My county's contribution to Western civilization has been the idea of economic freedom. And it is a vital contribution. Without economic life, no society accumulates the means to enrich itself with the other components that birth and sustain a great culture. On the other hand, when economic life becomes its own aim -- when economic wealth does not work to create and maintain the other systems that make civilized life possible - then economic life ceases to bless. In such case, wealth becomes corrupt. It begins to pollute the nation that hold it. For in a county that ceases to honor the common good of its citizenry, wealth leads to a rigid stratification of its people, leaving some able but others unable, to access the quality of education, health care and other facets of common life that are the common goods of a truly good and great nation.
Western civilization is the product of many centuries of reflection, discussion, and artistic creation among a diverse people. It's life is sustained by open and informed debate about how these ethereal gifts enlighten our understandings of the meaning of life.
The heart of Western Civilization, what pumps it's life blood through its cities, towns and nations, is an unavoidable struggle between the values of classical Greece, empirical Rome, and Judaeo-Christianity. Each of these strands of Western culture promote ideas that are incompatible with the others. As a result, some Western nations tend to lean toward one of our three cultural sources, other nations lean toward another. However, all Western nations necessarily wrestle with each of those three ancient sources because this conflict is not only the heart of our history; it is the root system of our contemporary debates.
In the end though, the most dangerous threat to Western civilization, that which most threatens the utter loss of all of our accumulated treasure, is the allure of barbarism -- the idea that society would be better off without the advance of science, art; without much of anything beyond the kinds of knowledge presently deemed immediately and pragmatically useful.
The threat of barbarism arises even within Christian faith when believers become comfortable asking for the blood of Christ while ignoring the implications of what he taught; when Jesus is loudly praised as Savior but quietly rejected as teacher. The faith this rejection of history produces thus becomes about rules, or about nationalism; or it becomes forms of religious corporation, even forms of religious entertainment. But in all such versions of faith, Christianity loses its ability to justify its own existence. Even theology becomes suspect because the study of scripture and christian history threatens the legitimacy of the superficial and adolescent expressions of religions that the new barbarism produces.
American Christianity has now entered an era characterized by globalized, pluralistic and secularized expectations. Unfortunately, it has been crippled, most seriously by its own proponents, rarely understanding enough of its own past to remind the surrounding culture of the contributions it has made, and might make still, to Western civilization. In some cases, Christians have no desire to even know, much less share, those riches we once offered to form this never- perfect but nonetheless culturally wealthy society through which I walk today.I fear the gravitational pull of this romanticized barbarism far more than I fear any other single threat to my faith or my culture. And, I fear, the solution - serious catechism of heart and mind -- has become an object of disdain among those who would most profit from the words of life.
It is raining on the cathedral. Only time will tell if the water washing over it's ancient walls is a refreshing new baptism or a flood that will wash it all away.
