Culture and the Christian Faith

The Christian faith, over time, has refused to be bound by one culture. Beginning in the Middle East through a few Jewish followers, it broke the bounds of those who wanted it tied only to that nationality.

It refused to be bound by Greek speakers, spreading to the western Roman empire. When the new religion of Islam devastated Christian empires in the east, it grew in Europe.

Eventually, it burst the bounds of church/state unions in Europe. Kings tried to own it, but segments broke away from a church/state identity and spread, especially in the New World. Amazingly, Christianity began to grow in a new arena that refused any ties to state domination.

Over the centuries, Christianity keeps discovering new areas of growth: against slavery and racism and worship of money. Against nationalism.

Christians still struggle not to be dominated by outside interests: class, wealth, politics, power. In the United States, a too-close identification with American culture has led to declines in some groups.

But one of the faith’s strengths is that defeat leads it to find new arenas for growth.

Touching the Sore Spot

“No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores reacts strongly when someone has the courage to touch the sore and say, ‘You have to treat that. You have to eliminate that. Believe in Christ and be converted.’” (Oscar Romero, Quoted in Plough, Autumn 2021, “Daring to Follow the Call”)

Oscar Romero, a Roman Catholic archbishop, was a critic of armed groups in El Salvador and a spokesperson for the poor. He was assassinated in 1980 by an unknown assailant.

At the same time as I read of Romero, I was reading about bloody religious battles in 1500’s Europe over efforts to reform what had become an unbelievably corrupt religious system. Criticizing established institutions is not a job for the cowardly.

We Americans are like anyone else in our desire to be proud of our culture and our institutions. They are ours. They are us. We don’t enjoy seeing them criticized.

Yet no human institution is without error. To worship an institution or a country or a leader is not only idolatry. It also cuts off efforts to heal and overcome imperfections, to become, never perfect, but better and more useful.

Many sore spots are being touched today. If we are wise, we will not react with hatred or fear but with the ability to listen and change and heal. Perhaps even to love our neighbors as ourselves—including our critics.

I am God Politics

Recently, during a local election in our normally quiet small town, political fighting has turned ugly. Election signs have been vandalized and hateful words exchanged.

Why?

Most of us say we believe in a peaceful exchange of power according to what the voters decide. Traditionally, the candidates campaign, the voters cast ballots, the votes are counted, and the one with the most votes wins. While the electoral college may cause problems in the presidential election, simple rule by majority is normally the case in local elections.

This November we are electing members of the local school board and our city officials. The vindictiveness of national politics has affected even these elections.

The idea of the gracious loser is an American tradition. John McCain, in his concession speech on losing the election to Barack Obama in 2008, gallantly wished Obama his support and praised the system that elected him and dealt McCain his loss.

Recently, too many of us have spurned his example, nationally and locally. Instead, we’ve chosen to act like those who support charlatans like Putin in Russia or dictators like Lukashenko in Belarus. Some of it is a clinging to power, but some of it, I think, is an arrogance that presumes we have complete truth.

We choose democracy precisely because no one has complete truth. The best we can do is let the majority rule. We have freedom of expression to state ideas peacefully challenging the majority. In the extreme, if one disagrees with the majority, one may offer civil disobedience, but even this should be peaceful, not a presumption that we have eternal truth. We are all imperfect human beings.

It is supreme arrogance to disrespectfully treat those with whom we disagree. We are all imperfect human beings.

Pledge of Allegiance in Saudi Arabia 1991

The first Gulf War, forgotten by most Americans by now, ended when Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein were pushed out of the small country of Kuwait in February,1991. U.S. President George H. W. Bush chose not to send U.S. forces further north into Iraq but to end the war with Kuwait’s liberation.

Saddam’s forces had taken over Kuwait in August, 1990. The reason for U.S. entry into this regional conflict was fear that Saddam would continue his southern march and send his troops into Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. The Iraqi dictator would end up controlling much of the world’s oil, as well as a country we considered an ally.

I had arrived at my first diplomatic posting in December, 1990, at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The U.S. push into Kuwait began a few weeks later. To say this time was an exciting introduction to working abroad in my chosen profession is an understatement.

No one knew the outcome, of course, when I arrived in Jeddah. Understandibly, Americans, Saudis, and other nationalities greeted our victory—after a short, anxious-ridden few weeks—with jubilation.

