The new radicals

Posted by admin on Mar 25, 2009 in Issues & Ideas | 0 comments

Why is a Christian education truly the best education? We learn something at Trinity Western University that they don’t learn at Harvard: deep respect for human dignity and, furthermore, a reason for it. The profound respect for human life is so vital because our generation will see the greatest attacks on human worth and dignity since before Abraham. The attack is well underway, and it deepens by the decade.

Today, our society marches to the beat of progressivism, mistaking newness for goodness, the fashionable for the noble and liberality for moral strength. These are the assumptions of our society we dare question, whether personally, through the Church, or through NGOs.

For now, this remains abstract. Isn’t progress a good thing, though? It has given us World Peace, more Ferraris, dentistry, democratization and prosperity, to one extent or another. But it has also centralized power, made most of the world’s population unnecessary in the cycle of wealth of the first-world nations, and brought media that alters and devolves the ways we think and interact.

The world may not be headed towards an Orwellian apocalypse – we’re too nice – but the visions of C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, and G.K. Chesterton in A Utopia of Usurers become more plausible by the year. As Jacques Ellul asked, “It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what if victory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection?”

Yes, deeper assumptions must be addressed if our generation is to flourish. An unknowingly grim majority believe an insidious lie. The core of this lie is the philosophies of materialist utilitarianism – a philosophy welded to the very core of our society that calls the metaphysical realm nonsense and holds happiness as the highest virtue and meaning. This is totally antithetical to Christianity and to human dignity, but also to free thought.

Many lies proceed from this: particularly disturbing is the lie that our productivity, occupation or identification with something unique, creative or new decides our worth upon this planet.

The lie is anti-human. It is the worst of the pagan lies, and endemic to our society. And it is being taught even in high schools; students, propagandized mercilessly, are given many more reasons for saving a beluga whale than a human life.

Today we witness only the first wave. Embryos and fetuses are abstract entities, easily made into the other. We’re starting to put up with “visionary” environmentalists who talk of “culling the human herd.”
The movement for the next attack against human dignity is well underway, more cruel and vicious under the mask of greater kindness: euthanasia or assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the elderly, the disabled, the beaten, the broken and the lost – in other words, death to those whom Christ came to save and give abundant life.

Christian education is integral to drawing the battle-lines. We, unlike society, are able to radically question. Make a secularist, however intelligent, think, and you get Derrida, Focault, Camus, Satre – voices of fragmentation, meaninglessness and depression. Christians are uniquely able to question the truly forbidden: the assumptions that the material world is where it’s at and the straight Darwinian narrative of the universe. In their place, we proclaim a deeply positive vision, literally too good and too true for this world.

Living in this age, we must proclaim the dignity that God Himself, through the Imago Dei and the Incarnation, has brought humanity. We are called to be the new saints, prophets and spiritual warriors. History is not over: we are the new radicals.