Saddle Up, Happy Warriors

I’m in beautiful California, and while hiking, I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, The American Mind. It’s usually like a warm dinner gathering of smarter friends— a place to collectively mourn or cheer the current state of affairs. Like the episode’s younger roundtable, I often feel dismayed by our hard reality; namely, that a dark veil is drawn across the world, oddly impervious to old ideas of both common sense and common decency. The scenery is often unrecognizable now, and the old roads are in disrepair. What’s a weary traveler to do?

Faced with multiplying evil, I’m tempted to hide in the halls of nostalgia, and it’s an easy option; there’s no shortage of social media to help me time-travel to the 1980’s, which was my generation’s golden past. Didn’t we enjoy those scorching playground slides—without whining—or roam neighborhoods on bikes (and without helmets or water bottles), and spend Thursday night watching Thomas Magnum outwit bad guys? We are the last generation to have been raised without Steve Jobs and Bill Gates engineering—and ruining—childhoods.

Of course, things weren’t actually perfect, because they never are—wars still raged, famine and disease still sickened children overseas, and divorce and illegitimacy broke our own. Yet, in the middle of the contemporary mess, most of us retained vestiges of decency; we still knew better than to cuss at parents or teachers, or to destroy property as “justice,” or to otherwise demand that the world conform to the ignorant whims of teen angst and criminal mischief. Now at midlife, we stand in disbelief, observing a world where this very sort of ignorance rules.

We all pine for the days when “the American dream” or something similar was possible—or even desirable. The older generations feel they grew up in more sensible times, and they aren’t wrong; despite the claims of embarrassed cultural apologists, things in our country haven’t “always been” this bad. Things are, in fact, worse than ever on a variety of fronts, and the world’s hopes are eclipsed by the deepening darkness.

It’s true that sin has been our wasting disease since the fall of man, and there is nothing new under the sun; in that larger sense, we were no better off a century ago. Yet just as physical disease advances by stages, so does our spiritual decay; the virtue pendulum doesn’t always just “swing back” by default. When the world was finally drawn to suicidal transgenderism and creepy transhumanism, it signaled the end stages of our disease—the death throes of our futile effort to exterminate God.

We must admit the unwelcome truth, then—that, after all our technological ingenuity and moral campaigns, our world isn’t progressing toward some kind of human triumph. The emperors with no clothes fail us regularly and spectacularly but still laughably claim moral authority. The socialist fervor of “the youth” and the utopian imaginations of the United Nations have not saved our groaning planet, either. The rescue must come from elsewhere.

Our rescue is found in God. The Christian faith is a realistic faith, and its truths alone bring sanity to the heart of our ugliest battles, both personal and international. Even our best secular values, however twisted they’ve sadly become, are rooted in Christianity’s own—equality, compassion, scientific inquiry, and so on. (For a summary of Christianity’s cultural impact, read The Air We Breathe, by Glen Scrivener.) Amid the many popular prescriptions for our peace, God’s word stands alone as reliable, exposing the fraudulence of all schemes that fail to understand or improve human nature.

The Bible, unlike our modern fiction, isn’t an account of good people, unlimited human progress, a fashionably flexible God, and a panoply of beliefs leading to the same happy end. Instead, it presents the world and its weary inhabitants as they really are—glorious yet broken, imaging God but resenting his authority, full of desire but raging in despair. The Christian faith contains a beautiful rescue, a hope vastly superior to the utopian and dystopian visions of the world’s faltering experts.

Here is where something good is afoot. No longer can one float comfortably in ambivalent neutrality or claim ignorance. Recent events have laid bare the real agendas; the once-liberal left now finds its faithful cheering Islamic terror and ushering sick men into women’s bathrooms. Personal beliefs suddenly have public, physical consequences, and the options are clearer than ever, even for the least political or religious minds among us. Will we be enslaved to depraved desires or live within the happier bonds of objective truth?

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