That spring, Americans working at the consulate gathered for a Memorial Day ceremony before the consulate flag. I don’t think I’ve ever joined with fellow Americans in a more heartfelt Pledge of Allegiance.

I think about that time in our quibbling over whether some meeting or other opens with the Pledge, or whether this person or that one is patriotic enough. I see such arguments as childish quibbling. Whether one does or does not say the Pledge should be a heartfelt personal choice. We are not, I hope, some dictatorship that requires mouthing loyalty oaths.

Breaking the Cycle: Hope

My mother’s father came down from the mountains of east Tennessee to the big city of Nashville and began working in an iron foundry. My father’s father also moved from rural Tennessee to the big city and found employment as a policeman.

Something happened in the next generation. By the time my brother and I came along, our parents were solidly middle class. They sidestepped aimless lives that trapped some of their brothers and sisters.

Both my parents underwent a spiritual transformation when they were in their teens. Something happened to them that shot them away from ruinous personal choices. A sense of hope gave them meaning and purpose and a sense of responsibility.

My parents were disciplined with their money, saving from modest salaries so their children received the college education they themselves were unable to enjoy.

Except for buying a house, my parents never went into debt. We had health insurance, which kept medical emergencies from overwhelming us. When my father died at the age of fifty-three from a heart attack, his provision of life insurance kept us going, along with our paid-off house, the social security my mother received as a widow with two children, and her modest job as a school secretary.

All these programs benefitted my parents, enabling them to give their children a good start in life. Today’s generational poor need access to jobs that pay a living wage. They need health insurance that stresses good health habits and prevents medical emergencies from ruining family finances. But it may be up to families, ministers, and teachers to instill hope and purpose.

Pax Victoriana and Pax Americana

Julia Baird’s Victoria the Queen, a detailed biography of Britain’s Queen Victoria, highlights that long nineteenth century when Britain became a world power. The nineteenth century, most of which was during her reign, belonged to Britain, it is said, as the twentieth century belonged to the United States.

The accomplishments of Britain in the nineteenth century were many; nevertheless, the author also delves into the shortcomings of her times. They include the terrible legacy left by the superiority many Europeans felt over the rest of the world. A little over a decade later, some of the failings of Victoria’s time became evident in two world wars.

What about the United States and the twentieth? We saved the world for democracy, yet have difficulty keeping democratic rule for ourselves.

We have never been able to rid ourselves of what Jim Wallis, of Sojouners, calls our “original” sin—that of enslaving Africans and refusing to recognize and repent of that sin. Even today, white supremacists march in calls for rule by whites only.

Who will the twenty-first century be named after?

Wretched Refuse

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (Emma Lazarus, 1883)

Once again, the tempest-tossed find their way to the United States. They join a long line of previous refugees—escapees from Europe’s religious wars in the 1600’s; then joined through the centuries by the poverty-stricken, seeking economic opportunity; followed by survivors from Nazi concentration camps; then the “displaced persons” of World War II; then Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and now Afghans.

In between, the descendants of black slaves and native Americans have fought prejudice. From south of our border, economic migrants added to the mix.

Our population history is a mixture of marvelous acceptance and depraved hatred. Yet, from these struggles, the country has continually been blessed by new life.

Nobel prizewinners and philanthropists, inventors and scholars—as well as ordinary business owners and stalwart middle class citizens have descended from this jumble.

May God give us the grace and wisdom to once again be blessed by this newest “wretched refuse.”

Decline of Religion

According to one academic study, religious practice in the world appears to be declining:

“From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied—43 out of 49—became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world.” (Ronald F. Inglehart, University of Michigan, “Giving up on God; the Global Decline of Religion,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020)

A previous study analyzing 49 countries from 1981-2007 had found that 33 of the 49 countries had become more religious. The 33 countries included most former communist countries, most developing countries, and even a few high income countries.

The more recent study, however, showed that religion was practiced less even in many lower income countries.

Inglehart concluded: “Modern societies have become less religious in part because they no longer need to uphold the kinds of gender and sexual norms that the major world religions have instilled for centuries.”

What is interesting for me, however, in a personal look into Christianity’s place in the world today, is how it is, this moment, continuing its tradition of breaking new barriers.

In times past, religion in western societies usually revolved around families and communities. Schools, politics, and other forms of civic life tended to uphold norms held by the majority. Religion included a kind of civil religion, generally Christian or Jewish.

