A “generational” winter storm and the solidarity of our souls

If you happen to live in the geographical half of the country that was not victimized by a “devastating dose of winter weather” over the weekend, please permit me to reflect on the experience on behalf of the half of the country that was.

• Trees exploded in Minnesota.
• In the coldest areas, people were warned that they could incur frostbite in five minutes.
• President Trump approved twelve federal emergency declarations yesterday.
• Nearly 820,000 are without power this morning.
• More than twelve thousand flights were canceled yesterday.
• Railroad operations were disrupted.
• Twenty-three states and Washington, DC, declared a state of emergency.
• A meteorologist warned that much of the country would be “entombed” in ice.
• A writer in Austin wrote, “If I were to run, where would I run to? The cold is everywhere, all the way up to New York City.”

His complaint points to the point I’d like us to consider today.

Why YouTube is the most popular TV platform

A “generational storm” like this is one of the few things that unites us with other people. I got a phone call Friday afternoon from a friend in Pennsylvania who was expecting thirteen inches of snow over the weekend. Like us in Texas, she assumed her kids would not be going to school on Monday.

Apart from a storm system that spanned forty states stretching from Arizona to Maine, what else unites us these days?

Media has shifted hard to the left and right as paywalls replaced advertising revenues, causing outlets to cater to “passionate subscribers who want their worldview reinforced, not marginal readers.” The United Nations no longer unites the nations. The World Health Organization no longer encompasses the world.

Our political polarization has reached an all-time high. From abortion to same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ideology to euthanasia, a record-high 80 percent of us agree that we are “greatly divided when it comes to the most important values.”

In an insightful Wall Street Journal article, Ben Fritz notes that “for most of the twentieth century, pop culture was the glue that held the US together.” He reports that an estimated 200 million tickets were sold for Gone With the Wind when the US population was 130 million. In 1983, more than 100 million people watched the finale of M*A*S*H.

From the 1940s through the 1990s, three TV networks and seven movie studios decided everything we watched, while five or six record labels determined what we heard. Nearly everyone saw Jaws and Star Wars, Jurassic Park and the Harry Potter and Marvel series, or so it seemed.

Then came the internet, enabling everyone to make and stream video content, and handheld screens on which to watch it. YouTube is now the most popular television platform. As Fritz notes, this is “not because it has the hottest handful of shows, but because there’s something on it for everyone, no matter how mainstream or obscure.”

A photo of my father and his father

Disasters and crises can still unite us. If you’re old enough to remember 9/11, you also remember what it felt like to crowd into churches along with people who were there for the first time, to watch the president of the United States throw out the first pitch at a New York Yankees game, and to grieve with hundreds of millions of fellow Americans in the face of such horrific tragedy.

Think back to the COVID-19 pandemic and, again, the solidarity we all felt. When my wife and I ordered groceries online, drove our car to the store, and opened the back hatch so the masked store employee could put our food inside, we thanked them with a level of heartfelt gratitude I had not felt for a grocery store employee before.

My parents had similar stories about surviving Pearl Harbor and World War II, and my grandfather about serving in Europe during World War I. My brother recently sent me a photograph of our father in his war uniform, standing next to his father, both of them with prideful smiles I seldom remember seeing from either.

But the exceptions prove the rule. For people made in God’s image and thus for relationship, the atomizing fragmentation of our secularized society is devastating. The US Surgeon General reported that our “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” directly impacts cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, infectious diseases, depression and anxiety, suicidality, and self-harm.

If it takes a storm that endangers thirty-five states to unite us, what is our future as a “United” States of America?

The power of “a love genuinely lived”

Behind all that divides us, there is a commonality waiting to answer my question. St. Augustine spoke for us all when he prayed, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee” (Confessions 1.1.1).

Thirteen very disparate colonies in the New World became a united nation only after the First Great Awakening drew them closer to God and therefore to each other, then an existential war for independence forged their national cohesion. The reason subsequent national crises, such as world wars, terrorist attacks, and pandemics, have not sustained the unity they sparked is that they were not preceded by such a transforming spiritual movement.

Our first president was therefore right to identify “religion and morality” as “indispensable supports” to “political prosperity.” Gen. Washington’s assertion makes sense: If we are created and intended to love our Lord and our neighbor as our highest purpose and aspiration (Mark 12:30–31), we will find unity and cohesion in doing both.

I cannot imagine that the weather crisis gripping much of our country will produce a national solidarity that endures once the ice and snow have melted. But I can respond to the personal finitude and mortality this storm revealed by seeking greater intimacy with the Lord who still calms stormy seas. And I can renew my commitment to loving my neighbor by praying earnestly for spiritual awakening to transform my nation and then by sharing my Father’s love with those I meet today.

In Meditations on the Cross, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed:

The world is overcome not through destruction, but through reconciliation. Not ideals, nor programs, nor conscience, nor duty, nor responsibility, nor virtue, but only God’s perfect love can encounter reality and overcome it. Nor is it some universal ideal of love, but rather the love of God in Jesus Christ, a love genuinely lived, that does this.

How “genuinely” will you live such love today?

Quote for the day:

“The real love of God does not consist in tear shedding, nor in that sweetness and tenderness for which we often long just because they console us, but in serving God by serving those around us in justice, fortitude of soul, and humility.” —Teresa of Avila (1515–82)

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Denison Forum

Where I live, we are less than twenty-four hours from a major ice storm that is predicted to shut down our area for days. Roads will become impassible; power lines may come down. Everyone is stocking up on food and preparing for the worst. Since most of us remember the “Great Texas Freeze” of 2021, we’re reliving the pain of those terrible days in advance.

