The age of Hitler wasn’t in the 1930s and 1940s.
It’s now…It’s the secular era.
Once upon a time, the most potent moral figure in our culture was Jesus Christ: he was the pole star of our shared ethics. Even atheists and agnostics would go out of their way to emphasize they saw him as a great, perhaps the greatest moral teacher.
But now, since 1945 – and definitely since the 1960s – the most potent moral figure in our culture is the guy with the toothbrush mustache. We take our ethical bearings, our definition of right and wrong, from him. He is, pretty much, evil incarnate. We may or may not, in our modern culture, believe that God is good. But we definitely believe that Nazism is evil.
And so, for a lot of people in the modern West, Christianity just feels irrelevant: either a shed skin to be discarded, or an old habit we can’t be bothered to break, but either way, not something with any moral urgency to it.
How should Christians respond to this state of affairs? It’s an urgent question because the age of Hitler is coming to an end: that cozy moral consensus is starting to unravel, or splinter, and the results so far are not pretty. Our shared values are up for grabs.
What comes next matters.
One Christian response is to get angry about this secular moralism and its shortcomings, maybe even to relish its newfound brittleness. We see a lot of that. But I think there’s a more truly Christian response than anger we should try out for size: repentance.
After all, when our culture turned away from Christian ethics in the twentieth century, it had good reasons. And I am not just talking about disgust for the centuries of churches abusing their power in many, many ways, though Heaven knows we’ve still got room for plenty of repentance about that. But worse, in the face of truly terrible evils in the twentieth century, too many churches wrung hands, dithered, or talked about other things. We behaved as if we thought fornication and blasphemy were worse sins than cruelty and genocide. And we claim to know the difference between right and wrong?
Let’s face it: our culture is right about the Nazis. If you want to choose a single human being as a representative of evil, I challenge you to do better.
Our problems with these anti-Nazi values are of a different kind. They’re correct, but they’re inadequate: and they’re built on sand. It’s all very well to know what to hate, but you also need to know what to love. And we need a firmer basis for our values than a fading memory anyway.
But God save us from making the same mistakes again. From assuming that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. From trying to unlearn the hard-learned lessons of the last century. From gouging the specks out of our secular culture’s eyes while blinking away the logs in our own.
Not only because there are secular culture-warriors out there who would find nothing more comforting than self-righteous, angry Christians: that’s exactly the sort of opposition they want. But it’s not just bad tactics, it’s wrong. Do we really think that the last century has nothing to teach us? Or that all it has to teach us is that we were right about everything all along?
If we’re going to reach a new, and better, consensus on our shared values – and not just collapse into chaos and irrelevance with our hands at each others’ throats – then we need both sides of the story: the old truths about what’s right and the new, hard-learned ones about what’s wrong. The Christian gospel can still save our secular world from itself. But only if Christians have the humility to accept that, providentially, through it we can be saved from ourselves, too. God knows we need it.
For more from Alec Ryrie, check out his latest book Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt
Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, but in this lively and startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through their hearts more than their minds.
Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed…Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age.
