Taken for granted?

A people without knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots".
Marcus Garvey.

"Where there is no vision, the people perish".
Proverbs 29:18


One of the things I'm looking forward to this winter is sitting down and watching The Man in the High Castle. The story picks up a popular idea often employed in fiction - what if something crucial had happened differently. In the case of this story, writer Phillip K Dick asks what if the allies had lost the second world war. The picture provided of America in fascist hands is awful, but what is really fascinating is what generates hope amongst the resistance, where they have evidence of an alternative reality in which these relentless enemies were vanquished, and life and liberty were secured and enjoyed across the free world.

My first encounter with the shock and possibilities of these ideas came in seeing a legendary Star Trek episode in the original series (By the way, if you enjoyed this Trek story, the STC team created a superb follow up episode that is essential viewing).

Fiction serves us best when it allows us to consider our own stories - the why of things in our current world, and that's essential.
As I noted recently, Tom Holland's latest work, Dominion has shown that the reason we live in such a caring and tolerant society in the West is because Christianity has saturated so much of what we take for granted that the very way we think and often feel about so much is because of the impact that this message has had and continues to have upon our world.

The problem, it turns out, is not the truth of that fact, but the present attitude of denial towards it.
The verse above from Proverbs is an interesting one. The word "perish" derives from a Hebrew word which means 'to loosen' (as in a woman untying her hair) - to create an environment where things are left unconstrained. It's when we leave ourselves in such a realm, as Marcus Garvey notes, that we truly can become lost... and perish.

The reason why we think it best to sideline thoughts about Christianity is that we (our culture) have been undergoing a process of seeking to untie ourselves from it for a lengthy period of time. Since the 18th century, there have been numerous attempts to 'enlighten' us away from the "tyranny" of religion, but they all share a common trait - the anti-theism that they have all sought to establish as an alternative is marked by evil. Look at the blood shed in the French Revolution, The Russian Revolution and under Stalinism, the holocaust in China under Mao, the extermination of the national socialists in Germany or the Killing Fields in Cambodia. 

When we seek to adhere to a lie concerning our nature and thereby our ability to determine what is right, we enslave ourselves to a far more terrible and frightening tyranny than what has bountifully enriched our world because of the hope found in the Person and actions of Jesus Christ.

What is true politically or ideologically, is also true socially and individually. The West has undergone so many deaths and the impoverishment of so many because it sought to marginalise the Christian message about our value as those made in God's image.

When a culture seeks to empty itself of what is good, we become tethered to what is worst about us.

In this season of hope, of good will, of heavenly intrusion, let us reflect on this, and return to the place where Christ is given for the sake of our broken world. God gave Him to rescue us from this very misery so we would not perish. That is the joy of this season.