Grabov Rat : weekly : images and thoughts

a view of the Pacific coast from the Ragged Point, California

When did many of us begin to believe that most of us had ceased to believe?

The first ‘us’ includes the chattering class - the editorial writers, the TV producers, the professionally opinionated, and a large swath of the Academy. But it includes much more as well. Perhaps the ‘overclass’ of recent years is coextensive with the first ‘us’. The second ‘us’ is simply all Americans living at the end of the millennium.

And it seems to me - a television talker and voracious consumer of high-brow intellectual producers - that the overclass is laced with a deep-seated assumption: that Americans generally do not really believe in God anymore, at least not a present, active, startlingly real God. A God who commands. A God with an agenda.

Do you disagree with this? The culture-defining class manifests its belief in American disbelief in a hundred ways, subtle and not subtle. Some are obvious. The entertainment fare served out by the television and film industries rejects God as real by simply not dealing with Him. And the nearly total removal of God from the vast amount of media we consume has an effect of gradually diminishing the relevance of the Divine to ordinary life. Think of it as the practice of shunning - an apostate is not exiled, but simply and completely ignored. At first, those doing the shunning must be obliged to practice not noticing the target. But after a while, it must become routine, indeed, second nature. The sunned is still there, still breathing, still living, still feeling, but invisible.

Hugh Hewitt: Searching for God in America, Word Publishing, Dallas, 1996.

a view of the Pacific coast from the Ragged Point, California

(Dec. 26, 2006)

Maybe Hugh is overly harsh with the media - they simply look up to Christ (and the Devine in general) by the volume of the Christmas shopping.