How can anyone fail to see that this is a civilization in decline? It is understood that way only if you have a direction in mind: if you know where Memphis is, you know whether you are traveling toward it or away from it. If you have lost track of where it is, not only can you not know how to get there, you don’t know when you are wandering away from it.
A civilizational decline is only visible if you have an idea of what “good” looks like. For most of my life I have assumed that we are in a state of confusion about what direction to take but that we all wanted to go to the same place, as though we have several paths before us, and don’t know which one will lead us to our joint goal. Then I began to see that we don’t agree on the goal. We all want good, but some of us think it is in Memphis and some in Jackson, and, depending on where we are, we could go together for a while but eventually will need to part ways. But maybe it is worse than that: perhaps we are so confused about where we would like to go that none of us knows what to do, and we are simply wandering lost. We may know where Memphis and Jackson are, but we are no longer convinced that a step toward either will help. Now I think I have been optimistic in every analysis. What I am beginning to see is that it is not just confusion, or differing goals, or even arbitrary wandering that our civilization is doing - it is a calculated and specific push we are making to go in a particular direction. It is almost as though we have been taught that Memphis or Jackson would be good, but never, NEVER go to Louisville, and we are determined to go to Louisville. Whatever we have been taught about right and wrong, and we are consciously choosing to oppose everything that we know to be good. It is almost as though we are becoming little Satans that desire to vent anger and loathing at God so much that we bend all our energies to the study of His word solely in order to make a specific point of doing the opposite.
As a child, our parents thought their job was to teach us right from wrong. Don’t we still think that? But doing so may backfire - that is, if your desire is to oppose God, knowing right from wrong only gives you a long list of “rights” not to do. After a while, a culture forgets that there was such a list, and forgets there was an agent that placed them on this path - a culture busy living out lives of dissipation and self-indulgence. Imagine one day that that culture finds a copy of the list of rights and wrongs. The Church presents this list (found in the bible), and the first argument it receives is that religion is for fools, and we shouldn’t bother to even read such a list. But if folks can be persuaded to read it, it shows not an arbitrary list of inexplicable religious practices (like watches can only be worn on the right wrist), but gives a list of the very things they have been opposing with the enthusiasm of self-righteousness that comes from the defense of individual liberty.
They learn that marriage is not a man-made institution but rather a visual relationship referring to an invisible relation of God with His people. All the adjustments to marriage that our culture proposes seem at the time to be liberating and reasonable but in effect serve specifically to blur or mar that relation. In fact, it doesn’t matter what is proposed, anything that will blur or mar is satisfactory: one could encourage no-fault divorce to make ending marriage easier to attain; or encourage pre-marital sexual practice to blur the line between single and married life; or encourage adultery while married, open-marriage, or “swinging” as it has been called to blur it another way; or encourage homosexual practice outside of marriage as a viable substitute for male/female courtship, but only for the purpose of eventually being able to convince the culture that homosexual marriage is a reasonable thing; or, man/boy sexual relations, and eventually sex with machines and animals. We may find we are repulsed by these thoughts, but that only means that there are still vestiges of the old morality woven into our souls. This revulsion is no final defense against decline, as we can be conditioned to overcome it (specially if those who show revulsion are labeled homophobic, or repressed, or old-fashioned). This trajectory can only be seen as a decline if you hold to begin with that there is an image that marriage is to reflect. But what is striking me today is the conscious intent I am beginning to see. The naked, pointed aggression toward marriage as an institution. It is as though a child built a little twig house, and another child, who could have walked anywhere in the garden, chose to come and stomp on it for spite. It is too calculated, too specific, too intentional to be offered as “an alternate lifestyle.”
Do you yet think I am attributing evil intent to those who only want to be free to follow an “alternate lifestyle?” What exactly is evil? If we follow our own definitions, individual autonomy is good, and anything that limits it is evil. But if we follow the biblical definition of evil, individual autonomy is actually evil. That’s right - what some call freedom is evil. How can that be? What is evil is not the freedom, it is the belief that we can know good and evil on our own apart from God. In that case, God is actually giving us a great blessing by telling us that we cannot trust our own hearts to give us the definition for good and evil...it seems that our hearts have already joined forces with the enemy and are not to be trusted. If autonomous freedom actually leads to slavery, what kind of God would allow us to take that road without warning us?
But there are other items in the decline. Is it not strange the interest in vampires? Not if you know that we are told by God that we are not to drink blood. There are rules for Israel in the book of Leviticus that particularly say that a body’s life is in the blood, so we are to drain the blood out of our animals before we cook and eat. It is wrong to drink blood. What could be more specifically “taboo” than to break two laws at once, the law not to kill, and the law not to drink blood? Why, to drink the blood of a person! Even better, let’s combine it with a perversion of sexual pleasure, and turn the whole thing into a metaphor for taking someone’s virginity? It is the cruelest, most consciously evil thing one could do: to empty someone of her virginity and life for momentary personal appetite. It is the same evil that clear-cuts forests or strip mines mountains for immediate profit. It can only be seen as a particular choice to take specific commands and go against them. Don't murder. Don't drink blood. Don't allow your appetites to rule you. Don't abuse the creation. Don’t go to Louisville. (I have nothing against Louisville...)
It turns out that we live in a world that DOES know right from wrong but has carefully, calculatingly, willfully chosen the wrong, and even finds delight in searching out “rights” to oppose. Wouldn’t it be a strange world to be taught that religion should be ignored because it is nothing but a bunch of arbitrary rules by an arbitrary god (like requiring that we wear watches on the right wrist), and then find out that it is the ONLY trustworthy repository of clarity about good and evil? And wouldn’t it be even stranger if we should find that the very teachers who told us that religion is arbitrary and meaningless spend their entire lives, energies, money, and even their last breaths fitting as many watches on their left arms as they could?
