The Church Can Stand in the Breach Against Chaos

Society is increasingly fragile. We need the best of Christian progressiveness and conservatism working together to strengthen it.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread in earnest in the United States a year ago, we made lots of jokes about the end of the world. Who would have predicted toilet paper to be the currency of our post-apocalyptic hellscape? we quipped. In a cinematic turn of phrase evoking crumbled civilization, we dubbed everything preceding March 2020 the “before times.”

Underneath those jokes was truth: not only that the pandemic was to be taken seriously but also that its disruption revealed how fragile our society really is. In normal times, this fragility can be difficult to see. We’re enthralled by normalcy bias—the common human assumption that the basic structure of our lives will go on and not really vary. Even changes brought by new technology prove less dramatic than anticipated. Our minds are prepared for a life of cumulative tweaks. We’re not ready for revolutions.

Yet revolutions happen, and not always for the better. The social order we take for granted is by no means guaranteed. “Every human institution is, in its way, built on sand,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in January, the day after the sedition at the Capitol. “It’s all so frail.” The veil “between civilization and chaos” is thin, she said, and “we have to go through every day, each in our way, trying to make the veil thicker.”

Noonan pointed to conservatives—as in temperamental conservatives, those concerned with tradition, prudence, and finitude—as the longstanding heralds of this fragility. “True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding” of it, she argued. They see the thinness of the veil. This is the classic tension between conservatism and progressivism: The progressive is optimistic about what change can bring and so pushes forward in hope, feeling a certain comfort with risk and exploration. The conservative responds with caution, pointing to the merits of what we already have and the limits of our own wisdom and ability to innovate. Read More

What I have observed on Facebook and other social media is church leaders who, rather than acting a moderating influence, are doing the opposite with their use of hyperbole and other rhetorical devices as well as false logic in their posts. If their claims were true, they would not be able to make them on Facebook. The secret police would have arrested them and either sent them to a prison camp or executed them. They certainly would not be freely expressing their views on Facebook. They are feeding their readers' fears, fears which are unfounded.