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AR 26:43 - Rebuilding mutual respect and harmony
In this issue:
BIBLE - watching America continue in its drift away from God
PHILOSOPHY - the irony of how a pursuit of meaninglessness has usurped our culture's quest for meaning
RACE - where anything but a biblical understanding "will do more harm than good"
+ wokeism and "the world it wants to hold onto"
Apologia Report 26:43 (1,548)
November 10, 2021
BIBLE
The American Bible Society's original "State of the Bible" research project began in 1812 and it has been updated ever since. The most recent ABS report, released last month, was produced by the Barna Group. It describes (pii) a "growing segment of adults who are skeptical of the Bible and its influence in society. ...
"[A] key theme of our research is the massive gap between younger and older generations when it comes to the Bible." Result: "the Christian community is woefully unprepared to address the questions, mindsets, and worldviews of Gen Z" - for whom "screens shape their perceptions of reality."
The study also reports on "the Hope scale, which measures a person's confidence that they are able to move themselves forward toward their goals, imagining a preferred future and acting to realize that vision." Here we find that the "elder" segment scores the least stress and most hope in contrast to Gen Z which finds they are experiencing just the opposite (p68).
On the topic of "Scripture engagement" we read that half of Gen Z youth are "Bible Disengaged" while "only 9 percent of Gen Z youth qualify as Scripture Engaged, compared with 14 percent of Gen Z adults and 23 percent of Millennials" (p108).
On page 113 we learn that a third of Gen Z has "a significantly lower view of the Bible than other generations" and nearly another third are ambivalent overall.
Further in, while still on the subject of Scripture engagement, we read that "More than half of self-identified Christians in the U.S. are not actively practicing their faith." Specifically, non-practicing Christians constitute approximately 60% of evangelicals, 80% of Catholics and 72% of people in the mainline church category (p154). <www.bit.ly/3jLVbKA>
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PHILOSOPHY
"Vacuous entertainment, pornography, and radical environmentalism are among the forces at work in our culture that have replaced the search for meaning with a search for meaninglessness." So concludes John D. Martin in "Our Search for Meaning" (Salvo 56 - 2021).
"The key insight of [Victor] Frankl's book [Man's Search for Meaning] is summarized in these words: 'Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.'" Martin notes that in post-war Europe when Frankl published the book, "existentialist nihilism was dominant in intellectual culture." These people "rejected meaning and instead advanced a bleak philosophy that asserted the meaninglessness of moral claims and even of human life itself. Frankl's observations stood against this philosophical turn in the West and became the core of the school of logotherapy, which he developed and promulgated until his death in 1997. ...
"When belief in a transcendent purpose is absent, people find substitutes for it in any of a variety of places, such as entertainment, hedonism, or collectivist politics. But in Frankl's understanding, none of these is sufficient to promote human flourishing. ...
"What would Frankl make of the current Western obsession with virtual reality? ... This phenomenon seems to be advancing in this third decade of the Internet Age, with virtual experience substituting for actual participation in such things as physically risky professions, military service, marriage and family life, and various social interactions, all of which have potentially meaningful impacts on society.
"Recently, it has come to light that disturbing public health issues are associated with various forms of compulsive or addictive internet use. ...
"[T]he World Health Organization has expressed concerns about the increase in video-game addiction as a worldwide public health problem...." Martin also refers to "an increased risk of depression among gamers. ...
"Studies of internet pornography use have indicated a link between porn use and various negative effects on one's mental health and personal relationships, including depression and social isolation. At least sixteen states have formally recognized the growing use of pornography as a public health crisis and are pushing for legislative measures to combat the widespread dissemination of porn via the internet. ...
"[P]orn use contributes to a flight from meaning ... it is also linked to mental disorders such as depression."
"The most extreme [and] latest radical iteration of the environmentalist movement, ... seeks to eliminate the human race from the face of the earth. This brand of environmentalism is embodied in such groups as Conceivable Future, VHEMT (Voluntary Human Extinction Movement), and Population Connection (formerly known as Zero Population Growth). All these groups boast of their large and growing memberships, with Population Connection claiming to be 'the largest grassroots population organization in America'....
