With a new year upon us, what can we expect? I refer here to the bigger picture – not whether you might get a new job, get married, or move house. Will things get better politically, socially, culturally, morally and spiritually – especially in the West? Or will things go downhill?
No real surprises here as to what I might have to say about all this. From my vantage point things have been going from bad to worse for quite some time now, and 2019 is likely to see more of the same. Indeed, evil, decay, decadence and regression seem to be the order of the day, and they all seem to be accelerating at an alarming rate.
Over the years I have spoken often on these trends and movements in our culture. One public talk I would often give had to do with the three crises we face. I looked at three key areas that we all must be aware of, and must fight against. The three were these:
-the crisis in truth
-the crisis in life
-the crisis in sexuality
All three should be pretty obvious, but let me say a bit more about them. We live in an age where truth is no longer embraced, and relativism rules. People believe whatever they like, and feelings tend to trump facts. Objective truth has been replaced with subjective experience.
And we also live in a culture of death. Abortion and euthanasia for example are now routinely accepted, promoted and celebrated. Not far behind this is the growing acceptance of infanticide. We no longer have any respect for human life, and a delight in death is on the increase.
Finally, all things sexual have simply gone off the rails. The assault on marriage and family, the rise of the porn culture, and the near hegemony of the militant homosexual and transgender agendas is found everywhere in the West. Those who remain chaste before marriage and faithful in marriage – heterosexual marriage that is – are becoming a threatened species.
For decades now I have sought to warn folks about these three major crises. Some listened, but most people just did not seem to care. And that includes people who should care: those who claim to be Christ-followers. I and others sounded the alarm and sought to warn folks about these things, but mostly our words fell on deaf ears.
Thus things are now much worse than they were even a decade ago. As noted, I have not been the only one to speak about such things. Others have made the same clarion calls for us to awaken to our fate. But their pleas have also largely gone unheeded.
One ally in this area is American academic and Christian commentator Everett Piper. In 2017 his important book Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth appeared. I have enjoyed following his incisive and hard-hitting commentary for some time now.
His most recent piece also looks at some of the crises of our time. He offers us four of them, but they are of course similar to my three and those found on the lists of others. Let me offer some snippets from this excellent article. It is entitled, “Nero’s fiddling, ‘but hey, we feel good’.”
He had been asked about the most important issues of 2018 that impacted the nation, our freedoms, and how we live our lives. Here are his four:
First, the feelings versus facts narrative has destroyed our culture, and it will continue to do so. It’s now all about “bread and circuses.” Nero fiddles — he entertains us, he feeds us, he placates us — yet, Rome burns. It’s no longer about the reality of the “economy, Stupid” but rather about the illusion of our stupid feelings.
As long as our bellies are full and our intellects are numb, we march along like mindless lemmings toward our own destruction. The infatuation with socialism, the Kool Aid of climate change, the literal lunacy of sexual fluidity, the name-it-claim-it teleology and ontology of the left, the suppression of free speech on our college campuses — all of this is the result of elevating feelings over facts. Left unchecked, this will continue to destroy anything that’s left of a free society and a free people.
Second, 2018 was the year we saw the death of due process. We now live in society where you are guilty as accused rather than innocent until proven guilty. This means we are all doomed to the fate of the accusation or the lie. Any of us — all of us — can be, and likely will be, destroyed by someone who just wants to silence and marginalize us because they don’t like our politics, our values or our religion….
Third, our ongoing worship at the altar of diversity will be our demise. We are the United States and not the Divided States for a reason. We are One Nation under God, and not many nations under the gods, for a reason. I am the president of a uni-versity and not a di-versity for a reason. A civilized culture celebrates unity and not division. It strives to bring people together rather than divide them….
Fourth is the loss of what it means to be human. This is the big one. If we are not objectively defined as human beings, then men, women, boys and girls become little more than cubistic cartoons drawn by those who presume to erase all form and ignore all lines. If we can’t defend the basic premise of the imago Dei, the image of what it means to be human, then freedom for the human race is lost….
He concludes this way:
Welcome to 2019.
This is no longer the United States of America, but the Divided States of Arrogance: A land that celebrates division and not unity; a society where science is denied and due process is dead; a country where the female is social construct rather than a concrete fact; a culture without a binding “cult”; a land of more and more laws and less and less liberty.
This is no longer the republic of Jefferson and Adams, but rather the dystopia of Huxley and Orwell.
Welcome to a brave new world.
Take your Soma. Listen to the music of the Ministry of Truth. Trust Big Brother. Slip into your dream (though it be a nightmare).
Welcome to a time when the delusions of powerful men strangle the freedoms of powerless women.
Welcome to a country where diversity crushes dissent.
Did I say it was 2019?
I stand corrected.
Welcome to 1984.
Yep, that about sums it up. These crises are killing not just America, but all of the West. Unless God raises up a lot more Pipers and others to sound the alarm, and unless a whole lot more folks start heeding these alarms, the West looks to be toast.
And perhaps irretrievably so.
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