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AR 27:4 - Are we nearing "the end of Christian civilization?"
In this issue:
CHRISTIANITY - "what is being lost as Christian civilization ends" in the "repaganizing" of the West?
GENDER - both straight and gay parents "tend to speak with one voice" to protect children from activist teachers
RACE - in a world of Black Religious Identity Cults, "Jesus is the only one who can restore our identity"
Apologia Report 27:4 (1,557)
January 26, 2022
CHRISTIANITY
"Is the West Becoming Pagan Again?" by Christopher Caldwell (New York Times, Dec 29 '21) -- "This year, at the height of what used to be called the Christmas season, a Pew Research Center poll on religion <www.pewrsr.ch/3KBlgYB> revealed that only slightly more Americans described themselves as Roman Catholics (21 percent) than as believers in "nothing in particular" (20 percent). The millennial generation, which includes most adult Americans under 40, is the first one in which Christians are a minority.
"Many Americans have a sense that their country is less religious than it used to be. But is it really? ...
"[P]erhaps we are dealing with an even deeper process. That is the argument of a much-discussed book published in Paris this fall. In it, the French political theorist Chantal Delsol <www.bit.ly/3HepCmp> contends that we are living through the end of Christian civilization....
"The book <www.amzn.to/32tBim1> is called "La Fin de la Chrétienté," which might be translated as "The End of the Christian World." Ms. Delsol is quite clear that what is ending is not the Christian faith, with its rites and dogmas, but only Christian culture....
"In the West, Christian society is the source of our cultural norms and moral proscriptions, not to mention the territory of our present-day culture wars, with their strident arguments over pronouns and statues and gay bridegrooms and pedophile priests.
"For the most part, Ms. Delsol rues what is being lost as Christian civilization ends. Yet her arguments, though they are strong and pointed, are almost secondary to the tone of the book, which is a model for polite engagement with hotly contested subjects. ...
"Ms. Delsol's ingenious approach is to examine the civilizational change underway in light of that last one 1,600 years ago. Christians brought what she calls a "normative inversion" to pagan Rome. That is, they prized much that the Romans held in contempt and condemned much that the Romans prized, particularly in matters related to sex and family. Today the Christian overlay on Western cultural life is being removed, revealing a lot of pagan urges that it covered up.
"To state Ms. Delsol's argument crudely.... We are repaganizing.
"Pagans thought that the collapse of their beliefs would mean the collapse of Rome. Many 21st-century conservatives believe something similar about the erosion of Christian values: that the liberties of our open society are parasitical on our Christian inheritance and that when that inheritance collapses, civilization will, too.
Ms. Delsol does not see things quite that way. The ethics of the Christian age, she notes, were shot through with unacknowledged borrowings from the pagan values Christianity replaced. ... In the same way, today's post-Christian progressivism comes with a large helping of Christianity. Why use Christian matrimony to unite gay couples, for example, rather than a new institution less wrapped up in Christian values? Because that is just the piecemeal way that civilizational change happens.
"So if another civilization comes to replace Christianity, it will not be a mere negation, such as atheism or nihilism. It will be a rival civilization with its own logic — or at least its own style of moralizing. It may resemble the present-day iconoclasm that French commentators refer to as le woke. (The term means basically what it does in English, except that French people see wokeness as a system imported wholesale from American universities and thus itself almost a religious doctrine.) ...
"Speech codes, elementary school consciousness-raising, corporate public service advertising — in some ways our public order is coming to resemble that of pagan Rome, where religion and morality were separated. Religion was a matter for the household. Morality was determined and imposed by society's elites, with grim results for freedom of thought.
"Whether or not a society is tolerant of rival ideas has less to do with its leaders' idle ideological positioning and much more to do with their position in a historical cycle." <www.nyti.ms/3fuLI7D>
Right on cue, at the same time we noticed the above item, a Fox News segment ("Tucker takes on Satanic Temple") <www.youtu.be/NQVVp9bcjWI> flashed across our screen announcing "an Illinois elementary school that is offering an after-school Satan club. The local school district is defending the Satan club, sponsored by the Satanic Temple of the United Sates."
Another item of related interest is this Dec 10 '21 Washington Post feature: "Tarot cards are having a moment with help from pandemic" by Sarah Pulliam Bailey. Tucked in the middle of the story we read: "Modern versions of tarot have been a major draw for many Kickstarter backers, according to Meredith Graves, who oversees the music and magic categories for Kickstarter. In the past 10 years, crowdfunding platform Kickstarter backers have pledged approximately $21.7 million to tarot projects, and 69 percent of those pledges came in 2020 or 2021. The platform saw tarot's biggest jump in popularity from April 2020 to May 2020.
