I keep reading of people who quite tired of figuring out what’s right, what’s wrong, what a good life, what it’s all about. Dating is a minefield. Success is a mirage, celebrity is depressing, freedom is enslaving, hope turns sour, dreams disappoint.
Some of these battered and weary people are becoming Christians or if you like, Christian-adjacent, seeing the ancient Christian values as useful signposts even if they are tentative about going the whole hog, or perhaps, the whole dogma.
There’s a lot to this.
For one thing, creaking though it maybe, Christianity is ancient and it has infused our culture and spawned many good lives like nothing else. A couple of hundred yards from our home is a church that was founded in the ninth century. (As I have mentioned before and often think about.) The fields around it had been harvested for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years already by then. But still: for the last one thousand, one hundred years Christian worship, Christian faith and Christian values have been seeping into village and national life and collective memory and ancestry.
For a second thing: Christianity is mainly and mostly about the heart. It isn’t a programme for national prosperity, or preventative health care, or political reorganization. Primarily it pins us like collected butterflies down to one main things: Above all, guard your heart. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourning, the peace-making, the pure in heart, the hungry for justice. And the test of these reformed and reforming hearts is not the mystic poetry they write about the experience (for example), or great revolutionary or counter-revolutionary acts (for another example), but the practical outworking of goodness and faith in their daily lives.
Which can lead to any number of different, interesting, varied, full lives.
No wonder it’s inspired lives across 50 generations, has experienced ups to match its downs, and may yet catch on widely again.