Trinitas Blog

As quarantine restrictions begin to ease all over the world, we should be able to start making some observations about how our weeks of sequestering have affected us. Oh, I don’t mean to enter the conversation about whether quarantining has worked to “flatten the curve” or whether it was the right or wrong action to take or what it has done to the “Economy.” I mean only to make a prediction about how staying locked in our houses and away from the world has affected our humanity.

An early look in Newsweek at a report that is to be published in full this June shows that Christians are the most persecuted group of people in all the world. The report, compiled by the Bishop of Truro, claims that the persecution of Christians in many areas is very close to meeting the United Nations’ definition for genocide. Why do we hear so little about this persecution in US media outlets? One reason may be that Christians in the US have largely escaped the kind of violent persecution upon which the report focused. In this country Christians have worshiped in relative comfort—even luxury at times—for more than two centuries. Make no mistake, though, Christianity is under attack here too.

School choice is a hot issue for the Trump administration, and it continues to be for the states as well. In Florida, for example, a bill is being debated in the closing days of the state legislative session that would create tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of state scholarships for low to middle income Florida families to use at private schools.

“A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; he rages against all wise judgment” (Proverbs 18:1).

I know a teenage girl who spends many hours a day on her smartphone playing games and posting on social media (and who knows what else). While the rest of her family engages in other recreational activities, mostly outdoors, she is content to and is allowed to spend her time with her phone. When she is forced to come out of her bedroom, at mealtime for example, she is sometimes sullen and often awkward in interactions with her family. Her contributions to the conversation are usually one sentence statements that are disconnected from the topic of conversation and seemingly meant to draw attention to herself—like an Instagram post. Even when the family detours from the original topic of conversation to engage her comments, this girl rarely has more to add, and her next entry will be as disconnected from the last one as it was from the family’s original conversation topic. It seems as if her time isolated with her phone has undermined her ability to communicate with other people in person.

Last week I wrote in this space about cell phone use among teens. There is a lot to say about it. I can’t get to all of it, but it is a serious enough subject that I will revisit it more than once. There are a great many discouraging trends in our society today, especially among teens, which are beginning to be attributed to addictive smart phone use. Arguably the most concerning trend is the failing mental health of our teenagers.

Anybody else out there think the world has gone mad, or is it just me? Every time I turn around some new (perceived) catastrophe has just unfolded, or some attention-starved person has just done something to separate himself even further from orthodox humanity. All the while, the spectators of these happenings are yelling, “Unprecedented, unprecedented!” Don’t these people know their history? Well no, in fact, they don’t know their history. If they did, they would know that hardly anything is really unprecedented.

A Trinitas board member sent me an interesting article recently, entitled “When Knights Surrender Their Swords, Beasts Will Devour Maidens.” The author, Paul Bois, has written hundreds of articles expositing the Christian perspective on a host of political and social issues. I haven’t read them all, but this one had a solid message.

The subject of the article was this Weinstein fellow who is in so much hot water recently for taking advantage of young women in the movie business. I have little to add to that conversation, but I do want to comment on Bois’s theme. Reduced to its essence, his assertion is that this sort of thing is happening in our society because we allow it.

On Father’s Day my pastor used the term “father famine” to describe the lack of fathers and fathering in our culture right now. Even though the truths bound up in this term are familiar to me as a watcher of culture, the term slapped me in the face—it was that shocking. Our culture is truly in the midst of a father famine. And it is not simply that we lack headship in families. No, the problem is much deeper: we don’t even understand what good headship is. We—all of us, the whole culture—have little vision for fathers or fathering.