A thoughtful, well-chosen quotation can stimulate our thinking and if read aloud over dinner with friends, stimulate conversation that can go in surprising directions. Here are two from my recent reading that I commend to you.
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Notes on the Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony
I thought the opening ceremony was amazing—different, joyful, creative, and a really fun way to look at SO many aspects of French culture.
I did not think some of the pearl-clutching, misinterpretations, and delusions of persecution were amazing. There is a significant segment of American Christianity that is just dying to believe they are being persecuted. This is no wonder—they’re being fed the narrative that they are 24/7 by elements seeking to turn their fear into their own power. But that this is so easy for them to do is a real indictment of the critical thinking skills and cultural literacy of some Christians. In 1995, Christian and religious historian Mark Noll wrote a book about American evangelicalism’s alarming abdication of any engagement with intellectualism. ‘The scandal of the evangelical mind,’ wrote Noll, ‘is that there isn’t one.’ Noll wasn’t calling Christians dumb (nor am I), but in a very prescient way shows what happens when Christians lose their ability to thoughtfully engage and understand different contexts.
Does it matter? I’d say yes. Perhaps this particular instance is just another example of cringe that spawned some funny memes. But it also matters in a few other ways. First, the mania to ‘prove’ how ‘persecuted’ they are cheapens the experience of millions of Christians who have been and are persecuted throughout history. Even if France had designed an opening ceremony specifically aimed at insulting American Christianity, you could… just turn it off? If the answer to stopping your ‘persecution’ is to change a TV channel, you aren’t being persecuted. Secondly, as mentioned above, culture war hysteria makes you a VERY easy pawn. Scared people are easy-to-control people. If you can be convinced that a (very cool) robot horse boat is a sign of the Apocalypse (???) and a direct threat to you (somehow), what won’t you believe?
[This quotation was in an email to me from Steve Froehlich, pastor emeritus of New Life Presbyterian Church, Ithaca, NY. It was written by a New Life and Cornell University alum.]
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A brief history of the last decade of evangelical/right-wing politics
In “After Virtue Came Strongman Politics,” friend and editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy, Jake Meador, traces what’s happened over the past ten years to bring us where we find the political world today. His overview is instructive, interesting, and insightful. Please read his essay thoughtfully. Here is what Jake concludes, and I find it to be a wise suggestion:
What can be learned from this history? There was for many of us in the mid-2010s a profound sense that something was missing in our common life in America. Material abundance seemed, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned, inextricably bound up with spiritual poverty. The false human story told by many progressives and conservatives alike in the years since Reagan, a story built around individual identity creation and the limitless pursuit of wealth through “free” (but to what end?) markets, often at the cost of transcendent truth, had left many people and places adrift.
The signs are not hard to identify even now: soaring rates of reported loneliness, an increased openness to euthanasia, shattered trust within communities, a strong anti-natal turn among many young Americans which has correlated unsurprisingly with freefalling birth rates, and all of that with a rising generation coming that is racked by anxiety and depression. These realities were present in 2015 and still are a decade later. If anything, the GOP’s capitulation on life and marriage suggests it will become even more entrenched on the American right as the GOP comes to be ever more dominated by what Matthew Walther has called the barstool conservatives. Yet the devouring need for truth, for genuine life together, and for higher goods than a purely individualistic freedom remain.
To where shall we turn, then? For those of us still seeking a better politics, we might consider the words of the White Rose movement, a group of what might be termed “radical liberals” who arose in the middle of the German Third Reich. The White Rose told their readers they would be Germany’s “bad conscience.” Through the written word and their small bit of organizing and shared life they sought to call Germans back to truth, to condemn the evils that then pervaded Germany’s public life, and to suggest that another way was possible. But that way was marked by strikingly liberal virtues—tolerance, for example, as well as a healthy commitment to some forms of pluralism.
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Photo credit: Photo by Lukas (https://www.pexels.com/photo/information-sign-on-paper-317356/)
Please Note: This is my eighth collection of short quotations worth reflection and discussion. If you’d like the read the earlier ones, you can find them on this website at these links: Sundry (1). Sundry (2). Sundry (3). Sundry (4). Sundry (5). Sundry (6). Sundry (7).
