The lack of a governing narrative in the West is a “result of the banishment of Christianity.” Both humanity in general and individuals are “grasping, desperately grasping for something to grant them meaning, even if that meaning is utterly meaningless.” For those familiar with the works of Francis Schaeffer, or are familiar with the Christian worldview movement, there is “nothing surprising” in this.

Tim Padgett, Resident Theologian at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, reviewed political polarization in contemporary society as an aspect of secularization at the annual conference of the L’Abri Fellowship in Rochester, Minnesota on February 14. Because of the many changes in society and unexpected turns of events (the collapse of communism, the destruction of the Twin Towers, and same-sex marriage would be examples) we now, like Alice in Wonderland “can think of several impossible things every day.” For some of these strange turns of events “if you tried to sell it as fiction even a generation ago, or even less, you’d be laughed out of the room.”

He said that in recent years, “people have adopted increasingly extreme socio-political positions…less than forty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and just shy of 80 years after the fall of Berlin, hammers and sickles and antisemitic tropes are all the rage, literally.” Symptomatic events included the toppling of historic statues. The extreme polarization of today is one of the strangest facts among these strange occurrences, because “materially speaking, we’ve got it good. By pretty much any metric, it’s better to be alive here and now than just about any other time or place.”

Spiritual Crisis

But it is the spiritual side of life which lacks public meaning and therefore generates conflict in the world today. The secular liberal promise was “a golden age of rationality and tolerance…once we got rid of that pesky Christianity, the world would revert to factory setting. We were told that a new paradise would emerge where knowledge, industry, and mutual respect would rule the day.” We got instead, “a dystopian mix of a Brave New World and doom.” This realization has had “at least one positive result…Seeing the insanity of a world without God, prominent atheists have been rediscovering the beauty of the Bible.”

But many today continue the quest for meaning on a post-Christian and postmodern basis. Even after the horrors of Marxist revolutions and tyranny in the twentieth century, many still see a revolutionary, re-engineered world imminent which will “save us from the evils of—the most prosperous and free society” that the world has known. Similarly, decades after the greatest of all wars, World War II, destroyed Nazism and exposed its evils, we still “have people denying the Holocaust…easily one of the most well documented events in human history. All around the West, we’ve had censorship in the name of tolerance, and we’ve had destruction of public art in the name of humanity.”

Padget said the lack of a governing narrative in the West is a “result of the banishment of Christianity.” Both humanity in general and individuals are “grasping, desperately grasping for something to grant them meaning, even if that meaning is utterly meaningless.” For those familiar with the works of Francis Schaeffer, or are familiar with the Christian worldview movement, there is “nothing surprising” in this.

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