The Post-Christian Mind

I have lately enjoyed reading H. Blamires' book of the same title (2001, Regent College Publishing). Quotations are as hard-hitting today as when it was published.

3: "[The] distinction between the Christian mind and the post-Christian mind is analogous to the distinction between civilization and the jungle, between order and anarchy."

5: "In the nineteenth century the threat to Christianity in the West was in some respects a clear-cut one. The development of scientific thinking encouraged an assumption that gradually a full understanding of the origin of the world and its inhabitants would be reached.This understanding would be such that past reliance on so-called 'revealed' truth. . . would be rendered unnecessary."

7-8: Around 1960, "the taste for reasoning faded. . . . Absolutes were non-existent. . . . It has led the clergy to an emphasis on the immediate which is neglectful of history and tradition."

Terms the book calls out as being misused in popular culture:

• Rights
• No specific right attaches to any personal trait (whether left-handedness, female sex, or homosexuality).
• Individual rights can be better termed 'entitlements.'
• Holding a right maintains the need for moral imperative and responsibility.
• The term 'duty' should be resurrected and the use of 'responsibility' lessened.
• Family
• Where does a norm become a variant?
• The post-Christian mind pursues "omni-inclusiveness . . . as somehow virtuous" (19).
• Increased housing prices in response to a greater proportion of two-income households is an imperfection in the economic system.
• Regarding the modern feminist movement against full-time homemaking, "one woman's liberation may be another woman's slavery" (25, to a boss rather than one's own home).
• Because emphasis is laid on the abnormal or unusual, this battle in morals has been lost by abdication.
• 31: "And when the heart is touched, the head ought not to be seduced into temporarily accepting patterns of sexual relationship that are destructive of family life."
• Marriage and divorce
• 37: In the post-Christian mind, "erotic love . . . is a god. It has its own authority."
• 39: "If we take everything into account, is it better to be over-severe about adultery or to treat it too lightly?"
• 41: In media writing about divorce, "the post-Christian mind allows a degree of selectivity in recording facts about the lot of children in such circumstances. The post-Christian mind is deceptively evasive. It dare not face facts."
• Morality under attack
• 46: "The post-Christian mind cannot do 'wrong'. He or she can only act ill-advisedly. . . . The implicit downgrading of free will is significant."
• 48: "In what civilizations was the basis of morality established by majority vote? . . . Nazi Germany . . . Muslim countries that [execute] adulterers."
• 49: In the post-Christian mind, "responsibility must be shifted from the shoulders of human beings."
• 50: "What is peculiar about the current post-Christian climate of thinking is that the mature age groups seem frightened of handing on to the young the values that they themselves inherited--and benefited from." It is also more qualitative than quantitative in thinking patterns. Therefore, "the tyranny of the average holds the post-Christian mind in its grip" (54).
• Values
• Do they change based on how we behave? Or is it our ability to live up to values that changes? No value is strictly private, because morality is always public.
• 60: "Our [Christian} belief in the resurrection of Chris is not an interesting personal preference on a par with our fondness for colourful ties or detective novels."
• Novelty
• The modern belief in inevitable progress has the untrue logical extension that the new is always better than the old.
• A deeper question to this: how should the Church relate to the world?
• 69: "Chop away everything that makes it different and the thing can be gradually destroyed. . . . This is the way of abdication from cultural responsibility. It is the betrayal of the young we should be educating."
• Discrimination
• Popular culture does not use this term in a neutral way (as its denotation prescribes).
• 79: "Christian men and women are taught to be grateful for God's creation of the world and its inhabitants. The desire to improve on the Creator's work is silly as well as arrogant. Accepting the pattern of the human family is generally a matter of joy as well as of obedience."
• Bodily beauty
• 86: Regarding indecent advertisements and media, "we have lost the distinction between the public and the private."
• First principles
• 93: "The post-Christian mind has divested itself of moral absolutes."
• 94-95: "We can turn the question [of why we believe in a good God while the world has evil] back on the questioner. 'How can you expect the world to be other than in a mess when the good God and his laws are ignored?' . . . There can scarcely be specifically 'Christian' solutions to problems produced by anti-Christian behaviour."
• 97: "[The] post-Christian mind has become obsessed with sometimes specious 'obligations' which arise only because fundamental obligations have been ignored."
• Democracy
• While democracy does protect against injustice and tyranny, it does not follow from equal representation that everyone's opinions must be equally valid.
• 102: "So Christians do not get enthusiastic about democracy because all men and women are blessed with good judgment. Christians get enthusiastic about democracy because they know that all men and women are subject to temptation and corruption."
• 103: "There can be no education without submission to disciplines." Children, while creative, do not know best!
• The post-Christian mind has no concept of sin.
• Freedom
• Couples enter freely into marriage; therefore, it is not a prison.
• Likewise, boundaries and constraints actually enable freedom within them (while the individual is protected by the boundaries).
• 114: "The post-Christian mind is quite prepared to inherit the traditions of Christian practice while emptying those practices of Christian content."
• 116: "'Freedom of thought,' as now accepted, is in effect an ultimate commitment to non-thought."
• Freedom of expression
• In the popular mindset, it is worse to allow minority-damaging material than actually offensive material. Due to this shift, and poor judgment and logic, "words about defending the freedom of the media are not only misguided but themselves offensive" (118).
• 121: "[The post-Christian mind's] external obsession with sex is perhaps the product of minds unequipped to grapple with the inner reality of its driving power."
• Modern "art" is often offensive. Censorship operates on both the one whose expression is censored, and the intended audience.
• Economic freedom
• Economic reform never quite works, regardless of the system, because conduct cannot be truly separated from humans' motivations.
• Advertising and insurance are forms of taxation without representation as well as abetters of criminal activity, because criminals get stolen goods for free, and advertising cost is included in the cost of the goods sold, without the consumer's choice.
• Back-to-nature movements
• Civilization and nature are falsely contrasted. It is more proper to distinguish between the urban and the mechanical.
• Charity and compassion
• 146-7: "[Our] welfare systems have presupposed a moral climate that post-Christian thinking has destroyed. . . . men and women are trying to be God."
• Denigration of Christianity
• Post-Christian writers and speakers call virtue vice, and vice versa.
• False comparisons also denigrate Christianity in the public eye.