Friday, January 06, 2006
Mark Steyn Says It All
Mark Steyn had a piece in OpinionJournal on Wednesday. It is a grandeloquent and sweeping piece that says in a relatively short space just about everything that is wrong in the western world today. I am behind the curve on this, everybody talked about it yesterday, but all the discussion has been so limited, I am not sure I realized the scope of this piece. At the core lies this thesis
Steyn is right of course, the plenty that meets our primary impulses is not on auto-pilot, if we do not tend to it, it will collapse under us. So the question becomes, "How in a time of such abundance do we keep society focused on the primary impulses?" Hence all of Dennis Prager's talk of "values," and values seeded in religion. This is why I was not too upset by the news that most teens in America are deists the other day. It helps hugely in fulfilling our societal needs, if it doesn't necessarily bring Christ.
This makes me think that the mega-church and emerging church, and all the other "relgious" institutions that I am so fond of deriding serve a most useful societal purpose, even if they are not really effective at spreading Christ. The problem is that the primary institutions of Christianity, the so-called mainline denominations, have suffered the same fate Steyn is describing, thus these modern religious institutions become "church" instead of being some sort of societal leveling agent, an effective arm of the church as they should be.
Traditional religious institutions must renew, or they must be replaced with something more substantive than a mega-church. Without such solid backing, the mega-church will cycle through this nonsense in decades instead of the centuries it has taken the mainline - then where will we be? The stakes are indeed high.
One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.He restates the thesis later in the piece with this little pithy sentence
The Western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we've developed a great cult of worrying.This is a common theme among many thinkers, but rarely have I seen it examined in such a practical, political and sweeping sense as Steyn does in this peice. We are, in essense, victims of our own success. As the "primary impulses" are satisfied with plenty, we turn to the secondary ones because we really are strivers. As a people, I don't think we really know how to relax and enjoy the fruits of our labor, so we turn to what seems like the next important thing.
Steyn is right of course, the plenty that meets our primary impulses is not on auto-pilot, if we do not tend to it, it will collapse under us. So the question becomes, "How in a time of such abundance do we keep society focused on the primary impulses?" Hence all of Dennis Prager's talk of "values," and values seeded in religion. This is why I was not too upset by the news that most teens in America are deists the other day. It helps hugely in fulfilling our societal needs, if it doesn't necessarily bring Christ.
This makes me think that the mega-church and emerging church, and all the other "relgious" institutions that I am so fond of deriding serve a most useful societal purpose, even if they are not really effective at spreading Christ. The problem is that the primary institutions of Christianity, the so-called mainline denominations, have suffered the same fate Steyn is describing, thus these modern religious institutions become "church" instead of being some sort of societal leveling agent, an effective arm of the church as they should be.
Traditional religious institutions must renew, or they must be replaced with something more substantive than a mega-church. Without such solid backing, the mega-church will cycle through this nonsense in decades instead of the centuries it has taken the mainline - then where will we be? The stakes are indeed high.
