Towards Christian Heroism

Our modern world doesn't lend itself to heroism. Our lives are usually boring, and we fill them with entertainment and distraction. We have few true heroes. Most of the heroes we do have, if we're honest with ourselves, are figures from the fictional media we consume via screens. These figures are almost always the product of elite writers paid and given platforms by the explicitly secular and anti-Christian parties who now dominate our entire cultural landscape. The situations these artificial "heroes" encounter, and the ways in which they overcome these situations, are often immoral, unrealistic, and ungodly.

Military heroes too have become more controversial, rare, and less spectacular. As our armed forces become more mechanized, and war becomes the domain of high altitude drone strikes, top secret raids, cyber attacks, and missile defense shields the opportunity for a single soldier to perform heroically on the battlefield is reduced. 

Little needs be said to explain that our politicians are no longer our heroes. When a "major political victory" is passing an annual budget we can safely conclude that heroism is absent, and even the capacity for it among our leaders is exceptionally rare. In fact, our political leaders have nearly become anti-heroes, figures used as object lessons of what not to become. It's difficult for any young person of sane values to respect or lionize those who legislate the murder of babies, the defilement of marriage with an abomination, or the furtherance of corrupt destructive monetary practices by a predator class.

Even the everyday heroes of the past, the kind who presented models of everyday heroism, or at least modeled virtue, are disappearing. 57% of children born to the Millennial mothers are born out of wedlock. More than one in two children never have the possibility of their parents modeling functional relationships for them.

The German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche prophesied the emergence of a type of figure at the end of history that he labeled "the last man." The last man is the final creation of modern technological society, a type without passion or connection and addicted to comfort and pleasure. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukayama wrote a book entitled 'The End of History & the Last Man.' It quickly became a bestseller and remains among the most influential books of the post-Cold War West. It claimed Nietzsche's last man had already emerged. Unfortunately, Nietzsche's prophesy seems to be coming true for most people, and those whom it doesn't describe are filled with evil convictions and vile passions. There can be few heroes in this increasingly debased world of comfort and vice.

This decadence has not led to the development of a good world. I personally had a front row seat to our society's future in my old public school system job. Dysfunction accelerates dysfunction with every passing generation, and we've reached rapid acceleration. Italian social theorist Julius Evola described our modern situation as a world of spiritual ruin. We dwell in a wasteland devoid of metaphysical meaning. The faith of our civilization, the worldview of our ascent, has been totally abandoned. Nihilism has taken its place, a culture of death and deconstruction. When homosexuality, an infertile disease ridden lifestyle, is regarded as too sacred to criticize, we know our society is hurdling towards darkness. The remainder of our prosperity is little more than the white washed facade of our people's tombs.

However, this state of affairs is not without opportunity. It presents a chance for deep spiritual heroism. It awaits the emergence of a new humanity of heroes to reconstruct functionality out of the ruins. The triumph of Christianity over the ancient Roman and European world was built on the myth of the martyrs who were too holy to live within the socially decayed classical world. I don't mean "myth" in terms of the martyr's historical accuracy, they were certainly historical people, but in a deeper primordial way as representing the figures and archetypes through which Christian civilization thought.

Martyrdom predates Christianity. The prophets were martyrs, and their examples served as the original inspiration for their Christian successors. The prophets were hated and murdered for their unwillingness to conform to social norms at the expense of giving up morality and truth. The writer of Hebrews describes the prophets, their suffering, and their values:

"For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets – who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated – of whom the world was not worthy – wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth."

The prophets represented a type that reached its zenith and divine "stamp of approval" in Jesus. Our Lord was murdered for telling the truth and challenging the corrupt establishment who had distorted the spiritual environment of his society. His rigid adherence to God's divine plan resulted in the ultimate form of peer pressure, public execution. A common theme throughout the Bible is a "conform or suffer" dichotomy in which those who adhere to God's higher truth are presented with the option to accept the pleasure of sin for a season or suffer for a time with the people of God.

