The culture is like a motorcycle careening wildly off a cliff on Shore Road!
The culture is lunging at the church like a thug with a drawn knife!
Christians are unconscious and their leaders are slumping to the metaphysical floor! 
If I were to write this post in the style of Franklin Dixon or Carolyn Keene, these would all be worthy sentences. These authors, like the comic books of my youth, were unafraid to generously endow their work with that too little used punctuation mark: the exclamation point! Even seeing it, embitters me toward generations of English composition teachers who have stripped it from our sentences!
Like a split infinitive in the hands of Gene Roddenberry the exclamation points of our youth helped us to boldly go from one comic frame to another or one Hardy Boys chapter to the next! They were friends butchered by English teachers jealous that they could never have gotten a date with Ned Nickerson or Callie Shaw!
Most future readers of great literature find themselves reading the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew at one point in their infant stage of literary development. I always preferred Drew to Hardy, since Drew’s mysteries were more complex and the Hardy Boys tended to rely more on machinery and muscle than brain power.
Both books did lead my brother and me to a life long quest to revive the use of the word “chum.” We have not yet succeeded, but have made some progress.
Paul Spears has already ably defended reading such horrendous trash with the help of G.K. Chesterton, so I do not feel compelled to do so.
The books are, however, not great literature and though they provided me hours of juvenile pleasure, they had some severe stylistic problems. Even this can be useful since one of their many literary defects is a good reminder of a particular cultural defect.
Both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys can always recognize a “bad person,” because they have give away physical and behavioral clues (some of which reflect offensive stereotypes of th time). Let’s take some descriptions of “bad guys” and fools in one Hardy Boy’s book (The Shore Road Mystery), selected due to its classical references to the Iliad and the Trojan horse:
“a short, stout man named Oscar Smuff, wearing a green suit and Tyrolean hat”
“he smiled ingratiatingly”
“the stilted language and pompous manner of the man impressed neither of the boys”
“gaudy tie clasp”
“squat figure”
“dumpy figure”
“the broad-nosed, bald man wiped his sleeve across his face”
“supercilious smile”
“glaring lividly”
“heavy round faced owner”
“he talked volubly”
“three men lounged”
Most important: villains almost always speak in contractions or the dreaded slang.
The book assumes that bad guys are always pretty easy to spot. They usually have bad guy names to help!
A Quick Warning
Of course, let us not make a different error and assume that certain physical and social characteristics are not good clues to cause worry about a person. If a man is extreme in his attire (either very dressed up or very slovenly), it does say something about him. We are often so conditioned by modern media’s love of the “anti-hero” that we forget that in real life most lazy or careless people often become lazy or careless about friendships.
We should also not forget that people who are actually doing bad things are bad. This is a controversial statement in our era where only Nazis can achieve the “bad person” label, but it is true none-the-less.
Generally, if a student or graduate becomes obsessed with their “right” to use the f-word, to drink, or to flirt with assorted immoderate behaviors; I am not encouraged about the state of his soul. These are generalizations and must be treated as such, but generalizations can still be useful.
Here are some useful generalizations:
Generally, people who watch five hours of television a day are in real trouble and this trouble will tend to show itself in their physical and mental characteristics.
Generally, bad company corrupts good morals.
Hanging out with morally bad people can be good for them, but can also be bad for you. Most of the time, trying to help a “bad friend” just sucked me down into their problems.
Of course, general rules can be misapplied in particular cases. The pharisees judged Jesus by the company he kept, but the Son of God was not corrupted by His bad company. He was a physician reaching out to the sick. Still, I have noted that in my own past I believed that I was being a physician (like Jesus!) when I was just infecting myself with bad company.
The rule of thumb seems to be: most people who hang out with bad people become bad. Our culture teaches us to fool ourselves into thinking we are stronger than we are. If you are given the ministry of hanging out with Hardy Boys villains, at least remember they are meaning to engage in a sinful lifestyle and have friends who can monitor your own behavior who are not part of that social scene.
Assuming, however, that one is not stupid enough to ignore obvious warning signs of bad character there is a problem that Nancy, Joe, and Frank never confronted. Many bad guys and gals do not tip off the hero.
They are evil, but only in one area. Otherwise, they seem quite swell (to use the Hardy vocabulary). As I know all too well from my own life, a chum can be attractive, but bad.
This is a mystery that no Hardy Boy or Drew girl ever had to face.
But Bob Was Such A Good Guy!
The problem of evil chums is that they are often only noticeably evil in one area. “Bob is a racist, but he is a swell guy otherwise.” If Bob is also good looking or “fun,” then the temptation of our culture is to overlook his bad behavior.
