Mourning a Lost World

You may be wondering why I have a penchant for wanting to read things such as “The death of Christian Culture” and “The Restoration of Christian Culture”, which are not exactly entertaining romance novels.

When I was a young girl and later as a young wife and mother, the world was a vastly different place than it is now. All of society was organized to support the idea of home, hearth, and family. To that end, ‘decency’ was a byword for all cultural transactions - language was monitored in newspapers and on the airwaves, movies were kept tame by the ‘Legion of Decency‘, teachers were not allowed to teach unless they were of proven moral character; in other words there was an unwritten code of behavior beyond which no one could go without censure. Everyone was worried about corrupting children! Men were responsible for providing for their families, women were responsible to make a home and tend to their offspring. This was our society - and so much more. This was the way society had been for millenniums and I certainly never thought it would be any different. I didn’t realize that it was a distinctly ‘Christian Culture’ at the time. I didn’t realize that for many years there had been forces at work who hated that culture and who wanted to destroy it. When the revolution and destruction came in 1968 I was totally unprepared for it and never believed that it would be a permanent thing. Surely, I thought, someone would set things right.

Well, now it is over 50 years since the first days of the ‘revolution’ . The Generation which was active as young men and women in the original assault and defense is grown old. It has been replaced by a new body which cannot remember the old unquestioned Unity of Christian Culture. The chaos was never dispelled - thus the useful part of a lifetime has gone by with no remedy, with things getting worse and worse, men and women more and more getting accustomed to irresponsibility and indecency. “We have a very gross national product”, says Dr. Senior in The Restoration of Christian Culture, “we have the grossest national product of any nation in history and not in a single city or town is it good or even safe to bring up children.”

But what can we do? Dr. Senior continues, “Anyone, right now, can live a better life if he wants to wherever he is - it is not a matter of moving to ‘kinder shores’, or anywhere else ‘out of this world’, except to the unexplored frontiers behind our own closed doors. The answer lies where it always has, not in the laws of nations, which indeed determine the destinies of Sodom and Gomorrah; the answer lies in the laws of the Kingdom within us because there we make the choice. There we are not the slaves of instruments* but only of our own bad habits….” (*instruments = technology).

Dr. Senior gives much practical advice in his books, always prefaced with "First, smash the TV, then....". He was born in 1920 and began teaching somewhere in the 1940's. He saw clearly where the problem of cultural demise and the decline in teachable children came in. Personally, I can't smash the TV. It doesn't belong just to me. But I try to hold the line. Even so, last year I became involved with an action show. This year I decided not to waste '24' hours on what amounts to absolutely nothing. I'm 77 years old and have too many books left to read, too many skills left to learn, too many things to pray about, too many grandchildren to enjoy to waste any more time. In other words, I'm one of the lucky ones who still lives in a Christian Culture and I'm not going into the other camp and let it spoil it in any way for me.