Part 4: The Finish Line
Chapter 31
Anticipating the Next Age
We stand at the threshold of 2001. The new century will present a host of challenges; we're beginning to face many even now. Alvin Toffler calls the span from the mid-1950s to 2025 "the hinge of history."1 Lance Morrow speaks of the coming millennium as a "cosmic divide." The 1990s are the transforming boundary between one age and another, between a scheme of things that has disintegrated and another that is taking shape," Morrow says.2
We need to anticipate these new challenges and assess the values implicit in each before they overtake us.
We need to understand and anticipate the changes in an America that is ever more racially and ethnically diverse and composed of more elderly persons than ever before.
We need to relate to a culture in which communication and transportation have brought about "rurbanization" as the population spirals outward from the urban centers, replacing rural values with cosmopolitan ones. And in which new immigrants from the Third World are streaming into the big-city cores.
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But of all the challenges the coming changes portend for the twenty-first century, three areas seem to be the most crucial for America's religious future: communications and technology; the family and society; and spirituality.
Communications and technology: I return to the observations of Neil Postman whose contention is that television, "the new state religion," now controls the flow of public discourse in America. "We have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut," Postman declares in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death.3
To support his case, Postman draws from the writings of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be "reduced to passivity and egoism." The truth, therefore, would be "drowned in a sea of irrelevance" as we became a trivialized culture. As Huxley saw it, people would come to "adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think," Postman says.4
Huxley foretold that "seemingly benign technologies devoted to providing the populace with a politics of image, instancy and therapy may disappear history just as effectively, perhaps more permanently, and without objection" than the state could do it through suppression. The Huxley warning, according to Postman, is that
in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate . . . When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.5
When religion takes on a civil role of self-indulgence and becomes a jaded consumerism, languishing in banality, then we find ourselves a culture wallowing in distractions. That is my concern about the media's seductive power over us as we race toward 2001.
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The affliction of the people in Brave New World could all to easily beset us: It wasn't that they were laughing instead of thinking. Postman points out, "but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking."6
Entertainment and the news media sometimes go for the simple-minded in their haste and distraction. When content is "dumbed down" on the assumption that the audience — or reality itself — has grown more stupid, there is a kind of self-fulfilling cycle. "The stupider the public's source of information, the stupider the public must eventually become," observes Morrow in a Time essay entitled "Old Paradigm, New Paradigm."7
At the same time, television has destroyed childhood innocence by blurring the distinctions between the inside home of the family and the outside realm of the adult world. By presenting the same information directly to persons of all ages, TV will make parental screening of information for their children virtually impossible before the next century.
Social critic Joshua Meyrowitz explains how television has changed childhood and challenged parenting by taking kids "around the world before their parents let them cross the street."8
Short of permanently pulling the plug or investing in locking devices for TVs, VCRs, and video-games, there are some helpful things parents and community leaders can do. The Center for Media and Values has developed resource materials for home use, parenting classes, parent-teacher evenings, church programs, and the like.9
Two other aspects of the communications / technology futures market need to be addressed here. People increasingly turn to computers, video games, and TV to meet their needs for intimacy. As the line between the machine and our own personhood is blurred by implants, bionics, genetics and cybernetics, we will be faced with the difficult task of fundamentally redefining what human nature is.
Not only do technologies determine how we interact — even providing surrogate intimacy — they also threaten to replace God as an object of worship.
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"In our post-industrial society," says Alan Jiggins, "nothing is sacred except the ideology of progress." The technological society is "arrogant and exploitative . . . corrupting our value system" and usurping the power of God.10
An article in the New York Times tells how a group of fifty Japanese engineers held a temple ceremony in 1990 to pay homage to worn-out computer chips. The chief priest, in deep purple robes, bowed low and chanted the sutra. Before him, at the feet of a giant cross-legged Buddha, sat a large lacquer tray overflowing with the used parts waiting to be exported to heaven.
In a few years, in addition to annual ceremonies, the engineers "hope to put up a monument to loyal, departed parts," wrote David E. Sanger. Shogen Kobayashi, the priest, said he had "no doubt that revering the chip will pay off for the Japanese people."11
The story is amusing, but it's a sad commentary on the extreme to which modern technology can take us. Values inherent in technology need to be critiqued from the perspective of biblical values.
Perhaps, as some analysts think, reaction against technological over-dependence may set in during the twenty-first century in the form of a "back to simplicity" movement. But I doubt it. Not as long as we're propelled by materialism and technology is in the driver's seat.
We must not bow down and worship at the altar of technology. Nor can we tamper with the basic nature that makes us human: the stamp that marks us "made in the image of God."
"The one attribute of human behavior that must be most scrupulously respected is the mutability of our nature," says Willard Gaylin, president of the Hastings Center. "While we may modify certain behavior we must not try to produce a human machine."12
Some lines must be drawn, and the bioethical, genetic one must be drawn at the point of respect for the uniquely human yet divine image — the spiritual side of individual existence. On the other side of that line is the real — and morally precarious — possibility that human enhancement engineering could obliterate the very image we most want to protect.
