The new barbarism. . .

The future of Christianity in America is not bright.  It is not that the faith will die or that our civilization is in immanent danger of collapse.  God will tend to the faith.  Our society may fall in upon itself at some point.  But the day is coming when there will be few signs of the institutional church the way there are even now -- in the days of transition.  What we once thought essential will prove to be worthless and what we deem ordinary will become extraordinary as the world becomes a more difficult and dangerous place for the people of God.  Perhaps COVID was a testing ground for our faithfulness and some practice for the more challenging days ahead.

We live in a new rude and barbarous age of intolerance, of the sanctioned murder of the children in the womb, of disdain for the inherent institutions of marriage and family, of the devaluing of labor and the overvaluing of government assistance, of control of what is taught in schools, published in the media, and allowed as our history.  We are not improving but in decline.  We have caved into the mob rule of those who have effectively used media to foster a point of view, a political ideology, and an immoral morality.

Our colleges and universities will either die or become secular institutions who love to point us to their legacy or history for fund raising but unwilling to embrace it for anything else.  The Title IX programs of government guaranteed student loans and rules regarding everything from sports to scholarships will force our colleges and universities to bow down or die.  Everyone knows this even though we are not talking about it.

Parochial schools are also in danger just as homeschooling.  The forces of political correctness and the engineers of our new society of sexual identity and gender choice will not abide places where the company line is challenged.  Neither will those who rewrite our history in view of modern day values or who have adopted critical race theory allow places where a competing narrative is kept alive.  It will begin with the government takeover of preschool education but it will not end there.

The places where the Gospel and the Biblical story are allowed will narrow just as freedom of religion becomes more and more freedom of private worship.  Christians will find themselves gathered behind locked doors -- not because they are afraid of the world outside but because the world outside is afraid of and will not tolerate them.  The public square, once filled with religious speech, will become a secular arena of ideas that fit the model in vogue of culture, society, education, morals, etc...

Pastors will find that the benefits we have come to count on may be few and far between.  Our venerable system of providing health insurance for a price and retirement security will be pressed by the aging of our church workers and the diminishing pool of younger and cheaper people in the mix.  Concordia Plans and LCEF and LCFU and the like will become more and more like Thrivent -- we will serve whoever has the money to purchase our products.  They may do this in part because they want to protect us old fogies who get a pension and our young families who need health care but it will not take long before the mission grows and the church becomes a bit player in their operating vision.

It may come the day when the population turns against such things as tax exemptions that make it possible for churches to have big facilities.  In evaluating the good that churches do against the harm they do to the progressive view of lie, I can see the day when tax exemption will eventually apply only to the actual place where worship takes place or when it will disappear entirely.  Then we will have to figure out how to live without our mighty structures or how to pay for the actual cost of them.  Some sorting will inevitably happen.

This may seem like a pessimistic view of things.  It is in some ways but not in others.  For too long we have lived in the shadow of the grand lie that we are able to redeem society and rescue culture.  It was never our mission and it was never the mandate God gave to His Church.  Maybe Rod Dreher and those who speak about a Benedict Option are doing us a favor.  We have to look in the mirror.  The Church is not colleges or universities or social service systems operating with government money.  The Church is not day care centers or parochial schools that offer everything in the public school and a pinch of religion.  The Church was and is always first and foremost a worshiping community.  We confessed a couple of months ago that the catholic faith is that we worship the Trinity.  The faith never was and should never be simply a private belief system or an assent to religious propositions.  We are first and foremost a community gathered around the Word and Table of the Lord.  If the new barbarism around us reminds us of this truth, then thanks be to God because I fear we have forgotten this basic truth.

The Church does not survive by popes or councils or synods or districts or dioceses.  She exists as a people called from darkness into Christ's light by the powerful Word through which the Spirit works.  She exists as a people set apart by baptism and given new and everlasting life that both secures an eternal future while detaching us from the need to define us by the moment.  She exists by the absolution that invades the guilty heart and mind with the gift of forgiveness and the mercy that ever reclaims us from the grasp of temptation, trial, trouble, and terror and from the grip of evil and doubt.  She exists as a community in which the truest word of all is the Word God spoke to us and we speak back to Him and in witness to our families and those around us.  She exists as a people kneeling before the altar where God delivers up His own to us and the fruits of His one, all-sufficient sacrifice as well as the sacrifice itself become our food and drink, the medicine of immortality and the foretaste of the eternal feast to come.

It will be great if we grow out from this in honorable learning communities in which the best of our past is preserved.  In these academies the goal is not simply learning but learning that equips us to live as the people God has called and made us to be in baptism.  It is not an education with a religious twist but a religious education that embraces every aspect of life and learning.  It will be great if we can find ways to care for those within the household of God and so manifest to them and to the world around us that love is not a word.  Love is sacrifice and service.  What we saw in Jesus and still see in Him we show to those around us, beginning from the household of faith.  Though we may be rescuing parts of the civilization currently being threatened, that rescue is not our goal but the redemption of the lost and the captive.  But our goal is not to replicate a religious structure that was conceived of and built in a previous time.  Our goal is and ought always to be is faithfulness -- faithfulness in time of prosperity, in time of adversity, in time of relative calm, in time of strife, in time of persecution, in time of influence.  God will not judge us for the buildings we have lost or our failure to revitalize civilization but He will judge whether or not we have been faithful in worship, in teaching the faith, in living out the faith, and in passing on the faith.  If we succeed here, the rest will come if God wills it or not -- but we will endure.