Tuesday 14 July 2015

Leave strategy to God: Attitudes to Christianity having lost the culture wars

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I became aware that Christians had lost the culture wars very soon after I became a Christian convert, and wrote a book about it called Thought Prison

http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.co.uk/

It seems that this situation of defeat is increasingly being recognized among Christians.

What is also being recognized is that - so comprehensive is the loss - any notions of assembling some kind of coalition army to counter-attack and retake culture is impossible - because there simply are not enough Christian people with enough power to contemplate the idea. It would be like fighting a modern army with pea-shooters, or modern mass media propaganda with hand copied notes.

Yet at the same time as it has become clear that secular Leftism has triumphed against Christianity in the culture wars, it has become equally clear that secular Leftism has lost all will to survive, has indeed destroyed its own capability to survive, and is indeed actively assaulting itself (e.g. by enforcing sustained mass immigration of people who will destroy secular Leftism).

Just as Christians have adjusted to the collapse of Goodness in culture, so Leftism has adjusted to the fact that it cannot achieve anything - that it has lost the ability to motivate, that it is drowning in self-inflicted bureaucratic red tape - that people nowadays cannot even imagine a Leftist utopia!

All that modern Leftist ideologues can offer as a lifestyle is the Social Justice Warrior, fighting ever-fewer, ever-weaker enemies, over ever-less-serious issues; an escalatingly hyped - but ever-less-convincing - dishonest rhetoric of hatred against the (almost entirely imaginary!) forces of reaction. Pathetic!

But, as these ideas sunk slowly into me - I suddenly realized what was going on - From a divine perspective we are seeing a recapitulation of the situation when God's influence is lost.

This can be understood as God withdrawing His protection, and allowing our civilization to collapse -- it can be understood as God ensuring that a deeply wicked society is not allowed to become too powerful and is reduced to impotence and ineffectuality -- or it can be understood as Modern Man turning away from God and stopping his ears against divine communications, and consequently making a comprehensive mess of everything he attempts, until he gives up attempting anything.

When we recognize that we have lost the culture war, but that the victors are killing themselves as fast as they can - there is a clarification and a liberation. Everything becomes simple - simple and difficult, true: but nonetheless simple.

We can easily see what is right and wrong, who is on the side of Good and who is evil in any particular dispute.

We can easily know what needs to be repented in our own lives - an awful lot of things, since the forces against us are so overwhelming and pervasive. But repentance is always possible and always effectual - so that should not be a worry.

In sum, acknowledged, comprehensive defeat leads to a certain lightness of spirit!

Since we know that we are in God's hands, in great and in small - and we know that we cannot know all the multitude of invisible ways in which He watches over us, cherishes us, helps us - we can afford to live much more in the here-and-now, and do what is right in the minutiae of everyday life.

And leave strategy to God.

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