When nothing else works anymore

America's institutions are rotting all over the place.

Professional football - and, more broadly, professional sports - has gone from marking our calendars with culturally binding events - Sunday afternoons in the fall, the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NBA playoffs - that have given contour to a year nearly as much as official holidays, to serving as yet one more referendum on whether or not America is on balance righteous and worthy of patriotic regard. While ratings and ad revenue decline by the week, the NFL's remaining cultural impact is to divide fans not by team loyalties, but how one sees knee-takers.

Hollywood, while always a realm with an undeniable bacchanalian element, is now understood to be a savage wasteland where hard, mean people cynically make movies about nobility and heroes, and preen at fundraisers for collectivist and feminist politicians, while viewing all fellow human beings as either objects of gratification and power-consolidation, or obstacles thereto. 

The news media is not much different, and it doesn't seem to matter whether the detectable bias in editorial tone os to the left or to the right.

Education, of course, is a cesspool of teacher's-union turf protection, identity-politics madness that extends to denial of how the universe is designed, jackboot tactics, Orwellian doublespeak, and indulgence of impulses that students were supposed to give up with their diapers and baby teeth.

The level of American business characterized by large corporations imposes an atmosphere in which questioning of "core values" such as "sustainability" and "diversity" will not be tolerated.

Law enforcement, demoralized by events of the past few years (such as the hatred for it emanating from the aforementioned sports realm, and the public disdain it gets from the likes of Bill deBlasio) and skittish about actually performing the function that is its raison d'être, is not, in many cases, any longer an effective bulwark against general chaos.

Institutional Christianity - "organized religion," if you will - does not escape the rot. If one winnows out the silly, hard-left preoccupations of mainline Protestantism, the deep fractures within Catholicism, the razzle-dazzle of praise-band-dominated community-church services, and the ever-out-of-reach carrot of the prosperity-gospel message peddled by televangelists, one is left with a handful of congregations and ministers in any given town just trying to avoid the crossfire of the culture wars with a focus on the realm beyond this one.

As all these facets of our national life enter their final stages of decay, what is left to point the way toward revival? What might form the basis for a possible return to a common understanding of what it means to be an American citizen?

If we're so far gone that such a return is out of the question, what prevents a final descent into raw anarchy?

On what basis can we hope for simple safety?

The basis would, it seems apparent, come from the last group mentioned in the fourth paragraph above: those individual churches that still put the eternal fate of the soul front and center.

It's only through realizing the infinite preciousness of each human soul that one is really compelled to extend charity, to constantly ask how kindness can be brought to the encounters of this human life, to examine how tact, thoughtfulness, humor, empathy, and prioritizing another's well-being over our own security and self-satisfaction can be practiced and honed by each of us.

It seems rather obvious to me that we are witnessing what life looks like when all the edifices erected by fallen human beings are shown not to work. Without being informed by the realization of the soul's sacredness, there is no institution that can keep us from being cynical, vituperative, cruel, and, indeed, murderous.

All the winding paths we have trod are now converging on their final destination: the foot of the cross.

The detours are all gone.

One either takes the remaining steps in the journey or stands still, looking around for some other kind of saving grace that is never going to arrive.