Mass migration of young people away from birth communities as well as modern inventions like social media have played havoc with community norms. The multi-generational family long ago gave way to the nuclear family which gave way to young people setting up single person households or with a significant other. Religion as encouraged by family suffered greatly.

Now, however, a next generation Christianity is proving that Christianity is not dead but evolving, perhaps closer to the model lived by Jesus.

A minority, but a significant minority, are espousing issues like racial reconciliation and care for the struggling—the homeless, the mentally ill, and the migrant, to name a few.

From the time the disciple Peter struggled to accept Gentiles into the Jewish Christian community, Christians have broken bounds, sometimes willingly, sometimes after fallow periods—but the conquest first named in a letter from the missionary preacher Paul continues today: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you all one in Christ Jesus.”

Vaccines Then and Now

I grew up in the dark ages. Children died from diseases like polio and measles. I remember attending a funeral for a young girl in my neighborhood who died of complications from measles. Another child died of complications from polio. A classmate was crippled by this disease. We saw images of children in “iron lungs”—large metal tubes they lived in to help them breathe after suffering polio. Measles could be a short childhood illness or it could kill or blind a child.

My parents were constantly worried about my brother or me catching one of these horrible sicknesses. We came back early from a vacation because a polio epidemic had suddenly broken out where we were planning to visit. During the summer, swimming pools required swimmers to get out of the water every hour and rest for ten minutes because overexertion might encourage the disease. Nobody complained about this restriction harming their civil rights.

Of course, we had immunizations against some diseases. Death and serious illness from small pox and typhoid no longer visited whole populations as they once had. My great aunt told of almost dying from typhoid, with a fever so high, she said, that her hair had fallen out.

Immunizations against these diseases were given each year in our public schools. The county nurse would make the rounds inoculating all students against the diseases for which we had vaccines.

When vaccines against polio came out, parents rushed their children to schools to be vaccinated—it was midsummer, as I remember—but schools opened for mass inoculation. Almost immediately, the fear of polio vanished in this country because almost every child had been vaccinated against it. It was a miracle.

If only, I remember thinking, the vaccine had come out a few months or a year earlier, my classmate’s life could have been saved.

With this history and these memories, I have a hard time understanding the massive resistence to vaccines. To me, science and vaccines and modern medicines are a gift God has given us with the power to create good for the world’s people.

Evacuations from Harm’s Way

Following recent events in Afghanistan, I’m reminded of my own two departures from danger zones, as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Mine were much less harrowing than the departures in Afghanistan.

Mentors for my orientation class in the Foreign Service told us we could expect at least one evacuation experience during our career.

Mine came in Algiers in 1993. Groups wishing to bring back a more fundamentalist government in Algeria began attacks against foreign interests. It seemed prudent to draw down embassy personnel. My job there as an economic reporting officer was deemed nonessential, and I was ordered to leave Algeria.

I flew out on a crowded commercial plane to Paris, where I spent an interesting afternoon and evening exploring the City of Light, attempting to make myself understood in very broken French. Eventually, I was reassigned to the U.S. consulate in Montreal, Canada.

My second exit, from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was a more serious affair. Americans in that country had been killed in attacks specifically targeting them, including one on a compound housing Americans. This followed the beginning of the second Gulf War in 2003. In this one, I managed to remain until my tour was up, then left by a commercial flight after being driven to nearby Bahrain.

Even this one, of course, never approached the danger level of the evacuations in Afghanistan.

I pray for those in danger, foreigners and Afghans. I pray that one day, the country may become a safer place, as well as free for women. I pray for God’s help in figuring out the complex world we live in. I pray for an appreciation of differences and respect for those with whom we disagree.

Syria and Dante’s Inferno

“. . . the Syrian conflict, with its bloodshed, destruction and human suffering, seemed immune to all our efforts to find a diplomatic solution.” (William Roebuck, “Raqqa’s Inferno: A Diplomat Reads Dante in Syria,” The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021.)

Such are the words of a weary U.S. diplomat, retiring after a 28-year career, on his last assignment to war-torn Syria, another country ripped apart by a dictator’s desire to hang on.

My own diplomatic career didn’t take me to places as devastated as he experienced. I was assigned to Saudi Arabia for two wars with Iraq and was in Algeria at the start of civil conflict, but I was never close to the terrible suffering recounted in Roebuck’s article. Nevertheless, I identify with the hopelessness of conflict which never seems to cease.

