“The blues,” said the great bluesman Robert Johnson, “is a low-down achin' heart disease, like consumption, killing me by degrees.” Often what kills comes not with dramatic flair or excessive violence, but the slow-burn death described by Johnson.
There have been many passionate attacks on traditional, religious ways of life in America—assaults on Christian adoption and foster care agencies, attempts to disqualify Christians from public service because of their beliefsand affiliations, litigation against Christian businesses. Do these portend even more aggressive, possibly violent political efforts akin to what Catholic France suffered in 1789 or what Orthodox Russia underwent in 1919? Or will the destruction of what little remains of Christian culture in the West appear as a more seamless, natural transition?
Recently I visited the home of a close friend who'd just had his first child. I've known this friend for a long time—he was in my First Holy Communion class almost 30 years ago. By just about any measure, he is a good man: conscientious, hard-working, and doggedly loyal to family and friends. He's also an Irish-American Catholic who was once an altar boy and attended Mass throughout high school. Yet like many in our generation, he later strayed from the Church. Not that he bears any substantive antagonism towards it; he simply stopped going to Mass. So when I asked him whether he was planning on baptizing his son, it wasn't particularly surprising to see him shrug his shoulders and answer, “I'm not sure.”
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