Will the Western World Die? Dave Elliot Originally published in Issue XI of Vulgata, 2003.  Painting by Paul Carrick

On a recent evening I was walking from the subway to my home in North York when I noticed, under one of those ugly orange street lights that choke out the stars, a new sign plastered to city garbage cans: DIVERSITY OUR STRENGTH.  Well that says it all, I thought.  If there is anything that I have learned about this country from being born, bred, and educated here, if there is anything that I have retained from the inarticulate garble of the media right up to the brilliant whimsy of University professors, it is that the garbage can was right.  It had defined Canadian culture from root to tip.  Now don't mistake; my reaction wasn't simply that of a hardened cynic's to spontaneous bursts of pep.  In fact, I am quite convinced that diversity in itself is food for praise because it is God's art.  Why else would we have a universe filled with everything from red dwarf stars to little green moss, jagged mountains to babbling brooks, giant elephants to downy eaglets, and  - best and worst of all - man; than that each thing, being other than God, should yet reflect some aspect of him, showing forth and communicating his glory?  "Diversity" in this sense is synonymous with "creation", which (we have it on good authority) is "very good".  But today we mean something very different by the word.  It, like the loaded words "liberal" or "conservative" in both Church and State ideologies, functions as a catchword concealing an agenda behind the puckered lips of a euphemism.  To use the above example: we are all acutely aware that to make a social or religious liberal grimace, we have only to mention the word "conservative".  This is because, far from seeing the term (linguistically) as referring to "conservation of the good", they understand it (ideologically) as implying a draconian scheme of patriarchy, moralizing, and bureaucracy.  The "nice spin" that its proponents put on it they simply dismiss as a thin coat of honey on the anti-progress sword.  Conversely, one need only mention the word "liberal" to a social or religious conservative to induce paroxysms of near-despair.  The benign connotations of "liberty" or "liberate" are quickly lost on them in their zeal to burst what they see as a morally anarchic worldview that would reduce us to the standards of a civilization of hyenas.  My point here is that language is always the first casualty of partisanship.  Just as morticians cosmeticize the dead to make people forget that they are dead, ideologues euphemize bad philosophies to make people forget that they are bad.  It happened when "liberal" ceased to mean "humanitarian" and instead came to mean "secular".  Now we see it happening with "diversity", Canada's great boast.  Once a descriptive term referring to Creation's beauty, it has been turned into the morally permissive "anything goes".  The former Helen of Troy has been made into a Frankenstein's bride, her stark beauty ruined by the worst sophistry.  And already the Greeks are reeling.

What does this mean in practice, and what does that have to do with the salient problems of the Western world?  I believe it is this: there is a new paganism in town, quite unlike the old.  Ancient paganism was a virgin not yet betrothed to the living God.  But modern paganism is a divorcee who has left him at the altar.  There is therefore a good deal of bad blood between the modern secular West and the Christian religion from which it has been divorced (as there is bad blood in any divorce).  And this makes complete sense.  The lapsed Catholic is usually the worst anti-Catholic.  The apostate is most often the iconoclast.  Now move this from the micro level of individual believers to the macro level of Western civilization as a whole - a civilization once thoroughly Catholic - and we see why the "new paganism" is so out of temper with Christianity.  It is lapsed Catholic at heart.   Add to this angst the plurality of cultures (each bringing their own religions) in countries like Canada due to mass immigration, and the proliferation of "alternative lifestyles" (such as homosexuality) due to gender schizophrenia and the sex craze, and the prospects for Christianity in the West don't appear very auspicious.  Having sown the wind, we are poised to reap the whirlwind.  And that rude eruption is beginning to look like this: the current regime of politicians, media-men, and so-called "experts" are reacting to the morass of conflicting worldviews by establishing a trenchantly secular ethic which abjures religion wherever it is found.  (Just remember the absurd spectacle last year when the Christmas Tree at Toronto's City Hall was re-named the "Holiday Tree".)  Being also clever, they have done this in the name of religion itself.  Their line of reasoning seems to go like this: "Religious people are unpredictable fanatics who will likely all kill each other in the name of Christ or Allah or whoever if we let them make a public showing of their faith.  Therefore, to keep the peace, we must not promote any one religion, but rather sing panegyrics to them all.  We must say that they are all equal, but keep them all under lock and key, and then name the whole thing 'diversity'.  Since public displays of religion are 'divisive', in practice they must be abolished.  Heaven only knows how much the average Hindu or Jew or Buddhist or Muslim might feel excluded by the sight of a Nativity Scene or feel oppressed by the singing of Silent Night.  This expurgation will leave us with a common ethos of secular humanism which guts religion of its power in practice while preening itself for promoting it in theory.  Our platitude will be that all colours are of equal value.  We shall celebrate the fact by painting the world grey.  All in the name of diversity, of course."