Lacking easy hookups to the internet, Roebuck caught up on his reading in off hours, including Dante’s classic Inferno. This is Dante’s literary picture of his imaginary journey through concentric rings of Hell.

Roebuck fits his daytime journeys into Syria’s destruction with his evening reading of Dante: “I had never seen anything like it—blocks and blocks where every single building had been hit. Slabs of concrete jutted out at wrong angles, like fractured limbs broken beyond any cast would ever repair. More concrete hung from blasted ceilings, dangling in a mesh of wrinkled steal rebar like insects caught in some horrific, oversized spider web.”

At night Roebuck returned to the Inferno. “Dante’s intense, bizarre, even grotesque imagery seemed to my mind to capture the depth of suffering and destruction in Syria.”

The situation in Syria is still bleak, but Roebuck took some comfort in the defeat in Syria of the Islamic radical group, ISIS, leading to a chance for recovery.

In the Inferno, Dante eventually makes his way out of the underworld, where he then notes a refreshing view of the stars. Roebuck compared that to evidences of life again in the broken towns of Syria: some refurbished schools, a bit of night life, families chatting on carpets outside their homes.

Fulbright Scholarships and Segregation

It’s one of those paradoxes—America’s sometimes heroic leadership in the post World War II era and its torturous dealings with its racist sins at the same time.

A recent article in Foreign Affairs about J. William Fulbright, a senator from Arkansas from 1945 to 1974, mirrors this struggle. (Charles King, “The Fulbright Paradox,” July/August 2021).

Fulbright’s name is attached to the famous scholarship awards program begun in 1946. The program has allowed thousands of American and foreign students to study each other’s learning and culture.

Senator Fulbright also led the successful fight to end Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror. McCarthy’s false conspiracy theories had destroyed careers and people’s lives.

In addition, Fullbright began hearings on the Vietnam war in 1966. Testimony was taken from numerous people, including John Kerry, then a young anti-war veteran of the war. Kerry’s testimony is remembered to this day for his question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Here is Fulbright, then, espousing such liberal causes as opposition to the war.

But Fulbright shows another side to his character: “In 1956, Fulbright signed the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, also known as the Southern Manifesto . . . .The document codified southern resistance to racial integration . . .”

The idea of black Americans in Arkansas having as much power through voting as white Arkansans was simply, for him, a bridge too far.

Though he could advance learning and understanding between nations and could see the folly of Vietnam, he, like many Americans today, could not see our own racial sins.

As King writes: “He was a figure who committed his life to global understanding yet found it impossible to apply the same ideals to his homeland. What seems like a contradiction in Fulbright’s outlook, however, is really a blind spot in Americans’ own. Ths combination of open-mindedness abroad and bigotry at home was not unique to him.”

Growing Up Is Always

Organized Christianity since its inception could rate an A or an F, depending on which bits you examine.

One could point to religious wars killing millions.

On the other hand, where Christians have become a force, slavery generally has been abolished. The status of women has improved. The sick and the poor are more often cared for.

Jesus himself said to judge his followers not by whether they say they are his followers. Rather, have well do they follow his examples? Do they feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, take care of strangers, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoners?

Bill McKibben in his column in Sojourners (“A Mad and Dangerous Spell,” July 2021) faults those evangelicals who talk of the power of God to keep them from harm from the Covid-19 virus. For this reason, they say, they don’t need to be vaccinated against the disease.

“These sentiments sound pious,” he writes, “but they’re in fact the opposite—individualism masquerading as faith. God gave us a world that works in certain physical ways, and God gave us the brains to understand it.” Science developed the vaccines that have saved countless lives from Covid.

Against the anti-science of some evangelicals and others today, one must point to the books and learning kept alive in Christian communities during the European Middle Ages.

Ignorance is always being pushed back, for Christians as for anyone. Some of the first Christians owned slaves. Women were often placed in inferior positions. Some Christians (or calling themselves Christians) murdered each other and non-Christians in vicious wars and pogroms and crusades.

But change came. And Christians often led the changes, even against co-religionists.

The apostle Peter had to overcome his prejudice against Gentiles becoming Christians. In every generation since, we fight these battles to grow and overcome. We are always children striving to become the adults God wishes us to be.

Small Patriotism

“What does it mean to be patriotic and should Christians even want to be?” Bonnie Kristian asks in “The Case for ‘Small’ Patriotism.” (Christianity Today, July/August 2021.)

