THE WAR OF THE WORLDVIEWS
The Christian Worldview & Christian Education
**Note: This Substack Article takes “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission” by Msgr. James Shea, President of the University of Mary (Bismarck, N.D.), as its primary source of inspiration. This is an unsolicited endorsement of the book. I cannot recommend it enough. I have never met Msgr. Shea, but I have read the book 3x through now, no-cap, and it strikes me as the work of a Saint. It only gets better with each read through—and that is the hallmark of any work that a saint writes. Most books dazzle at first, but get cheaper the more you look into them. The saint’s work is like that of our Lord at the Wedding feast of Cana (Jn 2: 1-11), saving the best wine for last, so that the more you get into it, the more it reveals its inexhaustible beauty. — If you are interested in ordering it, click here, or on any of the underlined links throughout the Article.**
I: Intro
The Christian worldview is gone from the general imaginative vision of our modern society: that is the driving premise of the book by Msgr. James Shea, University of Mary: From Christendom to Apostolic Mission. All of my experience and intuition accords with that observation. A “general imaginative vision” is the set of assumptions a society holds unspoken: what makes someone a good person; what demonstrates success/failure; what are the economic principles we presuppose as correct; what are the political norms we assume to be just; what are the fitting and appropriate forms of recreation and entertainment that people can engage in. A level deeper the imaginative vision holds assumptions of what we can reference to discern the truth or falsity of a proposition; what we can turn to authoritatively; what we can presuppose about existence itself. In all of these ways we can begin to see how our modern society, whether right or left, politically, does not work out from an imaginative vision of the Christian worldview.
II: The War of the Worldviews
People do not see the world—the cosmos—with the imaginative vision of the Christian faith anymore. They do not believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Christ. Many do not even believe in God. They do not believe that we have immortal souls, or that man is fallen and in need of a savior. They do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ and thereby the incarnation of God. They do not believe that grace is necessary for salvation. They do not believe that the sacraments of the Church inviolably confer grace. They do not believe that morality is informed by nature and nature by God. They do not believe that we possess a stable, unchanging nature. They do not believe that truth is anchored in the eternal and unchanging reality of God, or that there even is a definitively real reality. All of that being said, they certainly do not believe there is an immaterial reality at all, which precludes our possessing immortal souls, as already noted, but also angels and fallen angels: immaterial beings without material bodies…
What they do believe is that material reality encompasses all of reality; that the only constant is change and so we are subject to a never ending state of flux and change. What they do believe is that sin is either not real, or not disqualifying of anything meaningful. What they do believe is that if there is a heaven or an afterlife, you can be sure that you’ll get to go there. What they do believe is that consensus and coercive force determines the rightness or wrongness of things. What they do believe is that sickness in the soul is normative: depression, anxiety, compulsion, and addiction—and so the most mature response we can have to such things is acceptance, affirmation, and management. What they do believe is that we generate the meaning we experience in life and, by extension, that we have the capacity to manufacture our reality to conform with what we want to identify as.
All of this leads to a radical divergence in worldview today between the Christian (Catholic) imaginative vision of the world and the common, modern imaginative vision of the world. The way these different groups see things is decidedly irreconcilable. It’s one of the reasons that the Christian worldview—and those political topics that serve as sign posts of that worldview: abortion, marriage, parental rights—is increasingly treated as a threat to the modern world order and its adherents ostracized and persecuted.
The Christian education of our children then has a monumental task set before it.
III: Pros & Cons
Msgr. Shea, in his book From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, does a great job describing how “Christendom” represents a time, now past, in which the general imaginative vision of a society is Christian, and how that is contrasted with an “Apostolic” age in which the Christian imaginative vision is not the general imaginative vision and is therefore relegated to the fringes of a non-Christendom society. He points out that the teaching emphasis is different in the two contrasting circumstances: in Christendom, the teaching focus is less on the worldview, as everyone accepts it, and is more on morals and devotion; in an Apostolic age, the focus is less on moral education and much more on presenting the Christian worldview to the many potential converts surrounding the minority faithful. Further he observes that the noted vices that people most watch out for change from Christendom to Apostolic times: in Christendom, the noted vice of danger is to be a hypocrite, not really believing what everyone else believes; in an Apostolic age, the noted vice of danger is cowardice: the urge to conform to the non-Christian general imaginative vision surrounding one and abandon the Christian faith in the process. Equipped with these understandings we can begin to really see how insightful this contrast that Msgr. Shea has laid out is.