"Unsurprisingly, all of these groups have jumped onto the bandwagon of the current political and cultural panic about greenhouse gas emissions and their ostensible role in global warming. ...
"Man's very existence is taken as the current and most dangerous threat to life on earth, and politically minded scientists have been quite ready to link the control of carbon emissions to the control of people.
"According to a Bloomberg report, more than 11,000 climate 'experts' signed a statement in November 2019 asserting that the global population 'must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity.' ...
"[T]he ultimate goal of the most extreme environmentalist groups ... turns the movement at its extreme end into a pursuit of meaninglessness rather than a quest for meaning." <www.bit.ly/3no3oFy>
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RACE
"How the Race Is One" by James M. Kushiner (Salvo 56 - 2021), executive editor of both great magazines Salvo and Touchstone (touchstonemag.com), begins: "The Bible teaches that all human life is sacred and that men and women were created in the image and likeness of God." As historian Tom Holland writes: "the image of God was something to be found 'as much in the pauper, the convict or the prostitute as it was in the gentleman.' ...
"This Christian teaching about our common ancestry and shared blood means there is only one human race. This is also affirmed in ancient liturgical texts still in use today that refer to 'the race of man.'
"There are no races other than the one human race. ...
"Modern racial theories began in the 1600s, when Europeans made contact with the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. ...
"Combined with the theory of evolution, racial theories veered toward the view that there is a hierarchy of human races, that some are more 'evolved' than others. ...
"All of this goes against the timeless truth that all mankind bears equally the image of God. ...
"Harmony can only begin with deep mutual respect for each man, woman, and child as created in the image of God. Anything else is based on human theories and will do more harm than good. The Bible has it right." <www.bit.ly/3nGfIkJ>
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Religion Dispatches takes an irreverent woke look at "the intersection of religion, politics, and culture." Recently it featured "The Inverse of the Mormon Story" by Jake Johnson (Sep 28 '21), reflecting upon the tenth anniversary of The Book of Mormon the musical on Broadway and how it has "gone from America’s darling to America’s latest problem" over the past decade.
"During the course of the [COVID-driven] Broadway shutdown, Black actors from The Book of Mormon petitioned the show's creative team to rewrite parts of the hit musical they felt furthered harmful racial stereotypes of Africa and Africans. This is no small ask. Anyone familiar with The Book of Mormon is likely familiar with its capacity for rudeness. ...
"Some sincere tenets of the show's Mormon missionaries often sound hilariously inflated to an outsider, while the war-torn and corrupt Uganda where they're proselytizing remains flat, one-note, and unimaginative. ... The world has changed its tune about this one-time monster hit. ...
"Mormons practiced polygamy and built communities of shared resources - qualities that historian Paul Reeve has shown <www.amzn.to/3wikLMb> disqualified this almost totally white religion from the protections of whiteness. ...
"It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that Mormonism put forward a narrative of itself that flipped the script on its racial identity. The Church dropped polygamy and opened its arms wide to America. Mormons became linked with the highest favors of middle-class whiteness—industrious, capitalist, monogamous. ...
"Contrary to the source of their ridicule in the nineteenth century, twenty-first-century Mormons were now too white, too American, too representational of values receding into a problematic past. ...
"Ugandans in The Book of Mormon are facing an epidemic (in the case of the show it's AIDS). They bend to superstition and choose sexual assault as a remedy. In the real world, Americans suffering our own pandemic reject scientific reason and resort to eating horse de-wormer. ...
Today, its "jokes presum[e] too much idealization for whiteness and what it represents. Like actual Mormons, then, the satirical musical's carefully constructed trajectory into America's heart now seems miscalculated. In positioning Mormonism's exaggerated whiteness and bright-eyed Disney demeanor against an invented Africa, equally buffoonish and gullible, the musical took too much pleasure in punching down and now looks too much like the thing it tried to laugh off. Whiteness, once the musical's cause célèbre, is now its liability. It took Mormons most of the twentieth century to chart an exponential path from problematically not white enough to problematically too white. The musical spoofing them took only ten years to do the exact opposite."
Johnson concludes: "What the musical chooses to give away will say a lot about the world it wants to hold onto." (Continued irony is likely even now on its way.) <www.bit.ly/3EHK5y4>
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