The ever-slimmer piece of ground the pilgrim finds for planting his or her feet

Our societal brittleness now extends to what's left of its Christian component

My choice of the name Precipice for this site was one of those moments of inspiration in which a creation comes into being and it’s only later that the creator fully understands the implications of what he’s brought into being. It just sounded and looked so ideal as I was setting this up that I knew to go with it. I had some inkling of what I meant; for years, in newspaper opinion columns, at my blog Late in the Day (the name of which came about under similar circumstances), and in other venues in which I’ve opined, I’d employed the image of a precipice to describe how precariously our civilization is situated.

Even though we are collectively headed toward a precipice, however, I think in the final moments before oblivion we’ll each find ourselves with our toes over its edge individually. There’s no room for anyone but you on your precipice.

The fissures that spread daily throughout the civilizational ground beneath our feet are just about at the point of leaving each of us teetering on our own desperately small pieces of real estate. The distance is getting too great for you to reach out to a fellow inhabitant of Western civilization for mutual stabilization, much less for either of you to pull the other onto his or her ever-shrinking piece of solid ground.

The broad-broad brush enumeration of our divisions is hopelessly outdated. It’s no longer just about supposedly privileged demographics keeping all others under its thumb. It’s not about fat cats versus the poor or “working people.” It’s not about men and women, or racial dynamics, or heterosexuals and people with unorthodox sex lives.

On the left side of each of these dichotomies alone, fissures abound. The “fat cat” class is made up of billionaires who advocate for confiscatory taxation rates and corporate executives who are willing to put a damper on their firms’ profitability in order to implement “sustainability” measures. Women may have organized the pussy-hat march, but the March for Life, now in its 47th year, is principally organized and attended by women. There’s palpable lesbian resentment against what transgenderism has done to the cause of mainstreaming homosexuality - not only for the lecherous males who can infiltrate women’s locker rooms, but for the more basic blurring of gender lines in the name of “fluidity” and “questioning.” Regarding racial dynamics, it’s telling that the coming split within the United Methodist Church - over homosexuality - puts African bishops and congregants on the side of traditionalist American Methodists. The Coalition of African American Pastors has been at the front of the defense of Biblical understanding of human sexuality since the dustup surrounding state legislatures’ enacting of religious freedom laws in the decade just concluded.

Those pastors stand on narrow ground indeed, as all Christians do. The Church has picked a dandy time to fracture, given the now-thoroughly-secularized culture’s determination to marginalize it. I put it this way at a LITD post about the UMC split:

This development joins other fissures within twenty-first century American Christianity - the Trumpist vs. non-Trumpist split within evangelicalism, the struggle of the Catholic Church to surmount the sex-abuse scandal -  at a time when the overall faith is in a particularly vulnerable position. Our society becomes less Christian by the day. 

And those other rifts remain raw. In particular, the dustup engendered by the Christianity Today editorial calling for Trump’s removal continues to reverberate. The argument that Trump-supporting evangelicals are fully aware of his flaws and pray for his spiritual maturation as well as applaud for his laudable policy moves is superficially compelling, but its plausibility withers in the face of the roaring indulgence the Very Stable Genius got at his rally at King Jesus Ministry in Miami of one of his most egregious character flaws: his establishing of himself as a kind of savior:

During Trump’s speech at El Rey Jesus, he said he’s been the most supportive president for Christians.

Christians “have never had a greater champion — not even close — than you have in the White House right now. Look at the record,” he said. “We’ve done things that nobody thought was possible. We’re not only defending our constitutional rights, we’re also defending religion itself, which is under siege.”

He said his administration has stood up to the pro-abortion lobby, defended the free speech rights of Christians on college campuses and promoted prayer in schools. He also claimed he “got rid” of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations such as churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates, to support the religious community.

Nice stuff, Mr. President, but what about you? The closest you came to saying anything about the real practice of faith at that rally was asserting that Americans worship God, not government. Beyond that, there’s nothing in your remarks that indicates that you have moved beyond your 2015 “I’m-not-sure-I’ve-ever-asked-for-God’s-forgiveness” observation. It looks like you still view everything through a transactional lens. It looks like your real message to that Miami crowd was “Never mind what’s going on in my heart and soul. Look what I’ve done for you on the policy level. I fight the worldly forces besieging you people. Now, turn out in November and vote for me.”

And the crowd eats it up.

That’s desperation, plain and simple. It’s opting to cast one’s lot with an incoherent charlatan who champions your cause even though his motivation is self-glorification, just because he can give you a little more breathing room in this temporal realm. That suffices in the quest for a leader to a lot of Christians these days.

If one turns one’s gaze from this spectacle and looks leftward, the notion of absolute truth gets downright scuttled, the process being couched in gauzy nods to “mystery” (juxtaposed against “absolute certainty”) and distinctions between “received interpretations of Scripture” and its “overarching narrative,” and odd assertions that Christians are tempted to “worship” the Bible rather than Jesus Christ. Um, what we know of Jesus Christ comes from the Bible. It’s all a sneaky way of insinuating relativism into the situation. It’s a way of saying that the Bible is a nice overall road map, but that its authority is tempered by our immediate sense of what appears fair and compassionate. And this argument comes from a Baptist publication.

What one sees on the left and right have a relationship of mutual reinforcement. Those on the left make “healing our divisions” the overarching aim, at the expense of the difficult aspects of sound doctrine, and those on the right cling to a supposed champion because they feel surrounded by apostates of all stripes.

Just about the time one thinks one has found fellow Christians with whom to join hands in the quest for solid ground, further fissures leaving each individual standing on an ever-shrinking sliver of terrain appear.

Maybe there’s a divine order to this increasingly perilous crackup. Each of us stands on a smaller piece of ground, until there’s no room for anyone but the individual human being’s physical form, occupying so many square feet of space, and the spirit that looms ready to enter the space as well, as soon as the person says yes.

Ultimately, we each work out our salvation as individuals, and standing alone on that sliver, with no support from fellow sinners or the institutions they’ve built, completely dependent on spirit’s grace, may be exactly where we’re supposed to find ourselves.