Old & Young

I have referenced this passage from Roger Scruton before, but have been confronted with the reality of what he is saying so many times in my re-reading of Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson and other notable but passed on saints, that it needs to be looked at again:

We have to accept that it is no longer possible to govern young people by the methods that were used to govern and influence the young of my generation. Exhortation, example, the stories of saints and heroes, the life of humility, sacrifice, penitence, and prayer-- all such moral influences have little or no significance for them. And although from time to time they encounter obstacles, and perhaps experience real love, real jealousy, real fear, and real grief, these emotions are not available to them in the regular doses and predictable circumstances in which they were available to us.

SO WHAT SHOULD CONSERVATIVES BE DOING? This is the last of my regular articles for The American Spectator, so let me conclude a happy period of my life with a few observations for future use. Our work, it seems to me, consists in what Plato called anamnesis -- the defeat of forgetting. We cannot ask young people to live as we lived or to value what we valued. But we can encourage them to see the point of how we lived, and to recognize that freedom without responsibility is, in the end, an empty asset. We can tell them stories of the old virtues, and enlarge their sympathies toward a world in which suffering and sacrifice were not the purely negative things that they are represented to be by the consumer culture but an immovable part of any lasting happiness. Our task, in other words, is now less political than cultural -- an education of the sympathies, which requires from us virtues (such as imagination, creativity, and a respect for high culture) that have a diminishing place in the world of politics.

Of course, we should do our best to control the growth of the state and to make it more difficult to depend upon its constant expansion. We should seek, through whatever avenues remain, to rebuild our education system with knowledge rather than “self-esteem” as its product. There are a hundred small-scale ways in which we can help the next generation not to fall completely into the trap that is being prepared for it. But there is no way, I fear, to destroy that trap entirely. For it is built from human ingenuity and baited with our own desires.
 

We are engaged in a war of cultures and the war is being waged not by the usual suspects i.e. Islam (although they are a threat) but it is a war being waged almost invisibly because it is a war of technology. It is a war that Marshall McLuhan addressed in the 1960's when he stated that it is not the content of the new technologies that are the major threat, it is the delivery system itself that is the real danger. "The message is the medium".

The phrase was introduced in his most widely known book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.^[1] McLuhan proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.

 His message has never been more relevant than in the society we are currently shaping for ourselves and until the leaders of our church congregations begin to address and combat these forces, we are doomed to repeat the fate of the Churches in Revelation:

These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands.

² I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. ³ You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

 ⁴ Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. ⁵ Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. ⁶ But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

 ⁷ Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.
 

This war of cultures is impacting on our worldview and our worldview is changing our practice and even what it means to be a Christian. It is a world that has young, seemingly solid Christians entering into the world of fame and fortune and within half a decade emerging to question everything about the classical Christian doctrines.
Why is that?
I believe it is because our children have not been given the real meat of the gospel, the doctrinal true truth's. They are filled up with emotional responses and shallow rhetoric and sent into a world filled with temptations and subterfuge. And this is not restricted to only the young. Are the older congregants chewing on real 'meat'.
Our world is getting tougher and tougher and we are getting weaker and weaker and it is not enough to sit back and expect God to do the work that we have been tasked to do as far back as in Genesis, i.e. the CULTURAL MANDATE shrieks at us from history.