Where is the Vanguard?

I used to imagine the world was mostly solid. I thought the norms and institutions I was accustomed to would continue, basically as I knew them, for the remainder of my life. Young people have been correct in assuming this for most of human history. Some disasters and momentous historical events did shake the rare generation, but even those big events rarely changed much below the surface.

Enter the modern age, everything solid is melting (increasingly so). My former intuition assuming stability looks to have been totally delusional after witnessing contemporary demographic drifts and rates of technological and cultural change. Populations, civilizations, religious traditions, common beliefs, and institutions that have stood for thousands of years are now being revolutionized every other decade.

Races of people who have lived in the same geographic regions since before written language are now being shuffled around the planet in mass migrations that are totally reconfiguring the ethnic makeup of the world. Hundreds of millions of people are on the move.

Religious traditions that have ordered human behavior for millennia are collapsing. The Biblical mandate supporting male authority in the church is now mostly disregarded among members of my generation, and this disregard is pervasive in almost every nation on earth. Men have been seen as society's authority figures in all civilized societies throughout human history. Now, the wisdom of God and our ancestors is dismissed with a simple accusation of "sexism." Marriage, which has meant almost the same thing in all human societies for all time, has been redefined. This redefinition has now been exported to every corner of the world. The concept of gender and sex, almost subconscious assumptions about nature, are now regarded as immoral oppressive constructs. Over half of our children are now born out of wedlock, premarital sex is assumed, pornography is consumed by almost everyone, and drug abuse is out of control.

Western Civilization is imploding in spectacular fashion. It's actively trying to destroy and displace its own religious and ethnic foundations. It has devolved into little more than a platform for the acceleration of hedonistic capitalism. It no longer stands for anything, means anything, or is anything more than an empty shell of consumerism. Its legal system has been corrupted into a tool of oppression against traditional values, and its universities are now dedicated to deconstructing our past and denouncing our ancestors as racists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes.

Technological innovation has changed literally everything about our lives. It has changed the way we think, learn, interact (or don't interact), work, build, consume, entertain, practice hygiene, purchase, cook, and literally everything else.

The Church of Christ (CoC) hasn't escaped any of this. The numbers are terrible. We're collapsing, around 70% of our youth are leaving the church, half my fellow millennial Christians accept LGBT marriage, our sexual morality is barely better than the world (if at all), and well over half our universities now openly advocate women being given authority in chapel and worship services. Will the Church of Christ even exist as a recognizable entity in twenty years' time? At this rate, almost certainly not. In many places, including where I'm now located, the CoC has already functionally ceased to exist (despite a skeleton remaining).

God has retreated from us. The "enchanted world" in which God seemed to permeate every corner of society and inform all our decisions and fantasies has been utterly vandalized by nihilistic libertarian hedonism and materialistic capitalism. Can God openly operate within a society so clearly hostile to himself and his will? The immanent God of the past has left us. When Nietzsche remarked that "God is dead, and we have killed him," he wasn't saying that God was literally dead, but that we'd driven him from our world.

God is letting us collapse. In fact, he's likely pushing us over the edge. Jesus said: "And if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short." Hopefully, God is an accelerationist. Otherwise, the church will be strangled inside this death trap. The delusions now embraced by Western Civilization seem almost unthinkable. Traditional humans around the world now look at America and Western Europe with a mixture of bewilderment and horror: "How can they invent such degeneracy, and how long until that degeneracy starts poisoning our own youth?" Answer: It already has.

Where is the Christian solution to these problems? Nothing that's been attempted so far has done anything but accelerate the decay. Everything has been moving deeper into degeneracy for at least a century. No one can find an answer. In fact, fewer and fewer people are willing to claim there's an answer (or even that there's a problem). Millennial Christians have given up so thoroughly that we've now come to embrace all the values and lifestyle tendencies of the secular world. The serious Christians who remain dedicated to our religion in some form work tirelessly trying to mutate our worldview into something that accepts all the foundational principles of secularism. We've reached such a state of infiltration that we can't find a way to condemn the LGBT movement without tripping over ourselves trying to prove we're not haters. Even our protestations against transgendering our kids are weak.

The dark ages are upon us. The way forward is uncertain. The way back is completely blocked. God has promised us that if we cling to him he'll provide a way of escape. Now is the time of testing. Now is the time for us to show the world whether or not we actually believe in our God. They'll be watching and waiting to see what's left of us when the empty ruins crash down around us. The way forward is through the vast empty halls, shattered windows, and dumpster fires. And yes, that is the smell of blood. Where is the vanguard that will lead the way? God is calling you forward.