Tuesday, October 5, 2021

Another one bites the dust

Or ditches the Christian Faith.  Dave Armstrong goes through the minutes of the reasoning.  I have never heard of
Audrey Assad.  Apparently she is, or was, a big name in music, at least for Christians.  She's done with all that God stuff now, concluding that the modern Faith of Science has debunked all that made up folk tale gibberish we call religion.  At the end of the day, that's why she left.  

For all the unpacking Dave does, and he does an admirable job, I think it's simple.  She no longer believes and, most likely, hadn't believed for some time.  A great many in our churches likely don't anymore. They can't bring themselves to do what she's done because they don't know where else to go.  Thinking of the implications of a religionless world is terrifying.  This is all you get, then a feast for maggots and your objectively valueless life is forgotten about in a generation and that's it?  So they hang on, not believing it in their gut of guts, until a chance to bolt finally appears. 

Oh, we have that secular paganism, that 'heavenly birthday' and 'we pray to something' or such at times of crisis. Just enough fluff to paste over the implications of a truly secular universe.  But it's not much, and means less. Therefore many are no doubt where she was.  She may give this or that reason, the Church is thus, or the Church judges, or the Church intolerant, or hypocrites as good as always.

But that's all rubbish.  From non-religious hypocrites to intolerant atheists, the idea that these problems in the Church aren't found anywhere else is demonstrably false.  After a few days in the real world, it isn't difficult to discover in the fields of secular living the same problems.  

But it ultimately does not matter that they are wrong about such reasons, because the people who say 'too much politics' or 'too intolerant' aren't leaving for those reasons.  They are leaving because they no longer believe in 1) God, 2) Christ, 3) the Bible, or 4) Religion.  They've been taught those things have long been debunked by Science.  They believed the Secular Faith for years, perhaps without realizing it, but couldn't bring themselves to admit what Ms. Assad has admitted. 

More and more don't believe in God or the Holy Spirit any more than they believe in Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.  I'm not a talented enough writer to find a way to emphasize just how urgent a crisis this is, but: 

PEOPE DON'T BELIEVE IN THE CHRSITIAN RELIGION ANY MORE!    

Not the Bible, not the stories of the Bible, not any particular God if any at all,  not in some God Incarnate Messiah born in a stable, Miracles, Eternal Life, or any of it.  Certainly none of it as presented by the historical Christian Faith.  And that means more and has farther reaching implications than I think we can fathom. 

As I said, there's likely just enough nod to a 'vague spirit energy something when we die' to cover the awful implications of a truly materialistic philosophy, but that's all there is.  Otherwise, the Biblical stories and doctrines of the Faith mean absolutely nothing to them because they don't believe in them. Because our society has been a secular society and has preached and proselytized the belief in secularism for decades.  

If I may be brutally honest, most of our traditions have foolishly tried to meet this secularism halfway when there was no halfway between 'no God' and 'One God, maker of heaven and earth.'  We may have thought we were bringing them from 'no God' to at least 'some God', but all along they were bringing us from 'One God', to merely 'some sort of God'.  And in a secular age where secularism has been the universal faith for some time, that's a small step to no God of any meaning at all. 

That's why people are leaving in ever growing droves.  At least they're leaving and admitting it. Honesty about one's state of affairs is always best.  I fear many more in our churches are where she already was, even if she had to find reasons to justify no longer staying there.  I fear that a great many of our leaders, even in the highest places, no longer believe it either.  

How else can we account for people who no more than a few years ago swore things to be the revealed truth of the Thrice Holy God who now set those same things aside under mild pressure from the World?  How much did they really believe?  And if those teachings and morals can be tossed aside, how much else can and will join them? 

18 comments:

  1. Protestant to Catholic to Married to Divorced to Npt Christian. I doubt Dave that she stands for much other than a fair number of people are, and always have been, fairly superficial, especially those who make their money in the entertainment industry.

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    1. What struck me is what I've been seeing among my Evangelical relations in recent years. It's almost a monthly thing now where some prominent figure renounces the Faith. That's what struck me here. It's not just the old 'I'm sleeping in on Sundays again' cooling of some religious zeal. It's outright apostasy, rejecting verbally the Faith, if not God and religion in general. That's more common than it was even a few decades ago when I was in ministry. That's why I think something is afoot.

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    2. "I fear many more in our churches are where she already was, even if she had to find reasons to justify no longer staying there."

      I'm afraid of that also. Why am I afraid? The only way I can explain it correctly is comparing it like this. When you see someone you know or even a stranger saying something or doing something that is so embarrassing to themselves without realizing it, that you are embarrassed for them. You feel that pit in your stomach knowing your friend will crawl into a shell when the realization of their foolishness hits them. But this is worse. When the their realization that God does exists finally hits them, that we have an obligation to God and failing all that we have the very real possibility of going to hell, I'm afraid for them. I'm horrified for them that it will be too late. I cannot imagine being on my death bed and not believing in the next life with God. What a person of no faith must feel in those last moments I cannot imagine especially when they realize they've been wrong about God all along.

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    3. "we have the very real possibility of going to hell"

      I think that's a big point. I wonder how many Christians believe that anymore. How many beliefs or our lives have any impact on our eternal destinies, assuming we believe in any eternal destinies of particular importance. When I see things like Pope Francis saying it's good for states to have provisions for caring for people in non-traditional marriage relationships, it doesn't seem to follow that he thinks the way they live has any bearing on their eternal destinies. And that's just one of a million examples today.

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    4. I wonder how many actually ever believed it. Even among the most traditionalist, the focus is on defending religious freedom, not salvation of souls (don't get me wrong, religious freedom is a great thing, I just wonder whether the focus is leading to a lack of evangelization).

