The Marginalization of Faith

Steven C. Vryhof writes, "the explicit and implicit pressure to marginalize faith positions compromises communities of meaning, making it difficult for members to make sense of the world using memory and to order their lives using vision."

Vryhof quotes C.S. Lewis because Lewis also recognized this very issue. Lewis wrote years ago that, "the avoiding of God in many times and places has proved so difficult that a very large part of the human race failed to achieve it. But in our own time and place it is extremely easy. Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads of the beaten track...keep the radio on. Live in a crowd."

Can you see these things in current culture? Listen to the news and you will hear thought that is standardized and void of any higher categories. As culture continues to spiral out of control, our faith becomes victim to the cultural problem. And, there is a cultural problem.

Sidney Callahan, a professor at St. Johns University writes that, "the decaying culture of individualism denies moral realities or truths or ultimate meanings that possess the moral authority to impose overriding moral claims on the person or on the group. If the only meaning one recognizes is that which is constructed by the individual self, then farewell to the ongoing cultural quest for the True, the Good - for God. Since the self must make up its own rules without guidance or authority emanating from the morally real, it becomes very hard to sacrifice one's self interest for a cause - any cause."

And, that is what we find ourselves looking into today. Vaclav Havel puts it best,
"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bother him less and less."

What use to make men blush now makes men proud. Our problem is not our culture; our problem is that our culture is our faith and that is the true marginalization of my faith and your faith. What are we to do? I believe C.S. Lewis gave us a place to begin. I leave you with one final Vryhof quote from Richard Ford, winner of the 1996Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:

"Put simply, the pace of life feels morally dangerous to me."