"Creators were nervous, asking, 'Is this the right time to launch a project?' Graves said. 'People [in general] were looking for something to do, and they were looking for hope for the future.'" <www.wapo.st/3rmxueH>
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GENDER
"Despite San Francisco Chronicle sermon, parents oppose teachers hiding LGBTQ evangelism" by Julia Duin (GetReligion, Jan 4 '22) -- Duin points out the growing influence of "Abigail Shrier, the Wall Street Journal columnist and author <www.bit.ly/3fyWmuj> of one of last year's most controversial books," Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. <www.bit.ly/37ibZC8>
"In November, she reported <www.bit.ly/3GYKy0h> a sensational story: 'How Activist Teachers Recruit Kids' on her Substack newsletter, The Truth Fairy." Here she "reports on a California Teachers Association conference in October where two presenters bluntly described how they could spy on students' Google searches and listen in on their conversations to recruit kids into LGBTQ-friendly clubs. They also had tips on how to get LGBTQ material into morning announcements in schools, while making sure parents that don't know anything about what is happening.
"We're talking middle-schoolers here, not 18-year-olds. ...
"Someone else leaked to her a similar presentation - again via the CTA [California Teachers Association] - about how to broach the subject of gender fluidity in classes for elementary school students. ...
"Parents across the political spectrum oppose activist teachers having secret discussions with their elementary and middle school children about sexuality and gender. Far from this being a 'divisive' culture-war topic, it's close to a consensus. Conservative parents and liberal parents — and for that matter, straight and gay parents - tend to speak with one voice here...."
Duin also briefly calls attention to "huge ethical questions in that larger percentages of autistic kids are gay or transgender." <www.bit.ly/329Axyb>
To better understand the roots of Shrier's uncommon passion and courage, see this transcribed 2021 speech on "freedom in an age of fear" delivered to a Princeton audience: <www.bit.ly/3tSVPM4>
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RACE
"Black Christians Are Confronting Black Lies About Christianity" by Eric Mason <pastoremase.com> (DMin, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; founder and lead pastor of Epiphany Fellowship in Philadelphia, founder and president of Thriving <thriveinthecity.com>) -- Mason explains: "When I went to college [in 1991], I ... stepped into a new hotbed of identity ideologies. ...
"This was a significant time for Blacks wrestling with our ethnic and cultural identity. You would see brothers in the student union selling [at] vending stands [that were] filled with resources promising to fill the void of our Black minds with the truth white men had suppressed to prevent us from knowing who we were. ...
"There is a constant tension inherent in being Black and Christian in America, one etched into the psyche of many African Americans."
Thus the need for "urban apologetics," which seeks to "speak truth into a world that has become characterized by lies. We live in a world of bootleg truth promoted by Black Religious Identity Cults (BRICs). Because many people haven’t learned to distinguish truth from error, the real from the fake, they believe the lies. Most of the ideologies or cults appealing to Black people have a foundation in the Judeo-Christian worldview. They approach their rejections of Christianity and their framing of so-called truth in light of the Christian story. Urban apologetics seeks to demonstrate that only Christianity proves to be reasonable and true as a worldview." Christianity Today, Dec 13 '21, <www.bit.ly/34ZilIV> (paywalled)
Mason is the author of several books, most recently Urban Apologetics: Restoring Black Dignity with the Gospel <www.bit.ly/323bNb1> released in April 2021. The publisher's promo reads: "African-Americans have long confronted the challenge of dignity destruction caused by white supremacy. While many have found meaning and restoration of dignity in the black church, others have found it in ethnocentric socioreligious groups and philosophies. These ideologies have grown and developed deep traction in the black community and beyond. Previously found primarily in urban communities and conscious Hip-hop songs, now that we are in the Internet age, they have a broader reach than ever. Revisionist history, conspiracy theories, and misinformation about Jesus and Christianity are the order of the day. Many young African-Americans are disinterested in Christianity and others are leaving the church in search of what these false religious ideas appear to offer, a spirituality more indigenous to their history and ethnicity. ... Urban Apologetics is the first book focused entirely on cults, religious groups, and ethnocentric ideologies prevalent in the black community. It brings the church up to speed on the legitimate issues that blacks have with Western Christianity as well as the questions alternative religious groups pose about historic Christianity, and it applies the gospel to black identity to show that Jesus is the only one who can restore our identity."
Some chapters of special interest:
4. Black Church History and Urban Apologetics (Eric Mason)
6. The Nation of Islam (Damon Richardson)
7. Engaging Hebrew Israelites (Eric Mason)
8. Kemeticism and the Gospel (Vince Bantu)
9. Black Women and the Appeal of the Black Conscious Community and Feminism (Sarita T. Lyons)
13. Outreach as Apologetics (Doug Logan)
15. Apologetics as Spiritual Warfare (Eric Mason)
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