Following up on my previous post, David Brooks: My Decade-Long Journey To Faith: New York Times Op-Ed: How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact, by David Brooks:
I had forgotten how exhausting it is to live in Donald Trump’s world. He’s not only a political figure. He creates a psychological and social atmosphere that suffuses the whole culture — the airwaves, our conversations, our moods.
If there is one word to define Trump’s atmosphere, it is “pagan.” The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess, and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness. …
The callous tolerance of cruelty is a river that runs through human history. It was dammed up, somewhat, only by millenniums of hard civilizational work. The pagan ethos — ancient or modern — always threatens to unleash brutality once again. The pagan ethos does not believe that every human was made in the image of God, does not believe in human equality, is not concerned about preserving the dignity of the poor. It does not care much about the universal feelings of benevolence, empathy and faithfulness toward one another, which, it turns out, are absolutely required for a democracy to function. …
If paganism is a grand but dehumanizing value system, I’ve found it necessary, in this increasingly pagan age, to root myself in anything that feels rehumanizing, whether it’s art or literature or learning. I’ve found it incredibly replenishing to be spending time around selfless, humble people who are still doing the work of serving the homeless, mentoring a lost kid who’s joined a gang. These days I need these moral antidotes to feel healthy, resilient and inspired.
TIn his book “The Year of Our Lord 1943,” Alan Jacobs shows how many people during World War II felt the exact same impulse. With the bomb blasts of savagery growing greater in their ears, people like C.S. Lewis and the University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins recommitted themselves to humane education, to the task of raising generations that would never again fall for the strongman’s seductive promise of domination. That era eventually produced a golden age of public theology — Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King — and so much else.
Many great moral traditions have always stood against paganism and rebutted it. If paganism stands for manly dominance, Judaism, for example, stands for piety, learning and strictness of conscience. Think of the words so highly valued in Jewish life: chesed (loving kindness), simcha (joy, especially communal joy), anavah (humility), tzedek (justice and charity), limud (study and learning) and kedushah (holiness). Those words lift us up to an entirely different moral realm.
For the Romans, the cross was a symbol of their power — their power to crucify. The early Christians took the cross as their symbol, too, but as a symbol for compassion, grace and self-sacrificial love. Christianity is built on a series of inversions that make paganism look pompous and soulless: Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The last shall be first. The poor are closer to God than the rich. Jesus was perpetually performing outrageous acts of radical generosity, without calculating the cost.
The Judeo-Christian ethos showed the world something loftier than paganism. As G.K. Chesterton put it in “The Everlasting Man,” “One of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilization has been able to be really human.”
Judaism and Christianity confront paganism with rival visions of the good. The contrast could not be starker. Paganism says: Make yourself the center of the universe. Serve yourself and force others to serve you. The biblical metaphysic says: Serve others, and you will find joy. Serve God, and you will delight in his love.
You may be a person of faith or a person of no faith, but which moral atmosphere do you want to live in? The cultural atmosphere you immerse yourself in will slowly form who you are. I don’t fault those pagans for sucking down all those muscle-building diet supplements, but I know the kind of nourishment I need these days for the strength of my mind and the health of my soul.
Apparently, I’m not alone. Something’s going on in our culture. The decline of religious participation, which was so rapid between 2010 and 2020, seems to have stopped. There has been a relative surge in religious interest among young men. According to research by the evangelical Christian polling group Barna, 66 percent of Americans say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus — a 12-percentage-point jump since 2021. …
In his book “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God,” Brierley notes that the New Atheists were all the rage several years ago, but now it’s unlikely believers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson and the rock star Nick Cave. Vanity Fair recently ran a story headlined “Christianity Was ‘Borderline Illegal’ in Silicon Valley. Now It’s the New Religion.” …
Are we on the cusp of a new religious revival? The evidence is still much too flimsy and fresh to justify that kind of sweeping assertion, so color me skeptical. I think it’s more accurate to say that there is currently a great spiritual yearning in the populace, which the religious institutions have not yet risen to meet.
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