Living sanely and successfully in a grim and wicked post-America

Just about as long as Late in the Day has been around, I have been saying that I hoped the day would come when it would be appropriate to change this blog's name. I mean, who wants to live on the cusp of total darkness?

The most obvious response to that very premise - that the light of Western civilization is growing ever more faint and is doomed to go completely out - is to point out previous periods in history that were demonstrably more dire. There are plenty of candidates: the orgiastic scene Moses encountered upon bringing the tablets down from Sinai, the late Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition, the orchestrated Ukrainian famine of 1932, the concentration-camp system run by the Nazis, Cambodia in the late 1970s. In fact, there's a case to be made that stacking up 2018 America, with its standard of living, its array of choices in every facet of life, and its stability of basic institutions, against any of the above-mentioned periods is downright laughable.

But a number of firsts - not just in America, not just in the West, but for humankind generally - are obliterating assumptions about the human condition upon which our species' advancement has always depended. We're seeing developments that have never appeared anywhere, at any time, and they are nothing short of bizarre.

We make heroes out of liars. Exhibit A is Colin Kaepernick, who has built his brand on his assertion that America, and in particular its law-enforcement apparatus, is characterized by systemic racial injustice. It's just not so, and every honest American knows that. But the lie gets perpetuated, leading to a cognitive dissonance among the populace that assumes one's own country is fundamentally flawed.

Exhibit B is the academic field known as "gender studies," which posits that gender is fluid and an abstract concept. That might just be a silly fad were it confined to classrooms, but it has such visceral, real-world implications as US doctors performing double mastectomies on healthy 13-year-old girls.

Exhibit C is the lie that the global climate is in some kind of trouble requiring humankind to take urgent action to halt human advancement.

We're also in love with murder. That's what is at the core of the circus that the Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court is all about. While there's a small chance that what happened between Kavanaugh and Ford one night in 1982 is as ugly as is being asserted by her lawyer, that is not the main point here. Prior to Feinstein's eleventh-hour introduction of the letter into the proceedings, they had already become a circus. It's been obvious throughout the questioning from the likes of Kamala Harris that Democrats hold the dismemberment of Americans not yet born as a sacred right and will defend it by any means necessary.

And the feminist and Democrat love of abortion is, as in the case with gender dysphoria, rooted in a rage against nature, a resentment against the DNA one was born with. That rage insists on the individual being able to surmount the way she was designed. This is, of course, insanity, but we endorse this insanity - indeed, encourage it.

You bet the wording of the previous paragraph implies a designer. There is one. His nature, and our relationship to him, is discernible through His word.

But fewer people every day have any use for His word. Or they cherry-pick it.

Then there is the bitterness between Trumpists and actual conservatives. Trumpists have tried to marginalize those who insist on intellectual coherence, decorum in self-comportment, and a record of character. "We didn't elect a pastor" and all that. But the fact remains that we are presided over by a person who publicly stated that he doesn't need forgiveness for anything and who has spoken dismissively of the Eucharist. It's clear that he carried on simultaneous affairs with a porn actress and a Playboy model months after his third wife had given birth to his fifth child. And we know from his own bragging to Billy Bush and Howard Stern that much more such behavior is part of his life story.

Not an appealing picture of our cultural landscape, is it?

So how does one maneuver through such a grim scene? A few guiding principles begin to become apparent if one spends any amount of time contemplating this.

Escapism and cynicism are not options. There can be no throwing up of hands and saying, "It's just a world full of cads and cons and I'm just going to focus on having fun." We are each called to be agents of grace. It's an unavoidable commission.

We must speak truth plainly.  We must say forthrightly that there are only two genders, that no culture anywhere at any time in history had an institution of homosexual "marriage," that the global climate does not require any kind of urgent mass action, that it's impossible by definition to have a right to health care or a job, that people have a right to keep their own money, and that a sovereign God reigns supreme over this universe. We cannot cower. Those who do not understand these indisputable facts will be the only participants in our societal shouting match conversation if we don't speak up.

We must love. Yes, the vicious people who are single-mindedly determined to stomp us into the dust are the hardest people to love in the world, but we can do no less than pray for mercy for them.

We must make cultural contributions borne of light. As with not ceding the stage in the matter of speaking the truth, we must not leave artistic expression to agents of rot. If we have any gifts - for making music, for writing literature, for creating visual art or cinematic works - we must use them to produce works that bless and enrich our fellow human beings and give them a glimpse into what a Godly direction for our civilization looks like.

Finally, we must pray. Without ceasing. Our lives must become prayers.

The folks who take the position that it's ever been thus are correct. It has. In fact, a realization of that ought to motivate us to an insistence that darkness not win out.

Not this time, not ever. We're here to go forth and make disciples, no matter how daunting the task becomes.