A Christian Beginning

For some Westerners, Christianity still provides an identity and life purpose.

Civilizations in decline do not relinquish their heritage except bit by bit. All civilizations are religious even if this fundament weakens with the passage of time.

The secularism of the modern West took centuries to reach domination and even now, traces of the Old Faith are still around. There are old Jedis living in caves who remember the Clone Wars.

In my lifetime, Christianity has declined significantly in influence on American society. Much is made about it as a potent force during election seasons or ballot initiatives, but as an integral cultural shaper, it lost long ago to secularism. Please read no triumphalism in this. The numbers all show a steep decline in church attendance and Christian identification among people 40 and under. The West was much better when it had an energetic Christian ambience. What has replaced it is much darker, sadder and more neurotic.

America is the putative leader of the Free World for going on a century now. A land of innovation, its grandiose vision of a future shaped by powerful technology has supplanted the more otherworldly imperative of Christianity. America is a country shaped by two major streams: the religious and the technical. They overlap in their concerns. Techne has placed smart devices in the hands of its followers, delivering miracles and oracles moment-to-moment.

Western civilization has no theme any longer, no grand narrative rooted in a religious outlook. Everything is material and from this plasticity, we can sculpt the New Person and the Pretty Good Society as long as don't inquire about the metaphysical assumptions in either. We are probably on the cusp of modifying humans with implants that tie into the central nervous system, augmenting the powers of the human being in a way we can only speculate about.

Juval Noah Harrari promises a slack future of smoking weed and playing video games all day. All the big stuff will be taken care of by automation.

Sam Altman suggests we will get a check for $13,000 per annum to cover our basic needs once AI reaches a certain level. Presumably there will be a complete revaluation of debts, public and private to go with the new pay scale.

I grew up in a Protestant family whose lines go back to England, France and the Netherlands. My people came to America in the 1600s as Puritans, Huguenots and Quakers. In other words, as religious fruitcakes, odd balls, dissenters and nonconformists. I would describe my family now as vaguely attached to Christianity. None to my knowledge are church members or talk about it much except to say that they have been "saved."

We do not descend from the stream of techne, that tradition being rooted in a different geographical region.

Grandfather was a lifelong minister who worked in rural mission churches, raised three sons who turned into alcoholics and married one daughter off to an alcoholic. She divorced after years of abuse and married another alcoholic, one much less energetic.

Grandad lost his taste for religion late in life, drifted from church attendance, and died exhausted around 90 in uncertainty about it all. I don't think my grandmother went to church more than a few times in the last 20 years of her life. In both cases, their spiritual lives tracked the decline of Christianity in America.

There is a pronounced gnostic strain in American Protestant Christianity which is hostile to organized religion and as the established bodies weaken under the influence of secularism, it becomes more energetic, more vital in the lives of individuals who feel no connection with the new regime. They turn to an inner light for guidance. Meister Eckhart would recognize some of them, at least the aspiration. When the public square falls into ruin, men retreat into themselves and some find some warmth in the light of gnosis.

For gnostics, active regular involvement in a faith community is a Bad Idea because all of the churches are corrupt, their clergy untrustworthy and feckless (this is the contention that has launched 10,000 denominations). While megachurches had their heyday in the 80s and 90s, they did not remove the anti-establishment elements within American evangelicalism. No true gnostic was fooled by the showmanship and glam of the megachurches. Gnosticism has haunted the fringes of mainstream society for thousands of years.

Plenty of people still believe they have been saved through a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. All their debts have been paid by him and come death, he will lift them up on high and place them in a mansion. It is what is known in the low church Protestantism of my early life as the Blessed Assurance (of Everlasting Life). Any soul who confesses Christ publicly in this life will be backed by him come the day of judgment, when we all must stand before the Father.

The Blessed Assurance is antinomian to the core and a shocking theological cover for the most degenerate behavior. You can die drunk in a puddle of your own vomit lying next to a hooker and wake up in the arms of Jesus so long as you made the Public Profession of Faith and got baptized.