Family and Society: The world beyond 2001 may be physically easier. But it will be psychologically more difficult to live in. Family pressures, already battering at the door, may take over the house in
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the next decade because of changes in lifestyles, work, and leisure pursuits.
Much of the drama will revolve about the place and role of women, not only in the family but also in the larger society. Not all the results will be depressing. As we cross into the next century, I think a leveling will occur in the women's movement. The shrill, radical voices will be muted as the movement matures. A more open, less-defensive and self-critical posture will take their place. More men will participate in the dialogue and the new empowering.
AIDS will strike or hit close to every American family by the first decade of the next millennium. Homosexuality will be the most complex, troubling, and divisive of the issues in mainline Protestant churches; in Roman Catholicism it will be second only to abortion.13
However, we may need the greatest discernment and help in our attempt to rein in conspicuous consumerism. It went galloping off in the 1970s and 1980s and is still unbridled in the 1990s. This is the decade, says James U. McNeal, a consumer behavior expert at Texas A & M University, of "parent-blessed mini-consumers." He's referring to the five- to twelve-year-old set spending $4.2 billion a year of their own money on their own desires.
"Saturday morning television, with its $100 million of child-focused advertising, is a moving monument to this new market," McNeal declares.14
Consumer watchdog Ralph Nader puts it bluntly: "Kids are big business, and big business needs youngsters compliant, vulnerable and hooked on their fads, fashions and addictions."15
I see few indications that parents are going to do very much very soon to reduce their children's consumptive habits. Many parents are all-too-willing accomplices in making their children easy targets for commercial abuses and greedy marketing campaigns that capitalize on peer pressure.
Parents in general, McNeal believes, seem determined that their children will become consumers at an early age. "Or, more fundamentally, become adult at an earlier age. Kids are marching toward adulthood at a much brisker pace than they used to and are wanting more mature things to go with this accelerated growth."16
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The worship of materialism is idolatry, and parents will have to pay the price if they don't teach their kids that. Family values need righting, and parents need to fight exploitative videos for children and hammer home consumer savvy. Parents and children both need to learn not to buy things they don't need and to be suspicious of extravagant claims by merchants and advertisers.
The greatness of a people lies not in what and how much they buy but in who they are, reminds Media&Values, a helpful quarterly resource for teaching media and consumer awareness.17
Spirituality: Several predictions about twenty-first century spirituality and the church:
Large-rally evangelism in the Billy Graham mode will still be around. Some analysts have said stadium crusades would fall out of favor in the United States before the end of the century. Not so. In fact, crowds, in five — even six — figures will be packing the arenas, domes, and bleachers for the foreseeable future. Televised, video-taped, and satellite-remote events will reach millions, but they won't eliminate the need for the big-scale evangelistic meetings.
Church growth in the early decades of the next millennium will come largely through church-planting and mother churches birthing daughter churches. Far less numerical growth will arise from existing, mature congregations.
Recent studies show that 90 percent of all churches reach their peak in attendance, outreach, and giving by their twelfth year. Among evangelical churches, those under three years old will win ten people to Christ per year for every 100 members; those in existence three to fifteen years will win five people per year. After age fifteen, the number drops to three a year, according to Christianity Today. About two-thirds of older, plateaued, or declining churches are not revitalized.18
Liberal churches that "demythologize" Christianity in order to make it palatable to the "modern mentality" — i.e., well-educated people who value pluralism, diversity, and tolerance and stumble over the supernaturalism of the Bible and its "archaic" worldview — will find mythology creeping back under a different rubric. Despite a "this-worldly" interpretation of the Christian message in these churches, spiritual seekers will still encounter mysticism within liturgical expression and personal experience.
That's exactly what Don Miller found happening at All Saints Episcopal Church: people having "profoundly mystical experiences."19 What they didn't seem to realize was that the "mythology" they thing they are too sophisticated to accept comes sneaking in the back door. Faith is reinterpreted — "remythologized" — in their own form of mysticism. Thus the "plausibility problem" of a supernatural belief system is neatly circumvented. Supernaturalism, a la 2001!
Bias against the historic Christian worldview will escalate. Such prejudice is already evident in academic circles and by major media. In 1991, more than 800 Christian leaders representing some fifty denominations petitioned television networks, stations, and film studios to end the "anti-Christian bigotry" in their programs and movies.
The statement called on the media to stop "unbalanced portrayal of . . . Christians," which, it said, is "unacceptable to all fair-minded Americans." Noting that the industry didn't tolerate anti-Semitism, the church leaders asked for the same standards against bigotry to be applied in portraying Christians.20
Despite such pleas, Christian-bashing is likely to be one of the few remaining discriminations acceptable in the twenty-first century. Robert Wuthnow, an establishment sociologist of Princeton University, has taken notice of the problem, telling stories of "how subvert and covert" some distinguished evangelical scholars "have had to be and sound in order not to be seen as strange."
