Western civilization is coming unglued. Those who seem least aware of its impending collapse are (1) politicians with vested interests in promising a better tomorrow, (2) philosophers who despite a dismal record keep drawing up blueprints of utopia, and (3) stock brokers whose livelihood depends on marketing a bright future. Scientists seem more realistic about the world’s slide. They speak even of the end of human history—though their alarm centers in matters like atmospheric pollution, the prospect of nuclear destruction, limited natural resources, and possible famine in an overpopulated world.
Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, pinpoints our problem as a lack of conscience and will in the face of totalitarian Communist expansion. Meanwhile Muggeridge stresses the mass media’s promotion of the moral shallowness and spiritual superficiality of our materialistic culture.
What it all adds up to is the gloomy fact that for all its promise of bright tomorrows, scientific technology will itself crumble in the ashes of a society that abandons ethical and religious concerns. As the world in the last quarter of the twentieth century divests itself of belief in God and his revelation and in redemptive renewal, it is left without any clear understanding of the meaning of life. It therefore plummets toward pervasive melancholy and despair. A remnant that believes in God and his purpose in history will be left to carry the moral fortunes of a dispirited race.
It has not dawned on the West that, instead of being a conquered malady, Naziism is but a shadow of things to come, and that Russian Communism, which also arose in the West, is not the worst of all coming judgments. To be sure, the brutalities of twentieth-century Communism are aptly appraised by Solzhenitsyn:
What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared—not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only but tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims [The Gulag Archipelego, Harper & Row, 1973, p. 93].
Solzhenitsyn confesses, “We didn’t love freedom enough” but submitted rather to the Party line and so “we purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward” (p. 13, n. 5). The embarrassing question is whether the so-called Free World (the designation is less and less appropriate) truly loves freedom or whether it is not rather so motivated by a passion for private material gain that secular capitalism cries out for controls upon its avarice.
Does not infatuation with sex in a time of scientifically abetted libertarianism push aside moral principles and thereby cast to the winds the sanctity of marriage and the dignity of human personality? By its preoccupation with change and its enthronement of human creativity, does not modern academic learning become subservient to a renegade call for new norms, norms that simply substitute expediency for enduring truth and principle? We have turned freedom into license. Our professed love of freedom is increasingly shown to be a sophistry that replaces wisdom and righteousness with self-gratification.
It is time we professing evangelicals speak up and move out. Solzhenitsyn says of the Russian believers who waited too long to take a stand that “like the ancient Christians, we sat there in the cage while they poured salt on our raw and bleeding tongues” (p. 498). Martyrdom may indeed become the fate of a faithful remnant, but it should hardly be considered glory for a remnant that was silent in a time of spiritual eclipse.
Evangelical tradition in and of itself is not good enough for an era of civilizational end-time. We need to plumb far deeper than this into the basic biblical heritage. There we find prophets willing to be jeered at, flogged, chained, stoned, tortured, and if need be killed by the sword. Solzhenitsyn writes of victims of Communist terror who “crawled along the path of hope on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated” (p. 449). If in a time of cultural decay evangelicals live as if their tongues were cut, and confine their light inside the churches, do they deserve a better fate than the godless?
However casually we may dismiss Jesus’ warnings about some future judgment, we cannot refute Solzhenitsyn’s awareness that judgment may also strike in the present: “Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position; all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night” (p. 591). Who is to say that “the end of all the ends” may not actually be upon us, that tomorrow may not be the very last day or tonight the last night?
Signs of a bleak near future are unmistakable in the philosophy and practice of our time. Human life is cheap. Moral considerations are considered expendable in the passion for material gain and sexual gratification. Personal preference dictates what is right. Truth is viewed as a changing commodity subject to private redefinition. The inevitable outcome of such deceptions is a barbarism that will dwarf anything known to pagans in pre-Christian times.
We are approaching the deliberate abandonment of distinctions between good and evil espoused by Judeo-Christian revelation and along with this a surrender of the concept of human dignity that revealed religion has sustained. Neither American technology nor American democracy nor American capitalism in and of itself can spare us.
Let us not be taken in by illusions of political salvation. Politics has become the utopian metaphysics of restless twentieth-century visionaries, and the Christian—while he has no license to neglect politics—should never expect too much from it. Without shared national goals, without an enlivened public conscience, without a commitment to transcendent truth and law, without a sure dedication to moral and spiritual priorities, the national spirit on the eve of America’s bicentennial marks us as pied pipers whose call to hollow ideology leads down the short road to disillusionment.
CARL F. H. HENRY
