Love in a World Gone Mad

On tearing down altars

The early Christians were objects of contempt among their Greco-Roman neighbors. Increasingly, one finds that to be the case in the United States. While I was walking through the Miami airport on Monday, I saw a man wearing a hoodie on which was written “In Glock We Trust.” The same day I’d read two stories in the Christian Post, one about a Satanic Temple promoting abortion as part of its religious practice, and one about Gretchen Whitmer mocking the eucharist. Whitmer’s people have said the video was “misconstrued.” The people at Catholic Vote aren’t buying it. I don’t think I am, either. Consider what may be a more familiar example, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who satirize Roman Catholicism by dressing in sexualized parodies of nuns in order to advocate and raise money for LGBTQ+ causes. The Christian faith is an offense to them worthy of mockery. It impedes true righteousness, which they understand as unfettered sexual self-expression. These are but a few examples of relatively recent public derision of Christians.

We should not be surprised, though. The world has, after all, gone mad.

The madness of this world is no new development. It extends back through human history. We just have our particular brand of madness. I thought about calling this post “Not My Grandmother’s USA.” Such a title would be accurate. Things have changed quite a bit from the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless my grandmother’s USA had its own issues. It may not have had Satanic abortion cults (or at least most people didn’t know about them), but my grandmother was born within 50 years of the end of the Civil War. Her America experienced the lynching era, the Great Depression, the eugenics movement, two World Wars, internment camps, the Holocaust, Jim Crow, and the dropping of the atomic bomb. And while a higher percentage of the population identified as Christian, various kinds of cults and spiritualism had their place, particularly within the upper echelons of society. As Billy Joel put it, “The good ole days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”

They had their madness. We have ours.

Ultimate Concern

Paul Tillich described religion as one’s “ultimate concern.” What gives life meaning for us? What motivates our actions and gives shape to our attitudes? One writer describes Tillich’s understanding of religion as follows:

Every individual has some concern that is for him ultimate; therefore, everyone is “religious.” Individuals may have as their “gods” things like success, money, sex, justice, security, fame, political or physical power, intellectual or artistic achievement — anything can become a god for man because, Tillich felt, “what ever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him” (ST, I, p. 211). Likewise, groups have their concerns and therefore their gods. The life of groups, such as political parties, social clubs, business groups and churches, to name only some of the most obvious possibilities, depends upon and expresses some ultimate concern and, therefore, has a religious dimension.

For some people today, abortion is their ultimate concern. For others, it is sexual freedom. For others, it is freedom from governmental tyranny. One’s ultimate concern might be money, fame, or power. It might be an addiction such as gambling or alcohol. For a great many people today, their ultimate concern is obviously politics. These become “gods” for us. While we may not explicitly worship them in religious rituals, they are what we care about most. They occupy our thoughts and motivate our actions. To channel Augustine for a moment, we could say they are expressions of love gone awry. The supreme love that should go to the one true God has been directed toward objects unworthy of that love. The U.S. is increasingly polytheistic, sometimes explicitly when people adopt other major world religions or neo-pagan practices, but also through our devotion to these objects of misguided love.

Loving the wrong things

As Christian history so clearly shows, we in the church are not immune to the temptation to love wrongly. The madness of this world seeps into the church and grows like mold on its walls. The prosperity gospel is a present-day example of misguided love in the church. It is a faith that uses the outward symbols and expressions of Christianity, though the ultimate concern of its adherents is material gain. Faith is not a currency we spend in so that God will give us the things we love in this world. It is a response of love toward God, generated by God’s loving act of self-giving in Jesus Christ. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Loving wrongly, however, may be much more subtle than sending large checks to the ministry that promises us the most material return on investment. We love comfort. We love to be liked. We love respectability. I’ll admit these things appeal to me. I like to get along with people, have good relationships, and go through my days without being excoriated on Facebook. But our faith will at times require us to think, speak, and act in ways that make us and other people uncomfortable. In such circumstances, faithfulness requires perseverance. It requires trust that God’s promises are true, that Jesus really is Lord, that he has freed us for joyful obedience.

Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Telling the truth

A crucial aspect of Christian life in a world gone mad is truth-telling, which can be exceedingly difficult. Psalm 52 describes a “mighty one” who opposes God: “You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking the truth” (v. 2). It is not surprising that the mighty of this world are so susceptible to lies and misdirected love. They are surrounded by the temptations of money, power, and sex. When confronted by the truth, like Herod Antipas and his wife, Herodias (Mark 6:17-29), they won’t like it. Yet it is not just the powerful that face such temptations. We are all drawn to misdirected loves, to give our ultimate concern to things that do not ultimately matter.

It has always been the case that people love what is evil and prefer lies to the truth, and it has always been the calling of the church to speak truthfully and act in keeping with the truth in such circumstances. Early Christians told the truth by inviting people into the community of the redeemed. They proclaimed the good news of Jesus Christ amid a hostile Greco-Roman world. They lived the truth by rescuing exposed infants, caring for the poor, tending to the elderly and vulnerable, and exercising restraint over the desires of the flesh. They refused to return evil for evil. The God who came to them in Jesus Christ was their ultimate concern. They became like Christ because they loved Christ. They confronted the madness of sin with the clarity of God’s truth.

Speaking and living truthfully doesn’t mean we have to be jerks. Peter instructs us, “Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge” (1 Pet 2:12). In other words, the bad behavior of unbelievers is no excuse for you to behave badly. Conduct yourselves honorably. Do not return evil for evil. Follow the example of Christ. Love one another. You will be tempted to do otherwise, but the love of God compels us to live in ways that bring honor to Christ.

We live in a world of madness, where people build all manner of altars—to anything or anyone besides the one true God. Truth, however, sets us free. Followers of Christ are to tear down idolatrous altars by speaking clarity into confusion, truth into lies, sanity into madness.