What are the dangers that have come to the West with this pervasive
poison of materialism? We could make a long laundry list of unhappy
outcomes from a half-century ago, compiled by writers with far more
insight than I: CS Lewis'
Abolition of Man, GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, with
even more in recent decades (Ted
Kaczinski's rant comes to mind), with their dystopias of a world
governed by bloodless materialists. Fortunately, this materialist idol
comes with its own, well-deserved, offensiveness, such that for example,
few young men I know
(though all of those portrayed on TV) take Lucretius' advice to avoid
romance by promiscuous attachments. Even the tabloids record that in
real life TV stars stubbornly hold to some version of romance and
fidelity. No, in real life materialism is more akin to Christianity,
widely proclaimed but rarely practiced.
More often than not materialism provides some patina of intellectual
respectability to what used to be called simple vice, as Chesterton
commented in his preface to "The Man Who Was Thursday" (1903):
A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
But this inconsistency of the materialist religion should give us no
cause for even cynical rejoicing. As I read CS Lewis' That
Hideous Strength, and experienced it as a work of non-fiction, I began to
understand that materialism was not itself the
nadir of western society. Rather than the
final defeat of a rich and decadent culture as I had supposed, materialism was
only the siren's song, the promise of freedom from obligation, the ethical
license that attracted young sailors to the island of
dreams, but something else fed upon them there. It was Lewis
who explained the trap.
In his story the young professor, Mark Studdock, is brought
into a room full of surrealist paintings and left for an hour while
being initiated into the inner circle of materialists.
He turned his back on the pictures and sat down. He understood the
whole business now. Frost was not trying to make him insane; at least
not in the sense Mark had hitherto given the word "insanity." Frost had
meant what he said. To sit in the room was the first step towards what
Frost called objectivity--the process whereby all specifically human
reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the
fastidious society of the Macrobes. Higher degrees in the asceticism of
anti-Nature would doubtless follow: the eating of abominable food, the
dabbling in dirt and blood, the ritual performances of calculated
obscenities. They were, in a sense, playing quite fair with
him--offering him the very same initiation which they themselves had
passed and which had divided them from humanity, distending and
dissipating Wither into a shapeless ruin while it condensed and
sharpened Frost into the hard, bright little needle that he now
was....
On the floor lay a large crucifix, almost life size, a work of art in
the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic. "We have half an hour to
pursue our exercises," said Frost looking at his watch. Then he
instructed Mark to trample on it and insult it in other ways. Now
whereas Jane had abandoned Christianity in early childhood, along with
her belief in fairies and Santa Claus, Mark had never believed in it at
all. At this moment, therefore, it crossed his mind for the very first
time that there might conceivably be something in it.
Lewis wrote this book in 1943, and it has become the most prophetic
one I own. Nearly everything he saw 60 years ago and disguised as
fiction has become fact today. For materialism in this story is
merely the front, the initiation, the first step toward demonic
influence of the "Macrobes" of the story. And this is the real
unheralded success story of the second half of the 20th century, so for
example, when two relatives of mine graduated from a large state University, I
had no idea they also graduated from a "women's studies" course that
inducted them, like Mark Studdock, into the anti-Christian religion of
Wicca, all supported by yours and my tax dollars. It would not have
surprised Lewis.
In Lewis' epilogue to his most popular book The Screwtape
Letters, he has Screwtape proposing a toast. The efforts of the
demonic research institute were finally successful, said Screwtape, in
producing a "materialist magician". The problem with magic was that it
brought appreciation of the Greatest Magician who created worlds ex
nihilo, but finally, Screwtape reports, they have manufactured a
magician who is too sophisticated to accept the divine Word, who can
dismiss the greatest story as so much superstition. But it is in
Hideous Strength that we learn the purpose behind such a
miscreation--the advancement of the kingdom of darkness.
Evolution & the Culture Wars
Therefore evolution is not just the
front-lines of the culture wars, but the wedge that splits the
Christian view of persons in half, dividing asunder soul and body,
spirit and strength. It is the embodiment of the Kantian division between noumena and
phenomena that has crippled Christianity for 200 years,
separating the electricity from the motor, the wind from the sails, the
power from the Christian life. This, more than its explanatory power,
more than its predictive capability, more than its anything else, is the
whole purpose of the theory of evolution: as a metaphysical Trojan horse,
bringing with it the inescapable baggage of materialism.