"American higher education disdains Evangelical Christians," Wuthnow continued. "Few groups are as despised a minority. Jews certainly are not. African-Americans no longer are. Gays are not. Women are not. Roman Catholics once were, perhaps even very recently. But no groups arouse passions and prejudices more than Evangelicals and fundamentalists." Withnow has seen academic committees at Princeton reject prospective students simply because they classify themselves as evangelicals on their application forms.21
Martin Marty, meanwhile, has detected prejudice at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the faculty sponsor there for a
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group called Evangelical Divinity Students Eating Lunch (EDSEL). "Something in me says that such an association would need explaining in many academic circles in a way the role of a faculty backer for a Newman Club, Canterbury Club, or Hillel Foundation would not. "Why?" asks Marty.22 Why won't mistreated Christians, along with other abused groups, be widely defended in the coming decade by affirmative action, anti-defamation leagues, and other tolerance-promoting efforts? Wuthnow says it's because the conventional opinion is that being a Christian, unlike being a black, a woman, or a homosexual, is a choice rather than a unalterable part of one's identity.
Anti-Christian sentiment is also fueled by the excesses of some evangelical groups and an undiscerning tendency on the part of the general public to lump evangelicals and fundamentalists with cults and deceptive mind-control groups.
What's surprising, though, is the overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian character that our country has retained in its mainstream culture despite an immense, open diversity in our structures and institutions.
"That's what's uniquely American," said Barry A. Kosmin, the director of the City University of New York's broad survey of religion released in 1991. U.S. religion is a "cohesive element . . . a constant point of identification and commonality" ranged loosely in many different groups in an open "free market."23
The third millennium will see the strongest manifestation of the Christian church coalescing around a model foreseen by John A. Mackay, the late president of Princeton Theological Seminary. He made this forecast in the late 1950s: America's religious future will abide in "a reformed Catholicism and a matured Pentecostalism."
The End or the Beginning?
The meaning of millennium depends on how you look at it. It's the symbol of either an ending or a beginning. One millennium is drawing to a close while a new one is about to emerge. We can look back, or we can look forward. The threshold of 2001 marks a fresh opportunity to meet the most challenging — and exciting — forces of change ever to shape a century of civilization. The years between
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now and 2001 should be an important time not only to take stock but also to initiate renewal.
George Gallup has a prescription for making the 1990s a decade of deepening religious commitment. Ministry leaders, he says, need to
LISTEN to the remarkable spiritual experiences of people and help them understand and build upon these experiences.
TEACH people how to develop their faith, pray more effectively, bring the Bible into their daily lives, and become better trained in leadership skills.
ENCOURAGE small-group fellowships, which serve as a means for people to enter the faith community as well as a way to support current members.
INSPIRE people to reach out to others in appropriate and loving ways.
TARGET key groups for spiritual nourishment and religious instruction: people in business, the professions, and other fields who constantly make ethical judgments; students, who receive an incomplete and distorted education if the vital role of religion is ignored; and people in the media, who often are ignorant about religion.24
Some Final Questions
There's more to racing toward 2001 than weaving together the multiple strands of our common future — as important a task as that is. We need anticipation and understanding, yes. Even more, we need help to harness the forces of change for our personal and collective journey.
The First Law of Wing Walking cautions, "Never let go of what you've got until you've got hold of something else."25 But sometimes reaching for the future means spending some terrifying time in midair.
How many twenty-year-olds know who they will be or what they will do when they are twenty-five? It's difficult to be good predictors of our own lives, much less of our children's. Economist Todd Buchholz reminds that parents must "learn to teach their children how to handle uncertainty — not how to ensure stability."26
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Who are you? my son T.J. asked motorists as traffic crawled away from the Rose Bowl on the first day of the New Year. Who are you? I asked at the beginning of Racing Toward 2001. We need to ask the same question at the finish line: Who are you? To whom do you relate? Whom have you influenced the most in the past six months?
Who are we? Where are we going? Finally, what roadmap best guides our way into the unknown?
The final words of the apostle Paul's letter to the Christians in Ephesus were given on the edge of a new era for the people of God: "Finally then," Paul advised,
find your strength in the Lord, in his mighty power. Put on all the armour which God provides, so that you may be able to stand firm . . . For our fight is not against human foes, but against cosmic powers, against the authorities and potentates of this dark world, against the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens. Therefore, take up God's armour; then you will be able to stand your ground when things are at their worst, to complete every task and still to stand. Stand firm, I say.27
This is the place to stand. A place to assemble and marshal the forces for good and for God. A place from which to dismantle the strongholds poised to rule this nation. A place to seize the opportunities of the next age. And firm ground finally to rest upon.
