Monday, May 22, 2017
549 - Our Guilted Age
Spirituality
Column No. 549
May 23, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
May 23, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Our Guilted Age
By
Bob Walters
Mark
Twain’s 1873 classic satire The Gilded
Age: A Tale for Today described 19th century America’s gold-leafed
wealth culture that masked great miseries of the poor.
In the 20th century we
saw figurative “gilded” or golden ages of radio, Hollywood and television, of the
Greatest Generation, of rock and roll, space travel and civil rights. In history are ancient golden ages of civilizations
like Greece, India, Islam and others.
Twain’s 1800s complaint still
resonates. The gilded American eras of
the 1900s provide mythical, urban-legend-infused, gold-leafed narratives of
inspiring heroic times of glamour, glory and hope. Greeks used “Golden Age” to refer to the
first and best of ancient Greece’s five declining cultural ages. Third-century India saw a golden age of math,
science, culture and religion. In the seventh-to-13th
centuries Islam molded an empire influencing science, economics and culture.
But notice: what Islam experienced
as its “Golden Age” the West experienced as its “Dark Ages.” Golden Ages, then, are not necessarily “gilt,”
“gilded,” gold-leafed or golden times from all perspectives, as Twain aptly observed
nearly 150 years ago.
Today I sense a 21st
century golden age of a different and troubling sort: the Golden Age of
Guilt. In these permissive times of
popular culture categorically denying the personal moral need to feel guilty
about immoral choices, today’s out-of-whack controlling social narrative is
designed to induce crippling guilt at the suggestion of moral truth. That is the tarnished, tyrannical,
suppressive and wholly non-golden jiu
jitsu of political correctness: truth is sin, and sin is merely opinion. Guilt is weaponized.
Shame and guilt once were nearly
exclusively the schematic domain of a fearful Christian religion. God and Jesus and the church stood for right
and wrong and if you screwed up, condemnation, damnation and hell were set to
rain down upon you. The problem with
that narrative is that guilt isn’t what Jesus is about: He proclaimed love,
mercy, forgiveness and salvation, yet even so the worldly church generally had
more luck establishing its power with shame and guilt. Society is a lot like that these days.
As the apostle Paul said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel” (Romans
1:16). Me neither. Nor am I ashamed or feel the least bit guilty
about understanding biblical truths, Christian morality and divine
relationship. My faith in Christ is
driven not by the intensity of my guilt but by the intensity of my love. Shame properly understood is life’s great
guardrail, encouraging us to think before doing stupid things. It protects what we love.
When I consider the Pharisees who tried
to silence Jesus, I find little difference in them from the disingenuous tyrants of political
correctness (PC) today. As the Pharisees
pounded God’s will out of Jewish law, today’s PC despots have pounded freedom
out of moral public expression. How? By denying moral truth and coercing spurious
guilt. PC’s influence is a function of
control, not love; it offers crippling shame, not freeing salvation.
So resist the urge to feel guilty for
knowing the truth. Make that your golden rule.
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