THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Now is the time to look at not only the challenges, but also the opportunities within a post-Christian West. For even--or better yet, especially--in societies where Christianity has been relegated to an out-of-date relic of yesteryear, people are surprised to find that what they love about their favorite stories is that in them they encounter traces of the gospel.

To give just one example, the success of the Harry Potter franchise is illustrative of how gospel echoes persist in many of our culture's most beloved stories. Although many factors have contributed to making the series a worldwide phenomenon, Constance Grady and Aja Romano observe that the driving force of the series' success is straightforward: "The Harry Potter series is a phenomenon because it tells a story that millions of people loved, and it introduced the world to an enormous and magical world that millions of people have dreamed of escaping into."

But it's not just magic spells and quidditch matches that make this story so enticing. As author J. K. Rowling explains about her story, "To me [the religious parallels have] always been obvious." She comments on two biblical citations--"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (1 Cor. 15:26) and "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matt. 6:21)--found in the final book on the tombstones of Harry's parents and Dumbledore's mother and sister: "I think those two particular quotations he finds on the tombstones at Godric's Hollow, they sum up--they almost epitomize the whole series." The story is, after all, framed by two acts of sacrificial love--a mother who gave her life to save her son, and the son who willingly goes to his death so that all those he loves would live. The savior of the story is, of course, Harry Potter, the young wizard whose life had always been leading to the moment he would allow himself to be struck by evil unto death--only to live and return to defeat evil. 

Once the gospel has entered the bloodstream of a culture, even skeptics and doubters can't help but at times be taken by the story. For all the talk of repressive Christian ethics and the confidence in our ability to reason and use common sense to guide how we should live, the reality is the Western world's moral sensibilities are still living off the fumes of the Christian story. This is why Friedrich Nietzsche, the scathing critic of Christianity at the end of the 19th century, also turned his sights on the atheists of his day. For he realized that even these "secular" men weren't free from the story. Still today, fully escaping it proves elusive. 

The historian Tom Holland, a longtime secular progressive, recently wrote that despite his faith in God fading during his teen years, he now realizes his most fundamental instincts about life only make sense as an inheritance from the Christian story. Holland's book Dominion is a journey through Western history to narrate how our culture's moral ideals derive "ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God's image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female." Human rights, a universal concern for the vulnerable, human equality, sexual restraint, reverence for humility, and the notion of moral progress itself are just a few of our common ideals that have developed in light of the Christian story. Holland can't get past the irony: "The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past." 

Simply put, your unbelieving friends are probably more "Christian" than they realize. That is, they embrace certain Christian ideals and beliefs, but these assumptions don't make much sense within their current script. They need a better story. 

Holland himself recognizes how much the Western civilization's future depends on our coming to grips with the history of our shared ideals. As he puts it, since our modern moral aspirations are "not from reason or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity's evolution--a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America, has left God dead--then how are its values anything more than the shadow of a corpse? What are the foundations of its morality, if not a myth?"

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