Culture is Luring Christians Into Compromise

I have the highest respect for Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, whose career I have followed since the late '80s when he became Bishop of Rapid City. A Kansas native who is half Potawatomi, he is an outspoken critic of American culture and politics. His book, Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life (2008, Doubleday), is a fabulous defense of an individual Christian's right to participate fully in public life while holding to their religious values.

Archbishop Chaput is in the news again, this time speaking before The American Bible Society.

Stressing the need to recognize the impact mass media has on thought and action, he warned that Catholics are losing the habits on which they have traditionally relied because of “vanity and compromise.”

The archbishop delivered his remarks to the American Bible Society in New York City on Wednesday. The Archbishop of Denver is in town to receive the Becket Fund’s Canterbury Medal, which is given to persons who “most resolutely refused to render to Caesar that which is God's.”

“If we’re serious when we claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, then we need to understand our own times as well as Paul did his,” he counseled the Bible Society members.

The archbishop said this can be a problem because “the tools we rely on to inform us are the same tools we use to delude ourselves about the real world.”

“The American news and entertainment media, which now so often overlap, are the largest catechetical syndicate in history,” he continued.

Saying the media has helped create a culture based on “immediacy, brevity, visual stimulation, celebrity and self-absorption,” he warned this has great implications for the Christian’s place in American society.

[SNIP]

Noting that the United States was founded in a time of print-based patterns of thought, he warned:

“The more sensory, immediate and emotional our culture becomes, the farther it gets from the habits of serious thought that sustain its ideals.”

As a remedy, he advised Catholics to give up computers, televisions, cell phones, and iPods for “just one night” a week.

“One night a week spent reading, talking with each other, listening to each other and praying over Scripture. We can at least do that much. And if we do, we’ll discover that eventually we’re sober again and not drunk on technology and our own overheated appetites.”

I realize the idea of giving up electronic media for one evening a week is pretty radical, but I think it's going to take radical measures to save us from our society, in order that we can save society from itself.

Reading good books, too, is something that is being lost by the general population but is indispensable in forming an enlightened electorate who can counteract the ignorance and emotional excesses of the culture.

Notice I said ignorant, not stupid. There are vast numbers of potentially brilliant people who have not been intellectually challenged by our schools and universities, who instead have been fed progressive, anti-religious propaganda and told it is knowledge. The good news is that some people are taking it upon themselves to self-educate because there is something inside them -- call it conscience or gut, your pick -- that says what is happening in our society is not good. It is not the country that our grandparents remember, or the one we see reflected on old episodes of "The Andy Griffith Show," etc.

The left blames all our problems on conservatives (and their ideas?) but provide no facts or logic to prove this, and the history taught in our schools leaves the blanks unfilled as to where things started to go wrong. Instead, we are told that we should emotionally embrace "the public good" and allow government to fulfill its destiny in meeting it. Rejected is the notion that our responsibility, as individuals, is to fulfill our destiny as children of the Living God by both loving God and our neighbor through individual actions and, if we voluntarily choose, corporate actions as members of church.

I'm going to let Archbishop Chaput have the last word. Ponder it:

While human sinfulness is always present, the archbishop said, “What’s new about our current moment is that too many Christians have made peace with that sinfulness, baptized it with the language of personal conscience, and stopped trying to convert anybody -- including themselves.”

While a “post-Christian” society may seem similar to the world St. Paul confronted, it is in fact “much worse” because the old pagan world was ignorant of Christ, but today’s paganism involves “a specific choice against Jesus Christ.”