Query:
Doubtlessly you’ve received other emails already since the events that took place around Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but I know no other place to ask for guidance so I must ask.
In your living memory, has the United States political climate after World War II ever been this bad?
It is exceedingly difficult to approach these events and retain the Christian morality that I know that I should exercise. I don’t know how people actually in the heat of the situation will be able to make the right choices, and mainly I’m worried for what comes after.
Perhaps I am asking you to help me think. A more useful question might be to ask you what questions you’re asking yourself at this time, so I can think for myself.
Reply:
The United States political climate has never been this bad in my memory. It isn’t that we haven’t passed through other periods of politically motivated violence in earlier years, but it was much more widely condemned. For elected officials and news commentators to have egged the violence on, as they do today, was unheard of. Even during the Vietnam War controversies, very few students, even on the radical left, sympathized with the terror bombings carried out by the SDS splinter group Weather Underground.
The biggest confusion among my own students used to be rudderless moral relativism. Although there is still a lot of that, it seems to be on the decline. Now the problem is the explicit embrace of evil. The suggestion that one must never do what is intrinsically evil for the sake of a good result is a hard sell. Many of students are strongly attracted to “consequentialism,” the view that whether an act is right or wrong is determined only by the result. To say that the ends do not justify the means puzzles them.
The decline of faith has also produced changes in character. Young people who were raised in Christian homes, but then abandoned Christianity, often used to retain vestiges of their moral upbringing, and accepted such ideas as courtesy, love of neighbor, and the sacredness of innocent human life. Today, having grown up in faithless homes, many seem to think that courtesy is for fools, that no one with whom they disagree is their neighbor, and that they should hate those they consider wrong instead of praying for their repentance and restoration. As for the sacredness of innocent human life – for them, that idea went out when they embraced abortion.
However, I see some good signs. There is always “wrong on both sides,” but it isn’t equal. On one side, the violent nuts are merely the fringe. On the other side, they are the majority. I notice, too, that the former side is still having children. Charlie Kirk himself strongly encouraged young people to marry, have children, and hope for the future. Marrying and having children itself changes us, shattering our selfishness, forcing us to live sacrificially for others.
He also spoke openly about God. I don’t think we can reform ourselves by our own powers, just by trying hard. I know by experience that God can change us, and I find an increased longing for the truth and grace of God among many of my students. They have had enough, and “having enough” doesn’t meant that they start shooting, but that they start inquiring about Him. May He grant that I help that along!
If I believed the strange things so many people believe today, then I would be without hope. Seeing all the downward trend lines, I would despair. But I don’t believe that way, and trendlines are not a fate. In the first place, the providence of the loving God overrules our designs. In the second place, His grace through Jesus Christ enables us not only to repent, turn around, be forgiven, and forgive, but also be healed by a power greater than any mere resolution to be good.
As C.S. Lewis pointed out, a culture does not last forever, but a soul does. The redeemed will still be glowing when the last star has died out. Sneering at people of faith, some people say “History is against you.” By history, though, they mean only the last 15 minutes -- and they don’t understand even those.
For me, as you may know, this deeply personal. When I first got my PhD, I thought that good and evil were arbitrary human inventions, and that we are not responsible for our actions anyway. It took some years of painful divine surgery, but now I know better. When I hear people around me saying crazy things, I remind myself that I used say many of them myself. God, blessed be He, has devised a suitable penance for me, and I pray that I will never forget it.
So as to your second query, about what questions I may be asking yourself at this time: I don’t spend much time asking what is going to happen, but I do ask what God would like me to do in my own place. He sees the whole shape of things. I can’t, but like a faithful bone, I can try to turn nimbly in the joint where I’m placed.
Write any time.