Social persecution has been heightening over the last few decades of western history, and legal persecution is just beginning. The personal consequences of godly morality are intense. There's a reason that about three quarters of young people raised in the church fall away before their mid-twenties. The consequences for not conforming to our secular society, and the benefits of conforming to it, are real and convincing. Rebellion against these incentives requires heroism. A willingness to sacrifice and suffer on a deep level to achieve the deepest spiritual triumph. Let us aspire to become the foundation of a new, or rather revived, sense of worth and joy defined against the evil that surrounds us in the form of material accumulation, status, and sensual pleasure. Let it be said of us that, as the Hebrews writer wrote, the world was not worthy of us.

There are numerous obstacles in our path to achieving heroism. Among them is the mistaken idea that God will save us from the consequences of our virtue. He did not save Jesus, his apostles, nor the prophets from death, and he will not save us. When people say "God will provide," they often imagine that phrase to mean that "God will protect your bourgeois lifestyle comforts because you're a good person." Perhaps nothing is further from the truth. Jesus said:

"If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you."

Another mistake is to assume we will socially triumph or "change the world" (in a personally understandable way). Jeremiah was told by God that his preaching would not work to turn his people back from evil, and that its purpose was merely to testify to the fact that God had warned the Jews to repent before he punished them with exile and destroyed their city. Jeremiah's triumph was his own. We read of that triumph in the Bible as an individual triumph, a triumph of spirit. In all practical sense, however, Jeremiah was a failure, and his social suffering was an apparently futile work. In a deeper sense, however, Jeremiah was an archetype hero, a literal man among the ruins who lamented the destruction of Jerusalem and the desolation of his people. Jeremiah triumphed over both spiritual and physical desolation. Jeremiah's land, people, and even religion were nearly without hope when he died.

Virtue and morality were considered social goods in other eras. Morality was once taught, expected, and respected. Morality was default. Morality was socially inherited. It didn't require heroism to be moral during those moral agees, it required only a level of self control and social conformity. In the past, a moral person was regarded as a superior type who should be imitated. The moral man of the past had an incentive to be good, he knew he would be admired for his virtue.

Those eras, however, are long gone, and especially here at the end of history in the capital of decadence. The Christian hero must fight against society to maintain virtue and morality in this dark age. Morality is inverted. Here, the moral man is an intolerant boring bigot supposedly trapped in a hateful past. Unlike the secular or worldly heroes, however, our triumph does not rely on external victory. We are capable of weathering the storm of defeat, even the death of our entire world, and still retain hope because we know that true and ultimate triumph has always been beyond our power, on the horizon, coinciding with our Lord's return. For this reason, we should find the courage to rise to heroism in the face of our crumbling society.

Many Christians, especially the young, abandon the godly struggle out of despair. They quickly learn they can't stand against the world and triumph. The forces of immorality and social collapse now dismantling the western world are too powerful to be overcome. They are the result of deep spiritual forces that have been building for centuries. Nothing has yet turned them back, and all attempts to fight them have only accelerated their progress. Even the most common cell phone obsessed teenager senses this fact. Even our adolescents know they are choosing daily between comfort and tragedy, and the tragic hero is the Christian. Unfortunately, the enemy has blinded us to the spiritual dimension in which the materially tragic Christian hero is always triumphant. The modern Christian obsession with social justice and worldly relief plays into the hands of the decadent powers who know that any semblance of worldly triumph is now almost impossible for the Christ follower. Western Christians are now a dying minority facing a psychologically paralyzing "shock of history." The older generations of Christians cannot understand what's happening to their civilization. They were always above history and the rest of the world, they believed they were an intricate part of the system that built the modern world, only to wake up and realize their society and religious worldview is now openly attacked and hemorrhaging on all levels.

I, and many more of my generation, once imagined myself to be almost outside of history. I was the one who saw history and judged it. The millions who died in World War II and starved in Africa were distant and incomprehensible. Mere statistics. History was over, even if we denied it. The personal realization that death can touch me, that the negative forces of history can permanently damage and destroy my hopes for the future has been a shock. To the Baby Boomers the possibility of that shock was only ever theoretical, but to the Millennials it is daily becoming reality. The realization that we are the watched rather than the watcher can be a liberating experience, however. The question is not how we see ourselves, but whether God sees us as heroic pawns within his preordained plan. Life is not our story, and we don't have to finish it. Life is God's story. Our people's destiny, and our own, is ultimately not in our hands. Fate is not ours to manipulate. Life doesn't end with our triumphs or failures. 

Desolation is coming. The only question is whether we will meet it as heroes?