Creeping fundamentalism

It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy. … Perhaps sacrifice in the name of a higher good—God, Marx, freedom or whatever the good of the moment happens to be—is admirable only as long as you support the cause. Or perhaps, in the absence of absolutes, we must judge beliefs not by their inherent righteousness but by their visible consequences. —David Samuels, New York Times

Terry Mattingly is a journalist and writer who covers the “religion beat”. One of the things he does that I find interesting is to examine the slant that is given to religion coverage in modern media. The above quote tells us a lot about the (usually) unspoken biases against faith that drive the editorial boards and newsrooms of most of our media.

Terry’s blog makes great reading. Two recent discussions can be found by going to Creeping Fundamentalism: IV or to Creeping Fundamentalism: V.

What many of us fail to realize is that the world view of many in our post-modern culture has shifted radically, especially among the intellectual elites of the world. There is no truth, there are no absolutes, and Christianity is not only anti-intellectual, but it has been so thoroughly repudiated by modern scholarship as to be laughable.

And yet, in an age that openly scorns first-century faith, the Holy Spirit is still drawing men and women to the heart of God. Don’t lose heart.