Kristian identifies with the Anabaptist faith, a group traditionally placing their Christian call ahead of secular allegiance.

She asks: “What does it mean to be an American evangelical, to mark July 4 after January 6, when supporters of our former president—many of them professing evangelical Christians . . . overran the US Capitol in attempted sedition?”

She refuses such a patriotism that would support an “idolatrous civil religion.” Instead, she calls for a patriotism that doesn’t countenance conquest of others. It is more concerned for local communities and for foreigners than is the blustery nationalist kind.

Equating love of country with love of God is a dangerous heresy for Christians. Conquest and global power for Great Britain in the nineteenth century ended in two disastrous world wars in the twentieth.

Christians perform the role, first of carers, then of guardians. Caring includes rescuing the poor among us as well as welcoming refugees from destroyed countries. One generation’s poor refugees became the country’s future scientists and educators and leaders.

Christians also guard against pride misleading us to engage in wars having nothing to do with our survival.

Christian patriotism is an humble, watching patriotism, aware of how easily pride can become sin.

Jesus and the Disinherited

Howard Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited, let me peer into the racial sins we Americans have inherited, as no other book has done.

I was raised a white Southerner by parents and church and culture which was not overtly racist. Ours wasn’t the Ku Klux Clan kind of racism. We were a working class/lower middle class church in a similar kind of neighborhood. I will be forever grateful to that church and its love.

It was only in reading Thurman’s book that I began to understand the less violent kinds of racism. Thurman helped me understand how a black in America, particularly in the South, had to live.

He talked of a visit he made to India. His host, as they prepared for bed, told him he must be careful at night if he got up to go to the bathroom or for any reason. He must always shine a light ahead so that he would not inadvertently step on a Cobra, curled soundlessly in his path.

And that is when I began to understand the insidiousness of racism.

I never had to think, when I left my house, about my white skin. I never considered, as I went into a store or applied for a job, how my white skin might be noticed.

In a white majority society, Thurman showed me, a person with a dark skin has to be aware of it all the time.

Fighting Reality

One rainy day when my oldest son was a preschooler, I told him he wouldn’t be able to go outside to play because of the weather.
Me: “It’s raining.”
Small son: “No it’s not.”

My son wished to overcome a reality he did not like by pretending that the reality did not exist. I am reminded of this episode when I read of those who question Donald Trump’s losing the U.S. presidential election in 2020.

Despite numerous court decisions upholding Joe Biden’s win, some of Trump’s followers insist: “No, he didn’t.”

Normally in a supposed democracy like the United States, the winner, as directed by the Constitution, takes office. The losers may grit their teeth, but they follow the usual concession of power.

Not this year.

Just as we mortal beings sometimes fight the reality of dying, some Americans fight the death of the America they knew in years past.

Trump’s win in 2016 was perfectly legal, but it was an electoral college win. The majority of voters favored Hillary Clinton.

Nevertheless, those unhappy at a changed America, and in favor of a country more like that of the one they knew in years past, were encouraged by Trump’s win. However, in 2020, the majority of votes for Biden was sufficient to also win the electoral college vote and bring in his presidency.

Regardless of election outcomes, however, the America of years past is not coming back. Americans have changed. That one may cheer those changes or despise them does not alter the changes.

We may be tempted to power—to try to force our way—when we are losing. We may be tempted to support democracy only when the votes come our way.

The question is whether we really want to wrest our way by undemocratic means, even by lies which have no basis in reality.

Democracy only works when democratic rules are followed. If your side loses, you can choose legal means to regain power next time: perhaps better organizing voters of your political persuasion, spending money for your candidates, or writing opinion pieces on public forums.

To refuse the reality of your loss, however, is to betray all the efforts of the United States during the Cold War to lead nations to accept democratic rule.

Greater America

The United States is fortunate in that the potential immigrants into our country on our southern border are from populations with whom we have known and interacted for centuries. Unlike other migration movements in the world, our cultures share many similarities.

The United States has not always proved helpful to Central Americans. In the past, we have supported dictatorships friendly to corporate interests taking advantage of poorly paid workers.

We can atone for some of those sins by pushing for reform by those Central American governments whose corruption we have often overlooked.

In an effort to deal with increased flows of migrants toward our borders, President Joe Biden has begun meetings with our Central American neighbors at various levels to develop programs around issues that connect us. These include migration but also economic development and climate change. Dealing with these issues might reduce the northward flow of immigrants.

