Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College, writing in Foreign Affairs (May/June 2014) suggests that Americans and Europeans risk losing all that they have gained after the end of the Cold War. They are, he says, becoming “a narcissistic consumer with no greater aspirations beyond the next trip to the mall.” They are “unwilling to make sacrifices, focused on the short term, easily distracted, and lacking in courage.”
What happened to our victorious march to democracy in every corner of the globe?
Flying in a small plane over one of Saudi Arabia’s deserts in 1991, I read of the first attempt of the old Russian guard to bring back Soviet Russia after Gorbachev’s pivot toward the West. Boris Yeltsin, showing courage he lacked later in bringing true democracy to his country, stared them down and won the day. Russia appeared once more set on the road to what we call Western liberalism.
But something has happened on the way to the glorious finale of Soviet communism’s demise, of the Arab spring, and of nations on every populated continent accepting democratic ideals.
Every blessing, every progression seems to host a two-edged sword. The digital revolution has made neighbors of us all. It has revolutionized everything from medicine to street protests to Wall Street, yet we seem to have lost our ability to live for more than ourselves.
Is there hope? Probably not in the places of usual power—governments and corporations. If rescue comes, it will probably come in the guise of small communities of people deliberately deciding to live intentionally instead of grabbing for the most toys before dying.
When circumstances beyond our control and not of our making place us in bad, even horrible situations, we can remember the lessons of Viktor Frankl. Imprisoned in a German concentration camp, at the mercy of those who hated his race, Frankl continued to develop his inner thoughts and ideas. After release from the camp, Frankl expressed those ideas in a book read by millions, Man’s Search for Meaning.
The Nazis came to power in Germany in a society of educated, middle class citizens. An unsuccessful war and economic problems led a significant proportion of the population to look for simple solutions like blaming Jews. Instead they might have examined issues like the world wide recession and its effects on Germany. They might have found a way to deal with the heavy debt placed on the country by the treaty that ended World War I. Instead, they allowed themselves to be caught in the hyper nationalism championed by the Nazis.
This period was a beginning, not of leaving my faith, but of finding a more mature faith. Before in my world, Christians were Christians, and the rest was everybody else. Now I began to see graduations within the Christian community as well as in the community of “others.” I found that I could disagree but respect those who differed with me. I am, as the apostle Paul said, still working out my own salvation with fear and trembling.
I also came to understand that some people who called themselves Christians have committed grievous sins against others. We worship Jesus who, though equal with God, humbled himself to become like us. Yet, in our arrogance, we scream at the different others as though we are God and know perfection. Now I am more aware of my own potential for error and am more willing to listen to other viewpoints.
I find no fault in Jesus, but I fear that we have clung, not to Jesus and his radical love, but to something less, Christianity as a mere civil religion. Perhaps that is why Christianity is no longer the default religion in the Western world.
1) How much more influence does a citizen gain who spends a great deal of money on a candidate compared with an average citizen who merely casts a ballot? Can votes be “bought” in the sense of understood favors toward certain policies if one accepts money for a campaign?
5) Has money trumped political parties? Do wealthy individuals have more power to win elections than Democrats or Republicans or other political parties?
Jesus is crucified, his body taken away.
For the next episode, I was privileged to work closer to the front lines. I was in Saudi Arabia working for the State Department when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was defeated by the first alliance since World War II that included Russia.
Vladimir Putin in Russia, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the generals in Egypt, among others, push against what a short time ago seemed an unstoppable march to self-government.
Ukraine has recently struggled to return to democracy but it is hampered by the leftovers of a corrupt regime. Russia’s Putin took advantage of the country’s weakness. That is often the way dictators amass power.
The fancy name for coming-of-age stories is Bildungsroman (loosely translated: growth novel). This word is featured in a column by Christine Chaney, a professor of English at Seattle Pacific University, in the 2014 spring issue of Response (SPU) magazine.
In grappling with the place of the mind, that is the use of the mind, in the Christian pursuit, I read a book written by Mark Noll, now history professor at the University of Notre Dame. His book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, was first published in 1994. He sets out a challenge for evangelical Christians in the use of the mind. He describes the evangelical life of the mind as: ” . . . to think within a specifically Christian framework—across the whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts.”
We live less than a hundred miles from the huge landslide in Oso, Washington, the tragedy that killed over twenty people. Several are still missing.
Yet the blood marked face of the little girl in Aleppo, Syria, stares out of the picture, uncomprehending as to why one would want to hurt her. She is dressed attractively. Her family must love her very much, and perhaps she will survive. Others, surely, are more damaged by the barrel bombs, full of shrapnel and nails. The bombs do not differentiate between military and civilian. Those who employ them do not intend that they should.
Immaculée Ilibagiza, a young woman born in Rwanda, tells of her horrifying time during the Rwandan massacres that began in April, 1994, twenty years ago this month. Most of her family were slaughtered. Hidden in a bathroom with seven other women, she endured ninety-one days of cramped hiding. She tells her story in Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.
2. Rural Muslims tend to become more conservative when they move to the city. Nomadic Arabs that we met while in the desert appeared less strict in matters of dress and other habits than their urban cousins. This reminded me of the denomination I know best, Southern Baptists. Southern Baptists became more conservative when they left their rural roots. In 1990, Nancy Ammerman, then a professor at Emory University, wrote Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention, which portrays this shift.
5. Some Muslims are dismayed at the infiltration of Western culture into their own. One of their writers called it “westoxification.”
I have a cartoon in my files from 2008 when Russia invaded the country of Georgia. David Horsey drew the political cartoon for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Georgia, located between Europe and Asia, choose to leave the Soviet sphere after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2008, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed portions of their former satellite. The reactions were similar to our reactions today to Russia’s designs on the Ukraine.
The U.S. has issued visa sanctions against several Russian tycoons in protest of the Russian takeover in Crimea, meaning the tycoons will be prohibited from visits to the U.S.