Yesterday I stood before the iconostasis of a church that just a few years before had been a ruin. For a time it served as an official governmental museum promoting atheism and attacking religion. Now it is what was once trendy and daring that looks dull and dated.
Sticking with Jesus Christ over Stalin was a bad short term investment, but looks much better now. Of course history is still happening; any human expressions of His body are always being corrupted, and so the pendulum of what the wise of this world consider the best bet for the future may change again.
This is why finding, as best as one can, what is good, true, and beautiful and sticking with it is the wisest course. Even if you are wrong, even disastrously mistaken, you will have had character and dignity.
Those who pick their religion, ethics, and philosophy based on present trends have neither with the added benefit of usually getting it wrong. Most of us who try to be trendy aren’t. Anyone can become a saint or martyr, but only a certain facile and plausible type of man can Talleyrand his way to perpetual coolness.
I am often told on this or that issue that the “youth” are all on the other side. Write anything not approved by the spirit of the age and someone will comment that they will simply live long enough to see me dead . . . and my ideas dead with me. The mantra of “if present trends continue. . .” often substitutes for argument.
Of course, they forget that, with any luck, by the time my generation dies they too will be old (or at least safely middle-aged) and a new group of youth will be in the process of discovering that the wisdom of their parents is debatable. Since some of their own peers agree with me, and books will always remain so long as they allow freedom of thought, they cannot be sure how the next generation will view what they have done.
Such revolutionaries should recall that today’s revolution will eventually be yesterday’s stale platitudes. Particularly when the revolution has defied what most great cultures at most places at most times have believed, they are likely to find themselves mouthing platitudes that come closest to being forgotten when the times changed.
The movements most likely to fail (to actually die out) in history utterly are those that are most unique to a moment in time, a peculiar circumstance, or people. Despite present trends, I think it likely there will be many Christians in Britain in one hundred years (all those Chinese missionaries that came in the middle of the twenty-first century)!
Present trends in human affairs are almost certain not to continue. It is, of course, worthwhile and beneficial to note them and use them to benefit what one believes is best, but rarely are they a useful guide to what is true.
History does not render such judgments, because men perversely cannot learn from history and so make new history full of the same old glories and follies.
Those riding the present wave in some area such as the libertine in our era are simply setting themselves up to look silly during the neo-Victorian reaction. Meanwhile, nobody can make us change now. Even force, as Stalin discovered, is a broken weapon against the martyr and nobody is asking us to face a martyr’s death.
So, if only to irritate the editorial writers at the Times, social conservatives should live a healthy lifestyle and so live an irritatingly long life, vote, refuse to bow to pronouncements about the future, smuggle treasures of faith to the future, and simply wait for the next wave. You just might be the spiritual grandparents to the next, next generation.
Even if the next wave does not come in your time, you will have lived your time with peace and dignity, denied today’s youth when they too have grey hairs.
There was a time in Russia when all the brightest and best, and most (though never all!) of the young sided with change and became bad men. Thank God for the few who would not change and became great men.
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.