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    5. Absolutely. I don't think this is targeted at any one 'side' in the scuffle. I'm thinking of old colleagues from my Protestant days who said there is no salvation but through Conservative being added to the Gospel, who are now throwing so many hills they were willing to die on out the window. Did they really believe, and if so, in what?

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  2. Chesterton: “Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

    Religion News Service at one time had posts seemingly every other day on some 'popular author' that one might suspect was unknown to anyone who did not frequent evangelical book stores.

    Richard John Neuhaus was a critic of 'contemporary Christian music' and offered the opinion that the purveyors of it and the consumers of it were in danger of being co-opted. See also S.M. Hutchens on the intersection between evangelical worship and popular culture (or, perhaps more precisely, mass entertainment).

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    1. I never cared for contemporary Christian music either. But as I said above, I think what I'm seeing is a growing number of people not just going back to some 'not too religious' now living, but outwardly rejecting the Faith altogether.

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  3. I still maintain it is a dangerous thing to make one's living off of one's professed faith. Marshall McLuhan's "The medium is the message" comes to mind. If you set yourself up to be the messenger, then you better sure as heck have your i's dotted t's crossed in your rightly ordered spiritual life.
    I fear that many of us fall into the trap of talking more about God than TO Him anyway. I know I do and confess it frequently.

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    1. As one who used to make his living off of my professed faith, I can say you're right. I used to struggle with how much of my spiritual walks was a spiritual walk, and how much of it was a job description. I wouldn't say I always maintained the right balance, but I know how easy it would be to lose sight of the distinction. And most I knew understood the problem as well.

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  4. Two quotes from my recent reading, the first from Book II of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (with original spelling):
    "Why then should witless man so much misweene
    That nothing is but that which he hath seene?"

    And from my favorite philosopher, Josef Pieper, in his treatise on Faith:
    "Naturally no one can say whether something suffices without simultaneously considering what it is to suffice for. If anyone should therefore ask whether what is naturally knowable should not be sufficient for man, he can answer adequately only if he has first formulated what he considers a meaningful human life to be, that is to say, a life in keeping with man's true nature and also with his real situation in the world."

    If we do not have eyes of faith to see beyond this world to the eternal, unseen things, we cannot really understand why we are here and what is truly important. It is easy, even as Christians to think and live as if this world was the only reality!

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    1. I think you're spot on there. In its simplistic form, our faith eyes should be like Neo finally seeing the Matrix for what it is. The modern world of STEM, however, I think more than any time in history, makes that tough. Not that people throughout the ages haven't been able to only see the way man sees and not God, but in an age where we are up against almost everything non-natural and living, and locked into the cold and impersonal, I think it becomes even more easy to lose sight of the Invisible part of creation.

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  5. I think there's more too it. People have sins they want to commit or past sins they want to justify, and renouncing the faith makes it that much easier. I was married for 27 years and have eight children all baptized in the Catholic faith. My wife decided she wanted to embrace her bisexuality and justify past sins in that regard, which she hid from me and lied to me about at the time of our wedding. And so it meant abandoning the faith, divorcing me as an uncomfortable reminder of Catholic teaching, pursuing adultery in that regard, and inducing our children to also abandon the faith as supposedly "intolerant." From things she said to me I think she very well believes in God and fears His just punishment, but the allure of sin and the hope that faith is wrong led her to her actions. They don't 'believe' that God doesn't exist. They hope that God doesn't exist. It's a hope in opposition to Catholic Christian hope.

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    1. That's a rough development. Sorry to hear about that. But you're right, and I wouldn't want to suggest that every abandonment of the Faith is due to faithlessness. Though I'm thinking of the ones who have openly renounced the Faith by name, stating a rejection of God or anything non-physical in the world. The growing number who leave under those terms are what I wonder, and then I think of those who once were crusaders for this or that great Christian cause, only to throw the cause under the bus in the face of the slightest pressures, and I can't help but wonder how many really believed it back in the day.

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    2. I am so very sorry to hear this. Prayers for you and your family, AS.

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  6. I vaguely recall Assad briefly being a big thing, just as Charlotte Church was.

    I think a career in entertainment is a constant near occasion of sin that you have to deliberately fortify yourself against. As with AA, you can't hang around the spiritual equivalent of "wet places and wet faces."

    When you throw in the fact Wokism is the current ascendant religion, especially in popular culture, it takes a not-yet-canonized saint to get by with faith intact. And let me hasten to add it's not because the woke are invariably hedonists straight out of a scene from the life of Caligula. The fanged adherents aside, they can be welcoming people who share their stories and "witness" much better than self-declared Christians.

    All that said, DA really tripped all over himself with his analysis--he retracted almost all of it. While his writing has its virtues, he has a hard time working outside of his modular, slot-this-type-in-this-box-and-that-type-in-that-box thinking.

    The belief that deconversion--whether to another historic faith or to secularism--is invariably due to a lack of knowledge is nothing short of blinkered.

    Plenty of once-solid, well-catechized Catholics have walked out the various doors, and more will continue to do so. I've been close myself: and my head knowledge has been part of it.

    Trying to reconcile what is written on paper with the gleeful disregard in which said alleged doctrine is treated in the Catholic world by so-called shepherds from the top down can give you a bad case of cognitive dissonance. Witness matters--at the present moment, far more than the written word.

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    1. just as Charlotte Church was.

      Don't think Charlotte Church was ever presented or presented herself as anything but a musician. There's religious music on her 1st and 3d CD.

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    2. What I recall of Church is her music being in the Ignatius catalogues, as was Assad's. I made the wrong assumption about her ecclesial status. As with all my assumptions, they keep the donkey population stable.

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