We hope that Bob can compartmentalize his bad ideas and that they will not infect the rest of his life or us. Most often these compartments are as useful as the “water tight” compartments on Titanic. We have forgotten the obvious fact that over time our life compartments tend to leak.
By putting up with our friends behavior, we also empower that behavior. The tax cheat is a thief, but we rationalize the stealing as if the only real thieves rob 7-11 stores.
Sometimes strong minded people can compartmentalize their sin. That makes it less obviously destructive, but can lead to a different problem. The ability to compartmentalize parts of life from the rest is good for those who face severe heart aches in this sinful world. It is not so good for people to use that “emergency technique” to enable continued bad behavior.
Do we really want our friends to learn to separate themselves from their own feelings and experiences so they can go on sinning?
Probably not, but the temptation to avoid making trouble or to avoid a chief fear of our age, appearing judgmental, is very great. We don’t want to call a thief a thief, since he otherwise is so honest. We will not call our friend the adulterer what he is, because he is otherwise so personable.
The temptation is especially strong if our friend is otherwise socially acceptable. We can even come to minimize or justify sin, since “otherwise” our friend is so nice.
Only Hitler, Stalin, or Bull Conner is evil since we have a Hardy Boys eye for evil. We have missed the message of Jesus about evil and sowing and reaping.
We are evil chums, but we feel good about ourselves.
Sowing and Reaping
We are not an agricultural society, so most of us don’t understand the metaphor of sowing and reaping. Good seed is sown and bears good fruit. Bad seed is sown and bears bad fruit. Jesus uses this process as an image for good works and sin.
Most of things we do in a computer culture are immediate. We push a key and something happens. As I press the “x” key right now xxxxxxxxxx, it produced a series of the letter “x.” Much we do in our culture has immediate feedback.
Seeds do not grow this way. They are hidden in the ground and only come to light over time.
Sadly for us, changes in culture and in persons, work more like seed sowing (Jesus was wise.) than like hitting a computer key. It takes time for the evil we do to impact us or for the good we do to begin to benefit our souls.
I once heard a talk-radio host laugh at Christians since “gay marriage” had been around for five years and nothing bad had happened to Massachusetts yet! It is as if he believes that cultural changes will be understood quickly or simply.
For of course, most people (or cultures) do not just sow one kind of seed. We sow good and bad seed. Weeds and fruit grow up at the same time and we are confused about the source of both.
Many of my college students make the same mistake I made at their age. We reap the results of good seed sown by our parents and even of some good seed they helped us sow in the more controlled era of young adulthood. Then we begin to sin and sow bad seed and nothing happens! Not only do we continue to reap good things, but the bad we do (which is fun at first) bears little or no bad fruit.
Our parents were wrong, Jesus was wrong, sin is great! By the time the sin does begin to bear bad fruit (often twenty years down the road), we have forgotten the actions that marred our soul or began bad habits. We blame other more immediate things. We may even blame a “good turn” in our lives . . . since we try to reform and when nothing happens right away (our seed does not bear “good fruit” immediately), we give up.
We are like the small children who plant their beans in the classic experiment only to root them up in disappointment the next day when “nothing happens.”
Many of us also do enough good that we can tolerate our “little vices.” They are bitter to the taste, but mingled with enough good fruit to still be (barely) palatable. We live a life that is less than what it could be because we keep sowing bad seed.
Nobody this side of Jesus is as perfect as Nancy Drew and nobody is as bad as a Hardy Boys villain. Because of this, we are tempted to tolerate our own vice since it is “not so bad.”
This is sad and it can be ruinous. Most of the great big bad things I have done in my life have come to pass because of small sins I tolerated. Many of my annoying long term problems are because I will not allow God to root out my “bad seed” since it does not (on the whole) seem so bad.
The older I get the less I have tolerance for my own lack of holiness.
The Bottom Line
Sadly, the world does not work like a Hardy Boys book. It is true that evil eventually reveals itself, often even in the physical appearance of the person, but this takes time. Meanwhile, the myth that all bad people are totally bad or that evil will manifest itself immediately or in obvious ways often keeps us from repenting.
The drunken Christian college student who breaks voluntary vows to his school and indulges in immoderate behavior can, for a time, compartmentalize his bad behavior. The man who is cruel to his wife and uses abusive language toward her may also have many charms. The person who steals from the grocery story may be otherwise wholly honest, but the vice is still there.
To end this post the way the Franklin Dixon might end a book:
Joe and Frank wondered if they had escaped the results of their sin, but had the uncomfortable feeling that their souls were marred. Not only was this true, but they did not realize that soon they would face The Mystery of the Final Judgment.