You needn't look very far for the source of this idea. Luther said something to the effect that man is a steaming pile of shit made tolerable in the sight of God by a film of snow. Beneath it all, you remain the same and any attempt to save yourself through "good works" is the dark path of popery. No one is good except God and it's the folly of pride to think you can achieve perfection.

The tumult of American Protestantism leads some to just sleeping in on Sunday. True devotees will start their own movements, churches, communities. But for people with regular jobs, it's pretty exhausting and since the advent of cable in the 1970s, not nearly as fun as vegging out in front of an electric screen.

Much has been lost by the simple elbow rubbing and group singing of Sunday services. I've long suspected that a connection with others is more valuable in religion than any particular set of doctrines or rituals. The Buddha told one of his disciples that good companionship was the whole of the holy life, not as a way of saying that Right View is secondary, but that the good community imparts the wholesome things to you naturally. It's much easier to progress spiritually surrounded by wholesome friends whose lives show the doctrine.

I stopped going to church after a dustup between my parents and elements within the church they attended. American Protestantism is very fractious, leading to a landscape of colorful sects and beliefs, each claiming to have recovered the essence of the Gospel. The spirit of nonconformity which prompted people like my ancestors to leave northern Europe was passed onto their descendants. Although rapidly dwindling, there remain a significant number of Americans whose ancestral ties pre-date the Founding.

The cause of the split between my parents and their church concerned poor people. Specifically, my mom and step-dad Bill believed that poor kids in the church's neighborhood would benefit from a van mission. Sundays and Wednesdays, they would use the church bus, pick up the urchins from the public housing project nearby and bring them to church for Sunday school, worship, activities, Vacation Bible School, etc. and then return them home. White ghetto kids are the Lord's critters too.

They were generally the kids of single mothers being raised by a group of female relatives (it takes a village); the mostly scarce males were usually alcoholics, in no position to support or be around their children. They might have criminal records for B&E, check kiting or such.

My parents thought if you could get the kids integrated into the church, the parents would follow along. They could become better, happier people living in the light of faith with renewed ties to kin and community.

This apostolate offended the middle class sensibilities of congregants, who became annoyed that poor kids were mixing with their offspring in the church environs. This was an all-white part of the country, in what is now termed a Whitopia, well before the collapse of European-American demographics. So while everyone was white, there were class differences and those can be more significant than race depending on context.

There's an anxiety that comes with middle class membership – one could slip from the ledge of decent respectability at any time and end up living on government cheese in a red bricked 1960s-era LBJ Great Society housing project like the van kids. (I first saw government cheese in a housing project. It was real.)

Many of the middle and upper middle class people who disliked the van kids were themselves probably only one or two generations removed from them. Any proximity to those children was a reminder of their own modest lineages, minus the broken homes, AWOL fathers and single mothers. Those came later in the 1970s.

In some cases, the proliferation of drugs and pornography (mail order VHS tapes in those days) along with hysterical media reports of satanism led many concerned parents into a hyper protective mindset. The van kids were probably symbols for a host of subliminal fears and anxieties stemming from the cultural revolution.

One day, my step-dad Bill received a pretty vicious anonymous letter from one of the upset parents. I don't remember very much about it but the gist was, "You've no right bringing filthy little public housing ghetto trash into our church and exposing them to our children!" He showed the letter to the pastor and he in turn agreed to let Bill read it from the pulpit one Sunday morning. My parents quit the church that day and the pastor followed suit not long after to start his own non-denominational project.

Pastor Gary was a good man who probably doubted whether he was reaching anyone given the reaction to the van kids within certain quarters. For him, it was a sign that his leadership was not moving hearts in the right direction. After reading the letter, Bill reminded the congregation of the little ones spoken of by Jesus, how their angels see the face of God.

Gary started his own house church and this eventually grew into a community church complete with a building and grounds. The van kids started going there, Bill sharing the wheel with other volunteer drivers.

By the time I was 14, I knew that Christianity was not for me. I eventually got out of going to any kind of service, even sporadically. Mom, Bill and I were unchurched for about a year while Gary was trying to figure out his next move. Step-dads can be pretty lenient if you whine long enough. You're not their kid so why put too much effort into it?

