Situational Awareness in the New Year
Walk with Wisdom in the Strange New Land
As we stand before the uncharted terrain of another year, it is beneficial to exercise situational awareness, as we say in the military. This involves being aware of what lies behind and around before moving into the open field before us. It is only then that we can devise a strategy that is both wise and practical. Indeed, situational awareness provides an opportunity for success in whatever endeavor lies before us. At this time in our existence, it may very well be the very continuation of Western civilization.
A few years ago, I would have considered such a comment as unnecessarily hyperbolic and even slightly conspiratorial. However, our situation today is fraught with incredible danger, not only from external threats and the possibility of an interconnected global conflict but also from heightened internal dangers. I refer not only to the physical threats heightened by an open Southern border, unwise economic policies, and self-defeating energy policies. These contribute to a grave situation, perhaps best summed up as a metastasized, cancerous governmental intrusiveness that has turned Orwellian prophecies into a chilling reality.
More so, I refer to the threat to the very soul of our country – to our people, all 350 million of us. We are now subject to soul-searing fires flaring in the moral and spiritual realms of our existence. The secular age, aptly named by Professor Charles Taylor, is marked by what he calls “excarnation.” At Christmas, we celebrated the incarnation – the coming of God in the flesh. But in a philosophy of excarnation, there is a withdrawing – or a denying – of God by men, leaving us in the condition T.S. Eliot called “hollow men.”
This moral philosophy seems to promise personal liberation from the perceived narrow constraints of God. The rejection of these constraints has led to willful ignorance of evident truths, such as the existence of two sexes, male and female, and the definition of marriage as a biological, physiological, and spiritual union between a man and a woman, a concept with 6,000 years of precedence.
Yet, moral degradation is not confined to issues like marriage or the right to life of the unborn. It extends to the dignity of work, the rule of law, and a commitment to excellence in all things for the glory of God, inevitably compromised by denying God and corrupting our consciences. The removal of divine retainers is perilously equivalent to a deep-sea diver throwing off his oxygen equipment so he can swim and explore more freely. In a word, excarnation is suicidal.
As we consider our path forward, we must recognize the dangers of our current situation. However, there is great hope inherent in our present circumstances. As English historian Paul Johnson wrote, and even agnostic historians like the late Perry Miller of Harvard observed, the American spirit continues to be shaped by the Godward vision of those who came before us, including the Pilgrims of New England and the missionary-minded settlers of Jamestown and Roanoke Island. This self-awareness of our nation’s covenant with God, originally a Christian and Reformed-Protestant ideal, now with all faiths enfolded, is the true “American dream.” This national ethos has often led us, in invariably difficult times, to turn to God and experience large-scale spiritual renewal. The Great Awakening before the American Revolutionary War and during the Civil War are prime examples of this phenomenon, serving as significant factors in fostering a renewed national spirit just when we needed it most.
Thus, as we head into 2024, surveying the land before us with an awareness that we carry a storehouse of fertile seeds for good, inherited from our forebears, we also have the vestiges of a rich Western civilization. We have the opportunity to drink from the deep wells dug by our fathers. Parents and teachers can train up a generation in scripture, in the reading of the great books, and in the study of great ideas that created a civilization bringing blessings to people in every station of life — material blessings, human flourishing, and a desire for others to know these God-given rights and the goodness they bring.
Technology that has often become a contaminated pipeline of noxious ideas, can be deployed to bring the Great Books to every class, every homeschool. As public intellectuals such as British classicist Tom Holland have proven, the vestiges of the Judeo-Christian mind are still present. As we put the Bible in our rucksack, add copies of Milton, John Locke, Samuel Rutherford, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, John Steinbeck, and Jonathan Edwards. And put in some copies of Churchill, Reagan, Thatcher, Billy Graham, Frances Schaffer, and Pope John Paul II.
So, yes, there is danger lurking beside us. But there is also a magnificent legacy of truth that brings liberty all around us. This is the freedom Jesus spoke of when he said,
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32).
This is our situation as we look out over the unplowed pasture land and forest. Walk with God and walk with an optimism born of the cross and the empty tomb.