Letter #54: The Tide of Battle Turns

Reinforcements are on their way.

Dad,

We can expect that your powerful essay on antisemitism will be met with the wisdom, wit, and generosity of spirit that overflow wherever two or three are gathered online. Nothing lowers the temperature like naming the work of Satan in the world, bringing those in his thrall rushing from the fetid sewage pits where they feed on their own mental excrement to sling some of it at you. This exceedingly hinged behavior clearly proves demons are not at work here. Absolutely not, and how dare you sir.

For me, though, the most provocative idea you put forward wasn’t that Jew-hatred springs from the soil of God-hatred. It was that “Today, we are living through another recession of Christian faith—though I suspect that tide is already turning.” The professional pessimists among the commentariat would find this hopelessly naïve.

But I think you’re right. Like practically every other institution, the church has seen many of its member organizations go loony over political nonsense or lose their way amid a thicket of regulatory disputes. Hardly surprising that people my age and younger find these trivial obsessions unhelpful in taking on the problems of the day, which are severe.

But you’ll notice that those who wander away from the pulpit aren’t ending up in comfortable secular cul-de-sacs. They’re enlisting in apocalyptic political cults or fantasizing about the advent of a digital paradise. Not comforting trends, by any means, but not atheistic either. This is a generation that craves cosmic triumph and transformation—a generation searching frantically for true religion.

And amid this confusion, there are a fair few voices speaking in defense—not so much of the church, but of its ancient faith. Scientists and historians of science like our friend Stephen Meyer. Leading intellectuals and political figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Even artists and oddballs like Russell Brand. There are now too many of these to discount as outliers, though too few yet to count as a movement.

In 1851, Matthew Arnold thought he could hear the “sea of faith” receding with a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” Then it seemed as if belief would sink quietly into irrelevance. But now the tide of religious passion is sweeping in again—treacherous like the swelling of the ocean, but also forceful and alive like the rushing of mighty waters.

And so maybe what we’re witnessing is not Satan’s forward march but his rearguard action—maybe he’s not rising in triumph so much as seething and gnashing his teeth to see a hundred years and more of comfortable unbelief coming to an end. Not that his fury will be any less ugly or less dangerous because of that. But the enemy of God never marshals his troops unless he feels like he has to—unless he sees the armies of the other side just over the horizon, thundering toward the hilltop to the unheard melody of mighty trumpets. Those that are with us may yet prove greater than those that are against.

Love,
Spencer