Guest post by Rev. Jeff Meyers
This is a two-part, condensed version of my “Final Reflections & Summary” from my book Wisdom for Dissidents (full title: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s Christian Dissidents).
In 1980 a friend approached me after church and handed me a manila file folder. “Read these and let me know what you think,” he said. I did. It turned out the folder was filled with samples of 3 or 4 Christian newsletters. These were newsletters giving Christian commentary on contemporary cultural issues—abortion, economics, art, and politics. After reading them, I mailed in a donation and a request for subscriptions to all of them.
I had just come out of a severely dispensational Christian community where everyone was convinced that the end of the world was upon us. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth was a Christian bestseller. Because the world was ending you don’t polish brass on a sinking ship, rather you wait for the ship to begin to sink and then Jesus will swoop down deus ex machina to snatch up Christians off the tilting deck and rapture us into heaven. This meant that careful thinking about what might be happening in American society and how Christians might make a difference was new to me. But I was 23 years old with a wife and newborn daughter which meant I was motivated to think about the future.
Well, we thought things were bad back then. Christians in the early 1980s were worried about the increasing secularization of American culture. A few months ago, we renovated our basement and I had to box up three walls of books. I had an entire bookshelf of books from the 1980s that analyzed the anti-Christian drift that was occurring in American society.
Today, however, the marginalization of Christians in education, culture, and politics has accelerated faster than anyone could have imagined even ten years ago, let alone in 1980.
And this has led to some interesting proposals from Christian leaders on how Christians ought to respond. Everything from the call to “faithful presence” by James Davidson Hunter, to the “benedict option” by Rod Dreher. And then there’s the Trump-inspired populism of the last few years. Now, Dreher is prepping us to suffer as martyrs in his recent book Live not by Lies.
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