Of course, this flow into our country is not necessarily bad. One of these days, we may look back with envy on those movements sending us the immigrants we needed for our birth-deficient nation.

Christianity as Default

Christianity is alive and well, but Christendom is not. In the former places of Christendom, many regard it as somewhere between a harmless superstition and a deadly virus.

Christianity bested paganism as the default European religion in the latter days of the Roman Empire. It has endured centuries of peaks and declines since then as it spread throughout the planet, in one form or another.

But Christ is never fully realized in any society. When Christianity is lived by enough of its adherents as it should be, it gains followers and popularity and influence. Then people begin to think they are Christians by default because of the culture they were born into.

But of course, they are not. “Even when Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not.” Christian Wiman writes in My Bright Escape.

Living the Christ faith is never by default. Christ must be chosen deliberately, new in each generation.

World War II Hangover

One of the greatest things the United States ever did was lead Europe to defeat the Nazis in World War II.

Even greater was leading the world against Soviet communism without a major war that would have destroyed the planet.

We have lived on the laurels won in those conflicts ever since.

Every righteous victory has a day after. The Protestant Reformation, unfortunately, was followed by terrible religious wars devastating most of Europe. One of the mistakes was the use of religious ideas in political conflicts.

We run similar risks today. The United States is not Jesus. Criticism of some of the country’s policies is not blasphemy. Recognizing and confessing our sins does not diminish the country but, instead, can be part of its renewal.

David P. Gushee, a professor at Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia, has spoken about the beginnings of black slavery in America. The practice of slavery after 1619 “required an intensification of white racism. It also required an intentional deformation of other aspects of Christian belief and practice so that Christian people accommodate themselves to slavery.” (“Born in Heresy,” Sojo.net, Sept/Oct 2020. Italics are mine.)

Even after the United States was formed, Gushee says, “. . . we could have followed the British lead and abolished slavery. Instead, we deepened our excuses, weakened our ethics, and denied biblical theology.”

We even fought a Civil War. Technically, slavery was abolished after that, but the refusal to atone for our sins led to Jim Crow laws justifying segregation and denying black Americans the right to vote.

This is not ancient history. In the South where I grew up, blacks rode in the back of the bus and sent their children to underfunded black schools. As a child, I remember the separate water fountains in department stores neatly labeled “white” and “colored.”

Some white Americans seem unable to understand that centuries of racism continue to exert influence. The George Floyd murder by a white police officer is a reminder of the deep need for both repentance and change.

Killing Ourselves

It’s called the American sickness—the dissent into despair and addiction and suicide, recently chronicled by a couple of university professors:

“In the twentieth century, the United States led the way in reducing mortality rates and raising life expectancy,” they stated. “Now, the United States may be leading Western nations in the opposite direction.” (Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “The Epidemic of Despair,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020.)

This reversal especially affects the working class. “Marriage, churchgoing, and community,” hallmarks of this class, have all lessened. The authors single out “serial cohabitation,” the practice of men and women more frequently having children by different partners.

The authors fault the loss of good jobs as well as the lack of affordable health care. They call for practical measures like better regulation of the pharmaceutical industry and a more inclusive social safety net, as well as fair wages for the non technical workers.

However, notice the authors’ observation about the decreasing importance of “marriage, churchgoing, and community.”

An article by Charles E. Moore, Plough, Summer, 2016, suggests ways we have destroyed community:

“How would you go about destroying community, isolating people from one another and from a life shared with others?”

He quotes Howard Snyder (at the time Visiting Director, Manchester Wesley Research Center):

“Over thirty years ago Howard Snyder asked this question and offered the following strategies: fragment family life, move people away from the neighborhoods where they grew up, set people farther apart by giving them bigger houses and yards, and separate the places people work from where they live.

In other words, ‘partition off people’s lives into as many worlds as possible.’”

To facilitate the process, get everyone his or her own car. Replace meaningful communication with television. And finally, cut down on family size and fill people’s homes with things instead.

The result? A post-familial, disconnected culture where self is king, relationships are thin, and individuals fend for themselves.’”

Snyder’s words are harsh. Not all communities are healthy. Nevertheless, healing them is basic to overcoming today’s social isolation. In addition, the separations he talks about have grown with our addiction to social media.

Whatever solutions we develop for dealing with our social despair, building up families and communities must take the lead.