IV: The Neo-Apostolic Age
We live in a notably unique time up to this point in Christian history: we have had Apostolic ages, and we have had Christendom ages; we have gone from Apostolic circumstances to Christendom circumstances in many places and times—but we have never yet gone from Christendom back to Apostolic living. Where Christianity has taken root, it has grown; where it has grown, it has flourished. In some cases, it failed to take root and never grew or flourished: but where it has flourished it has not receded. That is what we are facing today. We are facing a world in which Christianity took root, grew, flourished, and is now facing aggressive marginalization.
Two quotes are particularly useful in recognizing the territory we are now in. The first recognizes this reality; the second speaks to how it must be approached differently than times past. The first quote is from Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen, said all the way back in 1974: “We are at the end of Christendom. Not of Christianity, not of the Church, but of Christendom.” He comments, reiterating what we’ve said already, “Christendom is economic, political, and social life as inspired by Christian principles.” (Shea, Preface) The second quote comes from C.S. Lewis describing the difference between trying to convert unbelievers from no faith to faith with trying to win back those to the faith who are either knowingly or unknowingly in apostasy, having abandoned the faith they had once received, either consciously or sacramentally. C.S. Lewis was said to compare this difference between that of a young man trying to woo a young maiden and a divorced man trying to win back a cynical divorcee to their previous marriage. (Shea, p. 2)* In our current situation, we are not trying to win over those who have never heard of Christianity—we are trying to win back the cynical divorcee that has left their spouse and has harbored animosity and resentment toward their once spouse.
All of which points to a unique set of circumstances and obstacles we are facing today in trying to pass along and spread the Christian faith in a darkened world. It is quite safe to say that we are in the beginning of the true Dark Ages—a time in which the light of the world (Jn 1:9) has not only been lost, but voluntarily cast into obscurity. Trying to encounter this next frontier could well be much more dangerous and duplicitous than in the proto-Apostolic times of the past. The enemies of Christ have had much more time to prepare, and they are strapped with a much greater awareness of how big and impactful Christianity is capable of being. The early Romans had every reason for a hubris that amounted to a comfortable disregard for Christianity believing it to be incapable of ever being anything larger than a small faction of esoteric and inconsequential believers. As they learned that it held real potency they could still defer to the sentiment that it won’t reach critical mass adoption. Not so anymore: those with designs to dethrone the Christian worldview from its previous place of prominence and influence have a much deeper understanding of how it must be broken down from within, by subterfuge and internal division, to really release its grip from the common mind. They are much more subtle, much more disciplined, and much more duplicitous today from times past—and that poses a monumental challenge to the Christian today.
V: Combat Training
The question this leaves us to ask is, “What can be done?” And while Msgr. Shea offers a handful of very helpful answers, I want to focus our attention on considering an approach to schooling that we can take going forward. I call this something to the effect of “High Contrast Education”—other names for it could be “Combat Training Education”, “Juxtapositional Education”, or “Apologetics-Based Education”. Its chief aim rests in the applicational, or final, stage of educational formation (Stage 1: Elemental; Stage 2: Organizational; Stage 3: Applicational) and it is based around deliberate juxtaposition of the Christian worldview with that of the secular worldview. It is not enough to simply teach students what the Christian worldview is, or even just how they can apply that understanding in their life—they must also know what the Christian worldview is not and what the claims of the modern worldview actively are. Like master soldiers or great athletes, they must strive to know their opponent more deeply than their opponent knows themselves. In that way they can combat not only those ideas that are proposed by their opposition, but also those ideas that are presupposed, and left unsaid.
The modern, non-Christian worldview is not the hangover of a former-status-quo paganism groping in the spiritual dark for fragments of truths and content with conventions they’d formed: it is an evangelistic and decisively proposed worldview developed in the midst of a Christendom world, designed not to hold off the Christian worldview, or maintain an already established status-quo, but to eclipse it and revolutionize the world altogether. The modern worldview has high ambitions—it sees itself as something new; something that can bring humanity into the next “stage” of its evolution. It sees itself as a gift to the world that can liberate those in bondage and usher in an upgrade of humanity writ large. We must be well aware of this distinct difference in our neo-apostolic, post-Christian age of today versus the proto-apostolic, pre-Christian age of 1,700 - 2,000 years ago.
If we prepare our children to encounter the world of today as it is, they’ll have a much greater chance of spreading the light of the gospel to the darkest corners of those souls suffering in the modern abyss of our world, devoid of eternal hope. We can both prepare our defenses while strengthening our initiative. It is worth it. There are souls hanging in the balance that are at stake. +
This is a good post. We should probably think of ourselves as living in the pre-Christian Roman Empire rather than a Christian society that has merely lost its way. Our society clearly has more in common with pagan antiquity than medieval Christendom.
Have you read Andrew Willard Jones? It strikes me that you would eat up every word of his Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. Anyway, kudos on the article, it's good juice.
Honestly the last sentence of the endnite gave me goosebumps