This is not to say that religious people are subject to the kind of pseudo-Marxist rot found in the anti-God weeklies.  Christians are not yet being sent to "Institutes for the Re-education of the Ideologically Unfit".  We are being pacified with the nice-sounding language of pseudo-ecumenical slush and then sent quietly packing "into that good night”.  That is why the acoustically pleasing litany of euphemisms, such as "multiculturalism, tolerance, pluralism, diversity, inclusiveness" etc. which defines the modern liberal democracy is so dangerous.  In practice such terms are not used as adjectives giving us the recipe for a tolerant utopia, but rather as incantations that lull us into swallowing secularism with a smile.  The juicy worm dangles, the ecclesiastical fish bites, and the barbed hook of the world snares him.  This is not to sire another conspiracy theory, by any means.  Too many forests have been chopped down already to make paper for those.  It is simply to admit what even the most cursory glance at our newspapers will reveal: that the state religion of Canada is secularism, and that "diversity" (or multiculturalism) is both the excuse for it and the pretty face painted on it.  Now what is puzzling about all this isn't just that an anti-religious agenda has tried to make itself go down sweet.  That's been happening ever since the Devil promised Christ all the nations if only he would rubbish the First Commandment.  What is really baffling here is this country's combination of an aggressively secular agenda with its pretended maternal embrace toward all religions.  It is as if I had prepared a great banquet and sent out invitations written in gold ink to all my neighbours only to lock the doors when the big day came to make sure nobody got in.  The only stupider thing would then be if everyone thanked me later on for having kindly inviting them.  If this last bit sounds ridiculous, then let me venture to suggest that every time a religious person plays the cheerleader for the "values" of "diversity, tolerance, pluralism" etc., they are doing the exact same thing.

But perhaps it is too generic to say that secularism is the state religion.  After all, it's a broad term, encompassing every ideology that puts a barbwire round the soul of man and plants a sign saying to God "Keep Out".  Is there not a more nuanced definition for our particular variety of apostasy?  Yes.  We find it on every billboard advertisement, every TV  commercial, every movie from Hollywood, every song on our radios, and every book crowding the aisles.  The proof that we've made it into our God is found in the fact that it's what sells everything, as if before it rational animals were reduced to helpless jellies.  Pubescent children in schoolyards have only to refer to it as "It" to get knowing nods all round.  It is referred to by Albert Camus when he says that for future historians a single line will suffice to describe twentieth century man: "He fornicated and read the newspapers".  It is encapsulated by George Orwell in his 1984 when the hero who has just "slept" (a poor euphemism, that!) with the heroine asks her: "You like doing this?  I don't simply mean me; I mean the thing in itself."  "I adore it" she replies, to his immense satisfaction.  "It", of course, is sex divorced from love; the soaring and iridescent god of the Godless.  "Drink the water forget the glass" is the current attitude to sex.  We call it "casual", but that is only a half-truth.  Sex is casual now in that it is used as a mere sense-toy or pressure-relief valve devoid of all fidelity and reduced in meaning to the level of a sneeze.  But it is solemn, terribly solemn in that it has taken on all the political, economic, literary, musical, and artistic trappings of an all-pervading cult.  And if Teilhard de Chardin was right, that "Religion is the essence of culture, and culture is the dress of religion", then this would make complete sense.  Turn sex into your "religion" and you turn culture into a religion of sex.  Like every religion, this one has a form of sacrifice to its "God" (though we don’t like to speak of it): the sacrifice of one's partner through the spread of STD's, and the sacrifice of one's children through the use of abortion.  Perhaps that is the ultimate proof of sex's apotheosis: our willingness to watch people die rather than restrict its use.  When the true God goes, the false gods come, and false gods always demand blood sacrifice.  None of this is to suggest that sex is bad.  The very fact that it is so fierce a demon when it is misused implies that it must be all the more luminous an angel when it is properly used. Corruptio pessima est, the medievals used to say.  "The worst things are the best things made bad".  And I wholeheartedly agree.  So I leave aside any holistic apologia for beneficent sexuality - Genesis 1 and John Paul's theology of the body should suffice for that - and move on to how we got into this bind and what we should do about it.

