Decline in courage
Alexander Solzhenitsyn posited, "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today." That was at a Harvard University commencement speech in 1978. What he said then is all the more true today in our cultural tragicomedy. Perhaps that lack of courage is due to our own successes. Parents are afraid that their children will not have a comfortable life. Apart from thoughts about the world to come, all we think about is this life, its comforts and extensions.
Solzhenitsyn's prophecy was on full display in our response to Covid, as well as the otherwise inexplicable lack of push back against a society that promotes Drag Queen Story Hour and the mutilation of confused children. Communism presented an enemy, but we seem to have nothing to offer as a healthy and life-affirming alternative, and so we see Marxism enter in through critical theory. The Democrat party represents so much of what is anti-human, but the Republican party has no courage, nothing good for which to fight.
In World War II, Russians fought to the death to save their nation, Communist though it was. It was their family and history and culture for which they sacrificed. And yet recently a dozen or so Republican senators could not even bring themselves to say a word in defense of marriage or even demand protection for those who still have the courage to say that which they longer hold dear.
I thought of all of this while reading an op ed from the St. Louis Dispatch, which said that the Democrats should pass the debt ceiling before the congress is handed over to the Republican "toddlers." It is supposedly grown up to go into further debt. The problem may be solved, but for it there is no courage. Why? I think that in our aging and prosperous society, there is no desire other than to run out the clock. Where was the push back when the Covid police closed our schools? Or when the government took over our schools? Where was the Republican party when the Respect for Marriage act came close to the finish line? Those politicians who opposed it did mostly in silence, much in the same way as we invited Obergefell. The libertarian spirit offers no answer.
Indeed, there is no way out apart from courage, and that courage must be built on the notion that man has an inherent dignity, that our lives are more than money, that there is a life, indeed, a judgment to come. What drives courage is the recognition that there is more and that we live not simply for ourselves, but for our children and for the generations that will follow. When we look at our leaders, and I mean those supposedly on our own side, the likes of senators Young and Lummis, they all no longer need freedom of speech for they have silenced themselves, they no longer need the free exercise of religion for they stopped going to church or taking church seriously long ago. Apart from God, there is only a vacuum, and with that, a voluntary slavery to gods that are not gods. And in such a world, compliance takes the place of courage, and the soul of our society is made hollow.
The Rev. Dr. Peter Scaer is chairman and professor of Exegetical Theology and director of the M.A. program at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Ind.
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