We Have Met the Enemy

And he is us

Pastors, why can’t you convince people to hold to the sexual ethic that your churches have been teaching for decades? How in the world has evangelical support for same sex marriage risen above fifty percent among young adults, when a trademark belief of evangelicalism is a rejection of same-sex relationships?

I can only hazard a guess that culture plays a bigger role in the lives of most Americans than religion. (I say this as a pastor who is becoming painfully aware of his limited amount of influence, by the way). Why aren’t religious leaders able to convince people to stick with the clear beliefs of their church tradition?

Malachi 3:6 states, “For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore, you sons of Jacob are not consumed.” So why does humanity’s view of God shift so quickly?

From: Ryan Burge, Liberals Have Won the Culture War

St John Chrysostom reminds me that no one can hurt me unless I first hurt myself:

…when a man does not injure himself, he cannot possibly be hurt by another: for I will not cease harping constantly upon this saying. For if captivity, and bondage, and loneliness and loss of country and all kindred and death, and burning, and a great army and a savage tyrant could not do any damage to the innate virtue of the three children captives, bondmen, strangers though they were in a foreign land, but the enemy's assault became to them rather the occasion of greater confidence: what shall be able to harm the temperate man? There is nothing, even should he have the whole world in arms against him. But, some one may say, in their case God stood beside them, and plucked them out of the flame. Certainly He did; and if you will play your part to the best of your power, the help which God supplies will assuredly follow.

Or, as the Pogo tells us in the defunct eponymous comic strip:

Tempting as though it is both the philosopher of the Okefenokee Swamp and the Golden Mouth, emphasizes that while circumstances are often not under my control, my response is. Chrysostom, of course, goes rather further and reminds me that even if all things are not good in Christ “all things work together for the good” (see Romans 8:28).

Looking at the situation of the Orthodox Church in the United States, the West more broadly as well as in traditional Orthodox lands, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that (especially in America) we have largely wasted the good things God has bestowed on us. As a college chaplain, I see this on a regular basis.

Families that have invested a great deal of time and energy in their children’s secular education have invested almost nothing in their spiritual formation. Students who can do advanced mathematics and who excel in the hard sciences are often woefully ignorant of Scripture and the teaching of the Church—especially the Church’s moral tradition. Children who are daily challenged by their teachers to be tolerant of others, rarely (if ever) hear an equally strong challenge to embrace the life of Christian virtue.

But tolerance (as with the other virtues) is a part of a larger moral tapestry. No one thread is sufficient. Remove that thread and both it and the tapestry unravel. And so, Pogo.

When I look around at the growing acceptance of moral teachings contrary to the Gospel, I hear Pogo’s words: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”