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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
America has lost its moral center, what sociologist of religion Peter L. Berger once called its “sacred canopy.” This is the culture’s understanding of public morality, once defined in the United States by a Judeo-Christian consensus. It’s what gives the culture purpose, direction, meaning, and hope.
As Judeo-Christian values are jettisoned one after another, nothing other than a rejection of absolutes is being put in their place, or in other words, nothing substantive or objective at all. No moorings. No port in the storm. No guiding light and certainly no metanarrative that defines the culture.
This has been happening since at least the rise of the counterculture revolution in the 1960s. “Make love, not war.” “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” While some of the changes since the 1960s have been good, like the rise and effective adoption of the Civil Rights Movement, other aspects of the cultural march to “Everyone doing what’s right in their own eyes” has been anything but good.
Add to the counterculture the rise of Postmodernity with its penchant for “freedom from” rather than “freedom to” across the spectrum of the academy and culture, wholly embraced by America’s opinion elites, and you have a recipe for moral relativism run amok.
Sexual freedom inevitably meant more pregnancies, and for women to be truly “in control of their own bodies,” well, then one must have abortion, which was legalized in Roe vs Wade (1973), to be followed inexorably by the spate of abortion-on-demand bills passing state legislatures in the last couple of years. The drug culture has kept expanding until now we have problems not only with illegal, super-charged narcotics like heroine, methamphetamine or crystal meth, and crack cocaine but problems with prescription drugs like opioids as well. Gay Rights plowed the field for what now is LGBTQ+ and a never-ending redefinition of humanity as long as it rejects “the binary” and thus continues to emphasize invented privacy rights at the expense of social order. Meanwhile, divorce and fatherless homes, sexual abuse and violence take a toll on each generation. To make an understatement, women struggle with sexual harassment and minorities with racism.
With this loss of center our sense of purpose, our ability to agree on right/wrong are gone, as is increasingly our national identity as a people, which we’re watching as centrifugal forces now vie to spin American culture into chaos. There’s no “unum” in E Pluribus Unum.
One of the heartening things in the wake of the tragic police killing of George Floyd May 25, 2020, is the peaceful protests we’ve seen in support of rightful change. One of the disheartening things we’ve seen in the wake of this tipping point is the lawlessness, anarchy, vandalism, violence, larceny, and general demands of a new “woke” culture that self-righteously seeks to silence or shame all who might disagree. Sadly, the latter in its vicious steam-rolling approach has almost overwhelmed the former.
This disintegration of order and democratic process has been painful to watch. And there’s not much hope of a brighter tomorrow because the many voices do not agree on even the most basic values. We have no sense of a unity to which we can aspire. It’s all now about power, a zero-sum calculus to gore the other side’s ox.
This is not an easy piece to write. It feels hopeless, and yet I am not hopeless because I believe in our Sovereign God. I believe in the timeless verities upon which this country was founded, and I believe for all our fits and faults we still offer much that our children and the world need. But our beacon at the moment is severely obscured.
God grant that we rediscover the importance of centering moral values before centrifugal forces pull us apart.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
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Call-out Culture America
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
In the new, emerging “call-out culture,” those with whom you disagree, or those who somehow make you uncomfortable, are ipso facto labeled dangerous and must be silenced or otherwise banished. Call-out culture, and its cousin, “cancel culture,” are a new scourge on the Body Politic.
In the call-out culture people regularly and publicly proclaim their bona-fides, i.e., “virtue-signaling,” within a given ideologically righteous group by attacking (calling out) others within, by definition, an ideologically unrighteous, therefore dangerous, group.
Call-out culture suddenly is the way to behave on social media. Have offense, will travel, will call-out. And it seems everyone is offended by everything. While there may indeed be wrong, even needlessly offensive behavior to which one should respond, there are ways to do it that does not turn into social toxicity. But this is not call-out culture.
Call-out culture is not about tolerance, though this concept is constantly referenced, but intolerance, particularly toward any idea and person defined as unacceptable or unworthy in this new pop worldview. Call-out culture intolerance, especially when it morphs to cancel culture, can be wielded in authoritarian if not totalitarian fashion. Freedom is not the first priority. Removing all offense to anyone and everyone’s feelings is the absolute goal, which requires silencing “insensitive” ideas—Who gets to decide what idea is offensive?— and even getting offenders removed from, among other places, faculty positions and speakers’ daises.
This self-righteous idea is one reason young people are now suffering record mental issues and are fearful, anxious, and unhappy. They’ve been taught to be offended, to believe their personal well-being hinges upon what others might say or do. They’ve been sold a bill of goods by misguided ideological pied pipers.
These social developments now have a grip on academia, politics, and Hollywood and in their worst forms amount to a direct threat to Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech, America’s fundamental distinctives. It’s not paranoia to say this is scary. It’s not exaggeration or overstatement to say these ideas and associated actions undermine and put at risk America as a free society.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
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America At A Crossroads
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
A 29:07 min video in which Os Guinness speaks to the challenges of American culture today. Thought-provoking and well worth your time.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2019
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A 2:09 min video I recently recorded with Manna Media. About our angst at living in the worst of times, that maybe the world is imploding, and what if it is, or isn't?
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2019
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What people born after the 1960s don’t know: How much culture has changed, or I could say, indeed how much it has changed in just my lifetime.
For example, during the week before Christmas, my wife and I watched a Perry Como Christmas music program first aired in 1975. In the latter part of the program Como introduced the Christmas story narrative and read it in entirety from the biblical book of Luke, saying it was his favorite story of all time because its message blessed all mankind with peace and hope and “because it is true.”
