Two stories that define our world
One tells us we can have anything we want. The other says our problems are someone else's fault.
These are strange times. I’m finding it hard to know what to hope for and what to pray for. My sense is that we are living amid two overlapping stories.
The first is the freedom story: Once upon a time we lived in a class-ridden, race-dominated, and gender-constrained society. But gradually the inhibitions of power, privilege, and prejudice began to be dismantled. The three key agents in this transformation were technology, globalization, and finance.
What does Christianity mean in this story? Its so-called liberal wing has tended to point out the casualties of the freedom story, to which the answer has tended to be that they simply need a larger dose of freedom. Its so-called conservative wing has tended to highlight those things the freedom story doesn’t satisfactorily address, notably sin and salvation. But the logic of the freedom story is so expansive and undaunted that it somehow assumes that through technology, globalization, and finance it will surely get to even those things someday.
