Reviled for Jesus’ sake

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time feeling like an anachronism. I work in higher education, a field that depends on the assumption that human capabilities are worth cultivating for their own sake—a belief our politicians regard as quaint and our business elites regard as outright dysgenic. (They prefer their genics eu.) Even many of my colleagues in neuroscience, philosophy, and economics are committed to accounts of human nature and cognition so insultingly reductive that they undermine any basis for higher education that does not reduce it to job training.

This is not my only anachronistic trait. I like reading and writing books, which a lot of people regard as an outdated media form. I like writing for magazines, such as this one, and when people who run magazines talk about the future of their industry, they sound like John the Baptist. And I go to a mainline church. At this point the narrative of mainline decline is a bigger cliché than anything about mainline churches themselves. No matter who you ask, such decline is our own fault—whether because we were too rich and White or because we lost our purchase among elites; whether because too many of us abandoned the Nicene Creed or because not enough of us did.

Now, clearly it’s a best practice for any church to blame itself first for its ill fortune; this merely follows the example of the Bible, which consists in large part of the Israelites blaming themselves for the actions of land-greedy ancient Near Eastern princelings. Moreover, we can tell the story of the mainline’s rise and fall in a way that provides a sense of order and symmetry: it declined because it identified too much with America’s postwar vital center, because it lost sight of Christianity as a personal and inner commitment, and because it lost its prophetic edge. In the same way, this story continues, fundamentalism and evangelicalism grew explosively in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s but have since stopped growing because, though they maintained a certain intensity about worshiping a god, they switched gods. Their first new god was America. And now, in the name of saving America, they worship the person who has done more to damage America’s vaunted advantages—its influence over other countries, its ability to succor its own citizens in emergencies, its value as an abstract symbol or idea, its friendly neighbors—than any single individual in history.