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One bad thing re getting involved in the #discourse about church/culture going downhill in various ways:
My whole life since conversion I have had a sense of the trajectory of the world/culture/non-Christians' lives as "towards Christ" because that's how it worked for me.
My whole life since conversion I have had a sense of the trajectory of the world/culture/non-Christians' lives as "towards Christ" because that's how it worked for me.
My baseline was that you wake up in a fully-formed world full of story & strangeness & extreme weather & holidays & beautiful architecture & Arthurian legends, but that there's a mystery about it, because there's no metaphysical accounting for how solidly wonderful it is.
Not just wonderful, but seemingly pregnant with meaning. No one around me was Christian and most of them if they had thought about it would have not been moral realists; they were mostly materialists.
But the flimsiness of the philosophy and "narrative" meant that Christianity, when I ran into it, had nothing to compete with: the "worldviews" on offer were paper thin, compared with the wonderful sturdiness of the world itself, the human world and the natural world,
and its stories, and with my own experience of joy and conscience and love.
People will become Christian based on their own experience of life and of beauty, if you give them a copy of, say, Mere Christianity. You don't need to twist their arms.
People will become Christian based on their own experience of life and of beauty, if you give them a copy of, say, Mere Christianity. You don't need to twist their arms.
You don't need to fight some incredibly appealing alternative. There are no equivalently appealing alternatives. Just have the conversations, know in your own self how good Christianity as a way of understanding and living in the world, how strange and satisfying it is.
This is a kingdom, a treasure hidden in a field. And everybody is looking for a kingdom and for treasure.
Anyway I forgot to say what the bad thing was. It's just that thinking too much in terms of culture war/fear of decline makes you forget all this about the sturdiness of Christianity. It's not that the world is very bad & powerful and the Gospel/the church are weak.
It's that the world is very good and wonderful and has no way to account for itself. It will keep asking the question.
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