Yes, despite the vast amounts of propaganda circulating out there,
careful historical accounts of the evolution of Evolution (e.g., John
Brooke's A Historical Introduction to Science and Religion) show
that Darwin was rarely accepted or even evaluated on his scientific merits.
That is, as we learn from Jonathon Wells Icons of Evolution, the
theory has been riddled with inconsistencies, fabrications, and lies
from its very inception, for its appeal lies not in facts but in myths,
not in physics but in metaphysics, not in explanatory but in
consequential power. Over and over we are told that evolution is not a perfect
theory, but it is the only theory, everything else is (pause)
creationism. And in this whispered threat lies a hatred, or more
likely, a fear of Christianity. Like Studdock, we are suddenly struck
with the question, "How can you hate it so much, I thought you didn't
believe in that sort of thing!"
I am reminded of the story told of Niels Bohr, widely viewed as the
father of quantum mechanics, who nailed a horseshoe over the door of
his Copenhagen Institute. "What is that for?" asked his European
friends. "Oh, an American gave it to me," he replied, "I'm told it will
bring good luck." "Why Niels," they remonstrated, "surely you don't
believe in such things!" "I'm told," said Bohr, "that it works even if
you don't believe in it." What Bohr meant as a joke, or perhaps a
lesson in the paradoxes of QM, we take as a far more sinister act,
which ties together unbelief and superstition in that peculiarly modern
chimera Lewis warned us about. For our western materialist culture has
elevated skepticism to the highest attribute of man, as Chesterton
immortalized in the phrase "the respectability of atheism". Rarely
in written history has skepticism been so transcendent. On the contrary, Jesus' words
come with all the force of five millenia, "Unbelief is a sin." For
unbelief is not, as is widely supposed, a virtue, but a decision, a
commitment to resist, a nascent rebellion, a guerilla revolution, such
that materialism of the 1950's has become the Wicca of the 1990's. They are
of a single cloth, woven of the same thread. As Lewis writes in
Hideous Strength
"Have you ever noticed," said Dimble, "that the universe, and
evedry little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing
and coming to a point?"
His wife waited as those wait who know by
long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to
them.
"I mean this," said Dimble in answer to the question she had
not asked. "If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or
family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always
find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow
room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be
a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and
choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad
is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality
are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the
time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder."
Reformation Roots
So the Reformation fueled Enlightenment rationalism that brought the
incredible advances of the 20th century has also moved from its
quasi-neutral stance into that keen darkness of the neo-pagan Nazis,
the now defeated Stalinists, and the soon-to-be defeated Maoists. And
here, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are seeing resurgence of
anti-realism, post-modernism, New Age and Wicca. What began as an
amicable separation has become a bitter divorce. "He who is not for
me," said Jesus, "is against me. And he who does not gather with me,
scatters."
What has been the response of the Church to this growing cultural
animosity? Sadly in the West we see only capitulation. Most bishops of
the Episcopal Church, for example, espouse an "ecstatic" theology that appears to be
warmed over gnosticism, a post-modern successor to German liberalism
that uses all the right words with all the wrong meanings. It is the
proper heir to Bultmann's materialism, espousing all the fervent
devotion of a Jungian for symbols without a corresponding fear of the
God who instructed us in their meaning, thus fitting perfectly Lewis'
prediction of the materialist magician. And now no Episcopal conference
is complete without a "labyrinth" walk, as if the Church had need of
another golden cow-headed goddess! And sadly, where the Episcopal church
leads, the remaining mainline denominations follow. Can any church
today make a separate peace with culture, can any denomination embrace
materialism?
No, the function of materialism and the theory of evolution is clearly
to oppose Christianity, and simultaneously cut off the energy source of
the Christian life. This both empowers neo-pagan and satanist
religions, as well as emasculates Christianity. The sad story of the
20th century is just how successful this subterfuge has been both
within and without the evangelical Church. The surge of global mission work after
WWII is now about spent. Organizations have ossified, overhead has
soared, direct mailings have multiplied, our focus shifted inward, and
our prayers have dwindled. Is there any hope for orthodoxy, any future
for Evangelicals?
Yes! For the Church of God marches onward, with
3rd world churches now sending missionaries to the West, so that the
split-off Anglican Mission in America comes under the care of a Rwandan
bishop! And without fail, every 3rd world Christian I speak with
immediately sees the connection between evolution and witchcraft,
between anti-spiritual Christianity and anti-Christian spiritism. What
is so murky to an American evangelical is crystal clear to a Tiawanese
or Sri Lankan Christian.
So