Evangelizing the Post-Christian Culture
by Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine:
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” said the preacher in the mossy graveyard next to a rather mossy and moldy church. A few people were standing round, putting on their solemn best. “We commit our sister to the grave,” he said, “in the sure and certain hope,” and here he paused for the slightest anticipation of the climax, “that we will keep her always in our memories. Amen.”
“Amen,” said the bystanders.
Hope? That’s not hope. That isn’t even optimism. It’s just the way human beings are. Then the people who knew you die in turn, and nobody remembers you, even if your name is still known and people still say things about you. Nobody remembers Shakespeare. Nobody remembers Michelangelo.
That scene was from one of the Star Trek shows, about forty years old by now. I can’t tell whether the writers wanted to insult Christianity and the intelligence of Christians. Maybe it was a case of bad writing and bonehead thinking. There was and is a lot of that going around. But it puts me in mind of another scene that I myself witnessed in front of the state capitol a few months ago.
A chapter of the Knights of Columbus had put up a beautiful Christmas creche on grounds that are open to all and some, for such displays. That irritated the people at the local Freedom from Religion Foundation. So, they put up a competing creche, with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin standing beside a manger with no child in it, but rather a copy of the Constitution.
That was meant to be offensive, but surely the joke was on the Freedom from Religion Foundation because they showed, unwittingly, how parasitical they and other post-Christian secularists are. Just as the writers of the lame and dopey scene from the television show could not imagine a truly religious burial without raiding the faith they had rejected or hoped to leave in ruins, so the celebrators of a set of national by-laws could not sit quietly by and let the Christians celebrate in public, nor could they come up with their own solemnity, or gin up their own joy.
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