Making Disciples in Dystopia
“Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is much written about us living in a post-Christian era. There is also a subscript aspect to this called Eastertide, or the post-Easter period, that the sacerdotal church starts on Easter Monday, is followed by a series of seven Sundays, and closes with the feast of Pentecost. Lent, that period of denial that prohibits the gathered church from crying out Hallelujah [Praise the Lord] from Ash Wednesday until Easter morning, is followed by the call to celebrate Easter for a good long while. It seems like the church year is just picking up some momentum and all the priests go on vacation anyway. Easter weekend is filled with clichés that roll off me like the proverbial water off a duck’s back.
First of all, I spent some of my weekend trying to find my celebratory button so I could push it and feel the proper level of sadness or gladness that everyone is supposed to feel. On Friday, which is a day for contemplation, I was trying to think about the suffering of Christ. If you stream The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson it usually works to tap down any residual good feeling. Toward the end of the day the clichés are piling up, dominated by Tony Campolo’s famous sermonic phrase, “Its Friday, but Sunday's coming” which has become part of Christian tradition. However, you will not find it in The Book of Common Prayer.
I was locked away most of Good Friday finishing up writing projects so I could enjoy some time off during the weekend and worship with my family on Sunday. So, on Good Friday evening I did what any normal pastor/theologian/writer would do, I began watching The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. Ten hours of detailed dramatic portrayal of the ins and outs of the trial of the century. After two hours, I was hooked, but I had a number of conflicts on Holy Saturday. The key to Holy Saturday is to celebrate nothing, because nothing is happening, the church is closed, Jesus is dead and buried, and he has no disciples. They have quit and are in hiding, licking their wounds.
After a morning of planning, which is the key to a great next week, I was able to relax. I even know when I will review my notes, when I will work on what and for how long. It came time for the Final Four games. For those of you who have not been baptized with a love of basketball, the final four teams in the NCAA tournament play on a single day on CBS. It is the apex, even more than the championship game of March Madness, even though it is April. Sort of like Christians celebrating Christ’s birth in December when he was born in April.
The more I watched the O.J. story, the more I learned about many of the intriguing details. I was traveling and very busy back when the trial was going on and I didn’t pay close attention. I do recall the day when the verdict came in. I was speaking to a group of pastors in northern Minnesota, and someone came into the room and told us the verdict was in and that if we wanted to see the result we would all need to go down the hallway to the bar to watch it on TV. After the obligatory hesitations regarding pastors going into a bar, we voted and took the pilgrimage [not really]. Thirty of us who were at the luncheon walked into the bar and, of course, were shocked by the verdict. We shook our heads in despair and walked back to our meal. Thirty white pastors in northern Minnesota didn’t get it. I do know now, however, how Marsha Clark likes her coffee - black with two Sweet and Lows.
There I sat in my office, O.J. streaming on Netflix, the Final Four with the sound off on my iPad, and the book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl R. Trueman on my lap. I was there for five hours. This is making disciples in dystopia. I am a product of my time, an elder boomer who is coming to the end of his string, in full distress about the decay and decadence around me, but at the same time swept up with the tools, networks, and narratives swirling around me. And holding a book by a brilliant scholar who is attempting to explain why this has all happened. But like Trueman says, trying to explain it all simply is like saying that the Twin Towers fell because of gravity. True, but something is missing in the explanation.
The more I watched O.J., the more I saw it as an early warning sign of the present-day blend of Brave New World and 1984. When you watch O.J.'s defense team spin their cynical yarn about the LAPD plot to frame him and watching Marsha Clark and Chris Darden roll their eyes, I can identify. As Robert Shapiro later stated, “Not only had Johnnie Cochran dealt the race card, but he had also dealt it from the bottom of the deck.” The entire narrative was from the theater of the absurd. Cochran, Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, and Alan Dershowitz, the Four Horsemen of Gobshite, developed a narrative they created in order to cynically influence jurors. There were elements of truth. Yes, the police have racists in their ranks. Yes, Mark Furman was an angry young officer, but it wasn’t actually a major factor. The evidence was overwhelming that Simpson was guilty and basically, everyone knew it then. Even those who pretended to believe in his innocence then do not defend him now. O.J. is universally persona non grata. I mean, would you join O.J.’s foursome at your golf club? It seems like the prosecutors were focused on evidence and justice. Whereas O.J.’s team was motivated by fame, power, and making a phony version of a supra-point. That supra-point was important concerning racism, but it was made in a shameful way.
This leads me to making disciples in a dystopia. The controlling forces in American life right now are those who control the narrative - freedom of speech, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Business, the universities, public schools, sports and entertainment. This cabal is progressive, anti-Christian, and committed to ideas that have been discredited again and again for thousands of years. Even China, Vietnam, and Russia have rejected socialism because it never has worked. Often white, highly degreed Americans point to Scandinavia as successful social experiments. The leaders of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc. deny this. They have high taxes, but they are capitalistic in their practices; they too know it doesn’t work. I bring this up because only the leaders of North Korea and Cuba still hold to these false narratives, and even they know it doesn’t work except for the few leaders who can enjoy the limited wealth.
In America, the controlling elite, like Cochran’s team, are presenting a narrative that is cynical. They call for unity but divide the nation along group identity lines and plan to indoctrinate children to be either of the oppressed victimized class or the oppressor class. How do you know? By your race and by your gender, though gender is no longer biological, the science really doesn’t matter. Reality is what you want it to be, therefore, reality is unreliable and the ground underneath you continues to shift. The elite have their own memory hole to shove history down. Oh yes, remember that book I had in my lap, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman? Here is something relevant to our subject. This deserves its own space but pardon the abridged version.
I often ponder, “Why does progress always seem to move away from the Christian narrative and common sense?” If I wrote a manual for How to Ruin Your World, what is happening right now would be its content. The longer humans live on earth, they gain knowledge. With that knowledge comes confidence, then arrogance, and then they flip the narrative. Humans started in a world that God ordered, and our role was to discover that order and conform to it. Now, with a hubris that combines knowledge and independence, humans say no, the earth and everything in it is the raw material and we create our own meaning from it.
From the book, Trueman summarizes it through representative men.
Idiotic Man [one fixed on himself]
Political Man [ one engaged in public life]
Religious Man [one who interprets the world through God and revelation]
Economic Man
Therapeutic Man
Expressive Individualist Man
The last one is a bit I think, therefore I am (Rene Descartes, 1596-1650). I think, I feel, I declare, therefore I am. “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” A phrase unknown to people two generations ago is now understood by everyone. Life that declares reality, that denies actual reality, is doomed to failure. It is part of the hubris of expressive individualism that aspires to a utopian dream that will collapse under the weight of its own tyranny.
The Gospel and the call to follow Jesus is an entirely different reality that challenges the prevailing cultural mood and story of expressive individualism. That is the main reason the church has lost 20 points in public opinion polls in the last twenty years. Twenty years ago, 70% of the public claimed to be a member of a church or religious body. Today the figure is 50%. The dystopia is upon us, meaning that in order to force a utopian dream, those in opposition must be silenced, marginalized, punished, even eliminated. So, Christians, and I mean real Christians who plan to follow Jesus in discipleship, strap in. It should be a wild ride. And if the conversion of the Apostle Paul means anything, God is at work behind the scenes, and he may interrupt this disaster in order to change everything.
[1] Aleksandr Solzhentisyn, Men Have Forgotten God: 1983 Templeton Address, National Review, December 11, 2018.
