When Progress Ain’t Progress

It is clear that all is not right in the world and things don’t seem to be improving. It is not about gas prices or the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. No, it is more fundamental than that. If a sizable fraction of people think that a mother can kill her children with impunity, we have gone or are in the process of going off the rails. When personal responsibility is disdained, we have gone or are in the process of going off the rails. When some are afforded agency while others are precluded from exercising their proper authority, we have gone or are in the process of going off the rails. When facts are laid aside in preference to emotions or opinions, we have gone or are in the process of going off the rails. When facts and mainstream beliefs are deemed to be fringe or extreme while falsehoods and extreme ideas are promoted as mainstream, we have gone or are in the process of going off the rails.

History teaches us that societies go off the rails more readily than we would like to admit. History also tells us that such forays into societal madness do not happen out of the blue. A slow and methodical process, perhaps over the course of several generations, can transform a society. Even science and technology can be co-opted to justify and accelerate the maddening process. For example, the theory of darwinian evolution can easily be adapted into social darwinism where one culture or race is more fit than others. If survival of the fittest applies for competing animal species, surely the same is true of cultures and races. If so, cleansing the gene pool seems like a reasonable path, nay, a moral imperative for the sake of mankind. If unregulated capitalism results in some accumulating more wealth than most others, then surely a tightly regulated economy would be better for all. Even better, if a central authority regulated all economic activity even to the point that private property is abolished, then that must be better for everyone. The victims of the nazis and communists would beg to differ.

Increasingly, we are seeing federal and state constitutions declared as impediments to ‘progress.’ The same is true of federal and local laws. Exercise of free speech for some, but not for others. Free exercise of religion for some, but not for others. It is no secret that Catholics have been targeted by the federal government. No one has been held accountable for these gross violations of the First Amendment. Washington State might pass a law precluding local elected officials from holding office if they hold ‘extreme’ views, if they belong to an organization that holds ‘extreme’ views, or if they contribute to an organization that holds ‘extreme’ views. On one level, that might seem prudent and logical. Who wants extremists in the government? But the definition of ‘extreme’ truly matters. As the bill is written, it would disqualify any state elected official who holds the ‘extreme’ view that there are only two genders and that only biological men and biological women can marry, or belongs to an organization espousing such views. All Bible-believing Christians, all conservative and orthodox Jews, and all people holding to biological truths would be disqualified from holding local office. Surely excluding people of faith who know they are accountable to God and those who understand biological facts from holding elected office will result in a better, more just, and more free society. Riiiight.

It is almost certain, however, that someone attending a mosque or otherwise practicing islam will be exempted from such a law. Maybe not in the letter of the law, but certainly in the application and execution of that proposed law. Politics make for strange bedfellows, but modern progressives and muslims qualify as the strangest of bedfellows. They are united by a common enemy: Christians, Jews, and Judeo-Christian morality. No doubt the progressives and muslims see one another as useful idiots, but one side of this alliance will utterly crush the other when it seems opportune.

How did we get here? Quite simply, by not following the Gospel. Year after year over several generations the faith has been watered down and often become beholden to the culture instead of holding the culture to Gospel values. Jesus did not come to establish a theocracy. But He did enjoin on us the task of being the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Mt 5:13-14). We have to admit that the world has been seasoning Christians with pagan values and insisting that we keep the light of Christ either to ourselves or burning so dimly as to be indistinguishable from darkness.

—Fr Booth