Think about whether an artist today would read the Christmas story at all on national television, much less claim it is true, or whether any entertainer would even use the word “truth” in reference to anything religious. This change in itself is an amazing and far-reaching shift in the moral/spiritual presuppositions of cultural philosophy just in a generation.
Another small example comes from ESPN’s “Good Morning Football.” The panel participants were talking about players wearing down late in the football season and a commentator used a Scripture paraphrase, i.e., “Spirit has to be willing when the body is weak.” Three others on the panel reacted immediately, “Wow, what a great quote” with raised hands and Woo-Woo hoots. The commentator who made the reference actually chair-danced. None of the four panelists seem to have a clue the paraphrase originated in the Bible. It’s like history books crediting the great Abraham Lincoln with originating the observation “A house divided against itself cannot stand," a notion from the Gospels familiar to Lincoln's audience but lost on 21st Century scholars.
Still another example from the Christmas season: It amazes me how many Christmas cards feature nothing or next to it about Christmas, i.e., lots of snow and red and green but not much else. OK, it’s a free country. But the really amazing part to me is how many ostensibly or avowedly Christian or church-related nonprofit organizations mail what amount to secular cards. Their cards feature no references to Scripture, the Christmas story in the Gospels, no pictures of the babe in the manger—which some people still use even if they don’t make reference to other religious words or symbolism. When I see these cards it always strikes me that these “Christian” organizations are missing a messaging opportunity.
Now these are just a few examples from the past Christmas season. We could list much more, including dramatic shifts, as alluded to above, in understanding what is objective truth yielding moral relativism, since 1973 the legalization and now expansion of abortion, the normalization and public promotion of LGBTQ followed by paradigm shifts in acceptance, then legalization, of same-sex marriage, since 1988 a steady legalization of commercial gambling including sports gambling in 2018, increasing complacency about debt along with a growing sense of entitlement, fatherless children, along with a decline in the importance of church in daily life with a parallel increase in secularization. More fundamental changes could be listed.
Of course, some positive changes can be listed too: greater awareness of women’s rights and potential, sensitivity to the needs and prospects of the poor, increased attention to opportunities for all races and ethnicities.
Ideas have consequences.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2019
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Somehow, we’ve come to a point in our culture where historical figures must be fully aligned with our ideology or they are not worthy of consideration, much less honor. If such people are, from the point of view of current trends, no longer considered worthy, or they failed in some aspect of life, then no matter what their achievement, they must be rejected, condemned, or simply ignored.
The problem with this all-or-none, you’ve-got-to-love-me-AND-love-my-dog approach is that virtually no one qualifies. So, no achievement, irrespective of its value to humankind, can be lauded because, well, the achievers were flawed, meaning most often that they didn’t agree with me or I don’t agree with everything they said or did.
But let’s do a reality check. No human leader or scholar or philosopher or hero or inventor or change agent or world class athlete or beauty queen or artist or politician, preacher, or professor, much less celebrity, has it all together and is without flaw. None.
The Scripture puts it this way: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Rom. 3:10-12). Yet God loves us all: “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). God understands the tug-of-war of good and evil in every human heart.
In the current cultural zeitgeist, it seems no historical figure, despite considerable laudable achievement, like Columbus or Martin Luther, the until recently properly appreciated Founding Fathers, the revered Washington or Lincoln or TR, or latter day MLK Jr, not even the earlier day Moses, David, or chief of sinners the Apostle Paul, is truly worthy of recognition if they are perceived as imperfect per our ideology, e.g., they owned slaves, they were a womanizer, they were rich…
I am not, of course, defending wrong-doing or misjudgments or outright sin. I am simply saying no person is perfect, no one fully and completely aligns with all other people’s ideological perspectives, which by definition are many, distinct, and perhaps contradictory.
Certainly, I am not perfect, nor is the person who lives for a time in the White House or sits on the throne of the United Kingdom. In fact, the only human being who lived a perfect life is God-Incarnate Jesus Christ.
So pulling down statues might be appropriate or it might not—either way, the decision should be made by duly elected representatives, not mobs—but this, along with sanitizing history books or museums of the presence of certain people, don’t accomplish much, unless indeed a serious review has taken place that can demonstrate the figure’s bad outweighs the good. I’m not closing the door on this, just saying kneejerk social media reactions aren’t the best way to determine who should or should not be honored.
This discussion brings to mind one of my highly-respected grandfathers, who served as a wise deacon for 40 years, and was regularly sought out for counsel by young and old from several counties around. He is the spiritual patriarch of our family. Yet when I was very young I twice heard him make comments about race or Catholicism that in contrast to the rest of his gracious life and jovial personality were and remain rather shocking. But I understand these comments as representing areas of his life that his well-developed Christian worldview and the Spirit of God had not yet penetrated. Had not yet convicted. Had not yet transformed. They do not discount all else that he did. And the memory makes me consider, what will my grandchildren remember about me?
It is possible to give honor to whom honor is due without lifting the person(s) to a godlike pedestal. It is possible to appreciate and value human achievement and legacies without certifying the person(s) who gave us these gifts as perfect. It is certainly possible and admirable to recognize and appreciate people whose contributions blessed the world, even if those people did not necessarily, even in fact likely did not, align with yours or my views. To reject such people is to miss the opportunity to demonstrate grace, perspective, and nuanced understanding of the interplay of good and evil in the heart of every human being since Adam and Eve.
Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2017
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statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers.