We're straining at gnats and swallowing camels. As I've explored ethics over recent posts, it seems as if the churches will focus time and energy on any ethical issue so long as it is not about the use of wealth to exploit other people and the environment. (The Eleventh Earl of Mar's photo says it all.) Indeed, the appetite amongst some Christians for these peripheral ethics is to the extent that it sometimes feels as if issues are being invented as further distractions. Whilst a few verses in the Bible about sexuality are blown up into a major issue that threatens the integrity of the churches, exploitation, an issue present on almost every page, can go unacknowledged in a month of sermons.
Humanity faces a turning point. The exploitation of the environment cannot continue for much longer. It is something unparalleled in human history. The collapse when it happens will be sudden and devastating. What do we find? Mad interpretations of Revelation lead Christians to speculate about conspiracies between all manner of unlikely people and groups. Apparently the European Union is part of a global conspiracy with the Roman Catholic Church which will lead to the end of the world. Go back to the forties and it would have been the Third Reich, back to the early nineteenth century and it will have been Napoleon.
This sort of speculation has gone on for hundreds of years. The anticipated second coming has not proven any of this speculation true. Now, for the first time in history we have more than one way of wiping out the whole of humanity and many Christians cannot see it. In direct defiance of God's will, that we be stewards of the whole world, we are destroying it. Could it be that our faith is so weak, that it is used not to face up to the issues of the day, but to act as a distraction from them? Could it be that we are all so deeply implicated by what has gone wrong, that we cannot face our complicity, dare not even acknowledge it?
Christians are not alone. The growth of fundamentalisms in most faiths suggests that people of faith everywhere are unable to face up to the consequences of their way of life. Even the atheists have no answers. They burn petrol just as much as the rest of us. Their attacks on people of faith, seem just as much displacement activities as Christian attacks on people who break their sexual taboos.
In Britain the second most powerful postwar politician (Attlee was obviously the first) told us during the 1980s, there is no such thing as society. This did not cause the state we're now in but summarised it and somehow authenticated it. By the 1980s it was possible to perceive the breakdown of relationships in our communities, a pattern common to most Western countries. This allowed monetarism to take root in all our lives, individualistic competition for wealth. It has justified and accounts for this unprecedented pursuit of wealth at the expense of stewardship.
It is therefore, where we are at. We are like all previous civilisations victims of the social systems we have devised. As Christians, we know the answer, we must be born again. And those who are already born again must be born again again. Sorry about that.
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