The survival of human dignity and individual rights depends upon vitalizing Christian churches to fill the role that the socialist political state endeavors in vain to play. That role centers upon the family.
For several weeks, Steve Treash, Senior Minister at the Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) has preached on the Bible’s messages for family cohesion and happiness.
Our church is an outreach oriented one, aiming to continue the ministry of the earliest Christian churches, which in the turmoil of the early Roman Empire, were the principal refuge and solace for the poor, widows and orphans, the ill, and the persecuted. In addition to Sunday services focused on the elements that engender a fulfilling family life, Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church offers to all comers a full range of support services, from marriage counseling to family financial planning and assistance.
With the deterioration of our nation’s founding ethos of morality under the onslaught of liberal materialist philosophy in the 20th century, it is an especially appropriate mission for Christian churches. So many people, even those who are highly successful in the business and professional worlds, perceive little substance and meaning in their lives.
The point that cannot be over stressed is that there can be no salvation – social or spiritual – through the political state. The message of socialistic, materialistic, secularity proclaimed since the 1960s by our educational institutions is barren and unsatisfying.
As I wrote in Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World:
Ecclesiastes’s message that things of this world are all ultimately meaningless resurfaced with a bang when the Baby Boomer activists of the 1960s and 70s rebelled against what they perceived to be the emptiness and hypocrisy of their parents’ goal-oriented lives in the 1950s.
Novels such as 1955’s “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” began American youth’s rejection of business-dominated society. This theme came into full flower with Mike Nichols’s 1967 movie “The Graduate,” starring Dustin Hoffman. Of it, reviewer Tim Dirks wrote, “The theme of an innocent and confused youth who is exploited, mis-directed, seduced (literally and figuratively) and betrayed by a corrupt, decadent, and discredited older generation (that finds its stability in “plastics") was well understood by film audiences and captured the spirit of the times.” Works such as Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd” glossed this inchoate search for meaning with the patina of intellectuality.
Disaffected young people tried drugs, Weatherman underground terrorism, rock concerts, esoteric Eastern and American Indian religions, and a good deal of self-centered, whining introspection.
Apparently none of it worked.
Twenty-six years later, in May, 1993, reporter Michael Kelly’s interview with Hillary Clinton appeared in the “New York Times Magazine.” In that interview, Mrs. Clinton spoke about the lack of spiritual meaning in contemporary society, giving rise to the name “Saint Hillary.”
The missing ingredient is love and caring, which must emanate in the first instance from families. With the rash of divorces, children too often grow up feeling guilty and unloved. They are potential anti-social troublemakers of the future.
The one institution particularly suited to allay this malady is the Christian church, with Jesus’s message of love for all people who hear and receive his gospel.
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