The problem you’re talking about is actually self-perpetuating. You point out the prevalence of culture war as the main reason for why the Church is rejected.
Has it ever occurred to you that this culture war mentality is just as encouraged within the Church as outside it? The media enjoys casting light on the so-called bigots and outspoken ‘counter-culture warriors’ on the evangelical ‘frontlines.’
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Can you tell me, with a straight face, that those ‘warriors’ are mere pawns of the media and don’t actually believe in the things they’re ‘fighting for’?**
I don’t think it helps to say that these people are actually more well-catechized. But as your professor has demonstrated, they underestimate the lack of those they’re preaching to.
What if that’s the problem? No, not the fact that people are not well-catechized. I’m talking about the fact that they don’t know their role in its self-perpetuation. They see the ignorance as only further reason to condemn, lament, and proselytize. I’d go as far to say that they’re so spiritually proud to admit they don’t know anything about today’s modern culture (outside of it being some spawn of Satan).
And thus, the fire stays fed.
Yes. Perhaps the face of Christianity presented by the media for the past decade was Fred Phelps and the so-called “Westboro Baptist Church”, who were/are extreme homophobes. Fred Phelps and everybody in his family are lawyers. Lawyers are not dumb people, they have a good deal of intelligence. These people were not crazy bible thumpers, they were crazy like a fox. They provoked people to assault them in some way so that they would make a living off of suing them in civil court. They also run a law firm in Topeka, Kansas, USA.
Now, of course, you’ll never hear about this in the mainstream media, or on the late-night comedy shows like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, from which your average western young person gets his or her news and information about religion. However, they will present them as being true to the bible. So your average young person sees these hateful people and thinks that this is what being a Christian or going to church is all about. You’ll never hear anybody in the mainstream media talking about or describing the classical tradition of Christian theism from Augustine to Aquinas to Pascal to Teresa of Avila to Garrigou-Lagrange to Ratzinger, no you’ll hear about some crypto-lawyers walking around with some hateful signs at funerals, and the media calling them bible followers and Christians. That’s why you seem to think that all Christianity does is condemn, because you think Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps represent Christianity, because you swallow the spin of the mainstream media and listen to South Park, John Stewart and late-night comedians more than you listen to the classical Christian theistic tradition. This is why you think Christianity is based on self-hatred and asceticism instead of the infinite love and mercy of God, but also his infinite goodness and justice. That’s why you think that the finite things in this world will grant you happiness, when what you really want is God himself, a desire that nothing in this world will satisfy, no matter how momentarily happy it makes you. This is why you have a “gumball machine” view of God, where He’s just there to grant your whims and desires.
If you are so happy then why are you posting here? This is the same thing I ask myself when supposedly happy people who are practicing homosexuals or fornicators come here and try to somehow “disprove” what we Catholics affirm by offering us their unique case of their momentary happiness when they have cast off God’s law, infinitely higher than our’s, and started following their law and their lusts to their heart’s content. And of course, notice how they are unable to refrain from calling us stupid in someway or another. This is not the attitude of people who are sure in their actions, but the attitude of people who are slaves to sin and idolators. Let me explain:
This is usually how 20-something aged apostasy goes: the person starts living in sin in some way or another, whether that be the most common source: sexual sin, or whether that be scrupulosity, or not trusting in God’s mercy, pride, or whatever. Their conscience is eating away at them, they hear their conscience telling them “God does not want this”, and they have a choice to make. Will they go to confession, ask for pardon, make a new start on life? Or will they just take God off the list, telling themselves that they were simply raised too conservative, too square and with too much guilt? And once they decide that, they think they are freeing themselves, when really they are just taking upon themselves the yoke of sin. They think that they can determine for themselves what is right and wrong, but that is the attitude of idolatry: putting something that is not God int the place of God. Atheism is idolatry, where man puts himself in the place of God.
If such ideals don’t matter to you, if you disown the idea of Christian humility and sacrifice (much as I have), then why would it matter to you if I expressed it?