When I was down in bed earlier this year unable to walk as a result of a horrendous side effect to a round of Cipro antibiotics I ended up watching lots of video on You Tube. For some reason I was drawn to watch anything I could find about Detroit, Michigan and its incredible decline. I watched all types of documentaries focused on Detroit that included fires, drugs, gangs, the car industry, the bankrupt city, racial issues, vacant homes, and public schools. One documentary that was produced by Ford Motor Company around 1961 extolled the virtues of Detroit and had one scene that has stuck in my mind. It was a young boy staring intently with his eyes squinted so he could take in a statue on a bright sunny day in downtown Detroit in 1961. The documentary panned from the boy to the statue as the narrator on the documentary told about the statue that represented the foundations of our society- family and God. The narrator explained that these 2 things are the foundation upon which all other things in our society are built.
After the narrator spoke these words I stared at the video in disbelief for a few moments thinking about how dramatically our society has changed since that day in 1961 because so much of our culture is now focused upon undoing family and God as that upon which all other things in our society are built. We live in a society that is in the midst of dramatic change. We live in a society that ridicules anyone who encourages sexual purity or sexual standards based upon the Bible. We live in a society that views as suspect a large family, and especially if that family goes to church. We live in a society that says it is enlightened to have no religious beliefs and it is weak minded to believe in God.
The world as it existed some years back does not exist now. And to make it worse many Christians believe if we would simply reintroduce prayer into schools, outlaw abortion, or require creation to be taught in schools everything would be solved. The problem is that the Christians who hold these views are a small vocal fringe element of Christianity just as those who believe we should eradicate religion and God are a small vocal fringe element of our American culture.
Prayer cannot and should not be introduced into public schools because in our multicultural mindset we would require all students to pray to whatever god anyone believes in- that would not be productive. We can make abortion illegal but it will become a time bomb if we don't do anything to address the hyper sexual culture that is producing lots of unwanted babies. Teaching six literal days of creation will come back to harm Christianity just as teaching that the earth was flat has done immense harm over the centuries.
The solution to where Christianity finds itself in 2013 is not to go back to life as it was in 1961. Do we really want to go back to a time period in which discrimination of people based upon the color of their skin was justified by Christians? Do we really want to once again advocate for a legalistic Christianity that teaches that we are saved because we accomplish a specific task in a certain way and our brand of Christianity is better than the other brands because we _______ (you can fill in the blank!)___?
The solution to the radical transformation of the foundations of our culture lies in seeking the wisdom and power and grace and mercy of the God who created us. (...and yes, he might have taken billions and billions of years to create us or he might have done it a single microsecond!) If there is a God and if this God really did preserve the record of His work in this world for us to read today then perhaps we should take comfort in the possibility that this God is powerful enough to get us through a confusing time in the history of this country and our world just as He did when He sustained and guided countless numbers of people through the millenia.
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