replaced and a new foundation of their own choosing established. But the foundation they wanted was actually the absence of any foundation. They wanted no point of reference for values, except one’s self.
Restlessness in the soul, disillusion with a commercialized Christianity, and a hunger for free expression came together to find a new way. In the high-speed descent into a profane culture, they tried to reexamine why anyone had ever bought into the sacred anyway, and a New Age dawned with a new way of discovering or defining the “sacred.”