I tasted freedom and wanted no part of church life. Mom enrolled in the gnostic school and shunned churches for the rest of her life. When I asked her a few years before her death about not "forsaking the assembly as some do" (Heb 10:25), she replied with a gnostic retort about the churches being corrupt, faithless social clubs who were as far from the Gospel as we are from the the moon.

I developed an interest in reading more serious books on 20th century history and ideas while in high school. Senior year, I was allowed to take an advanced, experimental class in 20th century American history. We read serious writers instead of textbooks, held seminar-style discussions and submitted notes weekly containing reflections on the material in the bibliography. The class was aimed at preparing us for college-level work. The teacher and others like him had a huge positive impact on my life. My heart brims with gratitude.

The world I grew up in was shaped by people who were active in their churches and community groups. My public school education was unique in that I had very capable teachers. The town was home to a STEM university with recognized secondary programs in music and education. Ours was a small community of 20,000 souls with a university-backed symphony orchestra that was pretty decent.

Our graduating class of 400 saw many of us off to very good schools, including the Ivies and military academies. College in those days was still seen as a positive track to a better life instead of a debauched initiation into lifetime debt slavery.

The presence of a university meant that the professors expected their children would be well prepared for college. As a result, our teachers tended to be very good and their lessons were thorough. There was a cohesiveness to the community that stands out even more in the backdrop of today's highly polarized, strife-driven America.

Despite the post-1960s family breakdown, GenX was the last generation to have a taste of a happy childhood. Kids were allowed to be kids. We lived in broken homes sometimes; we raised ourselves in many ways, earning the title of latch key kids since our mothers had to work with the demise of the single income earner. We were not the products of the idyllic times of post-war America, but we at least got to enjoy some of the afterglow. We had grandparents and other relatives who served as a kind of social capital capable of patching the cracks appearing in the foundation. There's a very finite quantity of that social glue to go around.

The blended families which became the new norm in the aftermath of the sexual revolution created tensions for the youth. We developed a kind of independence early in life. We were devoted gamers (Atari, C64/128, Dungeons & Dragons, board games), but we also spent plenty of time outdoors playing in the woods and eating self-prepared friend baloney sandwiches. Moms had to work and were usually too haggard to do a lot of the domestic duties women performed in olden times. We all showed up for the new school year with dark tans.

Quite a few families remained intact and their stability provided support for the rest living in unhappy, blended or single parent homes. I think they are called "non-traditional" families now. Even if your parents were divorced, you still knew plenty of families where life was normal.

I discovered new Ideas and interesting writers through my history class. Among them were intellectually accomplished Roman Catholics; it surprised me that such a superstitious religion would have capable exponents and professed adherents.

The anti-Catholic vibe was part and parcel of American culture circa 1960, although greatly weakened. JFK, the first Catholic president, was widely admired in life and sorely missed with his passing. The Protestant region where I grew up retained a visceral dislike for the Church of Rome, which was seen as the haunt of idolators and Mary worshipers, notwithstanding Kennedy's appeal to blue collar folk. The Catholic community in my hometown was small, so Romanism remained pretty abstract and there were more immediate concerns related to the general national decline.

My Mom worked a switchboard for the telephone company in Dallas and was on duty when JFK was murdered. I asked her what that was like. She said every girl in the Bell switchboard room was sobbing even as they struggled to handle the surge in phone traffic. Most of these Texas gals were solidly Protestant like my Mom but they liked the charismatic JFK and his pretty wife. It is really hard for people not alive at the time to understand what a devastating blow was inflicted on the national psyche with his assassination.

My grandfather was bitterly opposed to any form of popery, although holding compassion for its adherents whom he felt had been deceived. While living in the southwest, a family of Mexicans asked him to perform a Christian burial for one of their dead. He was not their first choice since he was not a priest, but the one they had contacted wanted a fee to perform the burial rite and they were broke. They figured God wouldn't care if they used a Protestant minister to see their loved one off. They found him in the phonebook as I recall.

Grandfather did not charge them anything.