The clue is to be found in the pages of St. Thomas Aquinas.  In giving advice on how to be chaste, the Angelic Doctor says that we should focus not so much on being chaste as on being humble if we want to be chaste.  This is because he sees lust as being the result of pride rather than of animality.  The idea is that just as a wise doctor may allow a patient to contract a lesser malady in order to combat a greater illness (such as when a fever is permitted in order to burn off a virus), so God lets the soul all raw and cancerous with pride fall into lust to cure it of pride.  There it will be humbled: either perforce; through shame, or willingly; by God's grace.  Hence we'll be made aware of the secret but greater sin of pride through the more evidently shameful one of lust.  Lust "smokes" pride out of the woodwork.  If successful, the soul will emerge humbled and dependent on God again.  Now if we move Aquinas' argument from the individual to the corporate level, then I think we will understand why society has become (if I may coin the ugly word) a Pornotopia.  It is because we have a civilization that is diabolically proud.  And because we refuse to humble ourselves before God, it is necessary that we should lose the taste and delight in the things of God, and therefore, since we cannot live without joy, should give ourselves wholly to lesser joys, especially those of the flesh.  This is where the new paganism that is mopping the floor with Christians seems to come from.  Honest pagans like Aldous Huxley will admit this.  "We resisted Christianity and we rejected it" he wrote of his generation, "because we wanted our sexual freedom".  Dishonest pagans like the Anglican Bishop Spong will actually try to disguise this religion of sex as something that is Christian, re-writing Thou shalt nots with Do what thou wilts - cheerily announcing the marriage of Moloch and Yahweh.  At this point the question might well be asked: what happens to a society fallen into lust through pride which subsequently refuses to humble itself?  I believe this question is quite relevant, since in my opinion it applies not to the mists of futurity, but to the wildly impenitent now.

With apocalyptic musings I don't at all want to involve myself.  We all know, from our reading of the Old Testament, that when the Israelites gave themselves to false idols, God would send in the Babylonians or whoever to give them a fierce drumming and then pack them off into exile until the lot of them repented.  The refrain of the Old Testament is PROSPERITY-EXILE-REPENTANCE-RESTORATION over and over again.  But the reason why we shouldn't exhaust the grey matter in our brains over this is because it isn't our business - it's God's.  Suffering is indeed a powerful way of producing repentance.  There have probably been more deathbed conversions than pulpit conversions.  But that is all God’s prerogative.  "God shouts to us in our pains" C.S. Lewis writes: "Suffering is His megaphone to rouse a deafened world".  In his The Silver Chair we find a good illustration of this.  There the child-heroes face the Dark Queen of the Underworld and are lulled into mindless euphoria by a sweet-smelling incense poured onto the fire.  It is only when their doughty guide Puddleglum gets them all to stamp their feet on the coals that the spell is broken.  The burning of their feet leads to a clearing of their heads.  It isn’t a weapon, potion or argument that saves them; it’s pain.  And sometimes it is the same way with us.  Viewed through that lens, it is possible to see so many of our scrapes and arrows as really being "The shade of His hand outstretched caressingly".  Of course, the weakness of this awareness is that there is very little we can do about it.  We are never to be torturers: the celestial surgeon alone knows when the wound cries out for the knife.  But we should be aware of this to help make sense of the next hurricane or cancer that comes along.  Painful sense, of course, but rather that than meaningless nonsense.

There is one other way I know of that individuals and societies in a state of deep impenitence are restored to God, and that is sanctity.  Of course, sensitive souls may be converted by a sunset or by a book, but for the rebelliously proud (and I am arguing that our civilization has reached that state) only saints will do.  That may seem an unfortunate prerequisite if, like me, you are nothing like a saint.  I know how vexing it is to go at it with an atheist hammer and tongs all night about religion without making any progress, only to have the same person light up like a Christmas Tree the day after when a sincerer Christian gently assures them "I'll pray for you".  Thomas Merton said that it was only because of the monks living and praying and giving glory to God that the world didn't slide into the abyss, and Mikhail Gorbachev was once heard to let slip: "Ten Francises of Assisi and we should have saved Russia".  Both of them were right.  But if we just settle into the idea that angry letters to editors, the picketing of parliament, or the voting in of conservative parties will save society, then I am afraid that what remains of Christianity in the West will vanish like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.  The Church's answer to secularism isn't just more language loud with fight.  The Church's irrefutable answer is her saints.  Of course, it would be plain nonsense if I, who am anything but a saint, started telling people to go and become saints.  You can't give what you don't have, and you can't tell someone how to get to a place you've never been to yourself.  But I don't mean this so much as an exhortation to sanctity as a bird’s eye view of the secular debacle and as a wake-up call that the lesser means we tend to put stock in will not prevail here.  Sanctity or suffering are the only alternatives to corruption now.  The halo or the horsewhip are the last defenses against our present stupor.