Our situation is by no means unique: this system could end up affecting more than two hundred million people in the US.

It’s an odd thing, really, our collective impotence in the face of nature. You and I live in the most technologically advanced age in human history. The slab of glass in my pocket can access the world’s store of information gathered across human history; these words I am typing on my laptop will soon be transmitted to hundreds of thousands of people in every nation on earth. My home is more climate-controlled and electronically equipped than any home I have ever owned.

And yet a winter storm I can neither forestall nor shorten will dominate my life for the next few days.

Is my religion a placebo effect?

Think how people felt in earlier eras, when there were no sophisticated meteorological instruments to predict the weather and no electricity to light and heat their homes. No wonder every civilization known to history has worshiped some type of deity or deities.

When you’re facing forces you cannot defeat, it only makes sense to call for help from forces greater than yourself. If worshiping a god of rain and storms can protect you and your family from the weather, this becomes a “why not?” proposition. If such worship seems to correlate over time with better outcomes, you’ll likely codify your religious beliefs into religious practices.

I have personally seen some of the altars built by Greeks and Romans across their empires to their pantheons of gods. I’ve met tribal people in Southeast Asia who worship the elemental spirits they believe inhabit and control their natural environment.

And I prayed this morning to my God, asking him not only to guide what I am writing today but to protect my family as the ice storm approaches our area.

Recent literature has documented the positive outcomes from religious practices for mental health, social stability, and overall wellness. But these outcomes are natural, not supernatural. They can be seen as a kind of placebo effect; the consequences of wish fulfillment and practices that produce benefits by virtue of the activities themselves rather than the supposed deities being worshiped.

And there’s the matter of negative outcomes. It would be one thing if religious practices always led to positive results. If people were healed every time we prayed for healing or storms were diminished every time we asked God for such protection, a skeptic would be more likely to believe that an actual God was at work. But I have prayed for healing that did not come and protection that never arrived. So have you.

The fact that I believe in Jesus doesn’t prove Christianity to be true any more than a Muslim’s or a Hindu’s beliefs persuade me to adopt Islam or Hinduism.

So I’ll continue to pray for divine protection as the ice storm approaches, but with the knowledge that my prayers may not be answered as I wish and that many in our post-Christian culture see my religious beliefs as outdated superstition akin to someone praying to Zeus.

Proving you should have children

At this point, my career-long study of Christian apologetics can be helpful. I can cite remarkable evidence from history, archaeology, science, and logic for the existence of God, the veracity of Scripture, the historical existence and resurrection of Jesus, and the continuing activity of the Creator in his creation.

But a post-truth culture will likely listen to all of that and retort, “That’s just your truth.” If all truth is personal and subjective, even objective evidence for Christianity becomes subjective as well. And even a professional apologist such as myself must admit that no faith commitment can be compelled through reason.

All relationships require a commitment that transcends the evidence and becomes self-validating. You could not prove scientifically or rationally that you should go to a school until you attend its classes, or that you should get married until you get married, or that you should have children until you have children. You could not prove that reading this article is worth your time until you read it. You examine the evidence, to be sure, but then you must make a decision that proves itself by experience.

Herein lies my point today.

Making God a “spare tire” in my car

Unlike every other religion and worldview known to human history, Christianity offers the proposition that the God we worship can and will inhabit our bodies and lives.

Jesus is not just at the “right hand” of the Father (Ephesians 1:20) akin to Zeus atop Mt. Olympus—he is also living by his Spirit in every person who trusts him as Lord (1 Corinthians 3:16). He is not just “with” us “to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20)—he is also “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). As Paul testified, Christ “lives in me” (Galatians 2:20) and we are “filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).

Here’s the problem: When I relate to Jesus as transactionally as the Greeks prayed to their gods, giving him what I think he wants so he will give me what I want, I miss the essence of the uniqueness of the Christian faith. When I make him primarily a “weather god” in the face of an ice storm, or a “healing god” in the face of a health crisis, or a “wisdom god” in the face of a perplexing decision, I make him a means to my ends—a genie in my bottle, a parachute in my plane, or a spare tire in my car.

This is not the heart of Christianity. The beauty of our faith is that we can experience the God of the universe personally and intimately. We can know the joy and peace of his presence. We can walk with our Father through the “valley of the shadow of death” into whatever lies on its other side (Psalm 23:4). We can know that he is “with” us as we “pass through the waters” (Isaiah 43:2) because we are in his hand and he is in our heart (John 10:29).

We can pray for his help, to be sure. In fact, he encourages us to do so (Matthew 7:7; James 4:2). But at a level far higher and deeper than any transaction, we can experience life and life eternal in a conscious, abiding experience of his presence in the depths of our being, no matter what circumstances life brings us today (cf. John 15:1–11).

“The greatest human achievement”

I cannot know what “ice storm” you are facing today. But I do know that your Father wants to redeem it by using it to draw you closer to himself. Not just for what he can do for you, but for who he can be in you.

St. Augustine, the greatest theologian after Paul, observed:

“To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him the greatest human achievement.”

What will you do to experience this “romance” today?

Quote for the day:

“Nothing in or of this world measures up to the simple pleasure of experiencing the presence of God.” —A. W. Tozer

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• Faith and politics, yoga and Christian practice, salvation, and hope in a divided culture
• Is Greenland worth what it will cost the United States?
• Why the Buffalo Bills were right to fire Sean McDermott
• Are you SAD? How to fight against the winter blues

Denison Forum