Today’s sermon is by Tom Wolfe. As a man of the pen rather than the cloth, you can’t accuse him of a vested-or vestmented-interest in religion as he addresses the topic “The Perils of Disbelief.”
Wolfe, who artfully assesses the sins of our times in his books and articles, originally delivered these thoughts as keynote speaker some weeks ago at the Illinois Humanities Council’s annual deep-thought weekend marathon.
In our pulpit, he begins with historical perspective.
If you think we’re anxious, angry and bewildered as we plunge toward the turn of the century, so were folks in Europe a century earlier.
The term often used for the spirit of that age was decadence. Friedrich Nietzsche used that word; so did Karl Marx.
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Guess what was decaying: Moral codes, which is to say . . . values.
“This led to the most famous statement in all of modern philosophy-Nietzsche’s statement that `God is dead,’ which, of course, was not a ringing declaration on behalf of atheism, although he was an atheist.
“He said, `The death of God is the greatest event in modern history.’ He meant that educated people and people of means no longer believed in God.
“And in fact, Nietzsche said before you atheists run up your banners and start cheering, consider what is going to happen: `In the 20th Century, there will be wars catastrophic beyond imagining.’
“And why? `Because,’ he said, `you have gotten rid of God. You have no one to forgive you, but you still feel guilty because guilt is something that is implanted in most people very early in life before they have the power of reason. Therefore, you will loathe yourselves, and you will loathe one another, and this will lead to these wars catastrophic beyond all imagining.’ “
Nietzsche also had a prediction for us.
“He said at the end of the 20th Century will come the age of the Great Re-valuation, in which mankind would struggle to find new values to replace the osteoporotic skeleton of the old.”
Bingo. Nietzsche scores again.
Wolfe offers some reasons why we got where we are.
One is our intellectuals were intoxicated by the vapors of Marxism, “which is really social Darwinism, the idea being that all these moral codes and religious values are simply mental constructs created by the ruling class to keep the lower orders at bay.”
Another is the enormous economic growth of the last 50 years, tempered only by a few recessions, which has caused many Americans, especially younger ones, to feel immune from a catastrophe like the Depression.
“At this moment, these two forces-this tremendous affluence and this pervasive skepticism-have converged to create a common result.
“If your best minds are saying these old American values are shams and superstitions that aren’t worth devoting your lives to, which is in keeping with Nietzsche’s statement about the death of God, then you have a kind of double permission slip to sweep aside standards that had been in place for a long time, in some cases for thousands of years.
“I think that’s what began to happen. You can go all across American life and see how these standards were swept away over the past 50 years, particularly over the past 30 years.”
He touches on two.
“I can remember when going bankrupt was a moral stigma, not just a financial catastrophe. Now it’s a strategy.
“Developers will tell you, well, gee, if you weren’t in Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 or some chapter of the bankruptcy code, you just weren’t a player in the ’80s.”
Moving to the sexual revolution (“a very prim name for the lurid carnival that is actually taking place”), he points to the “trophy wife,” who’s in her 20s, preferably blond and acquired by a corporate titan after he dumps his spouse of 20 or 30 years.
“And is the new couple socially radioactive?”
No way. Their social set is merely curious, not judgmental.
Then there are the bleak, familiar statistics: Births to unwed mothers have increased from 5 percent to 28 percent of all births in 30 years; 27 percent of all children live with mothers who have never married.
Cohabitation once was a pejorative term. “It’s now the standard form of courtship at any university.”
Is it any wonder we’re in a period of moral fever and finger pointing?
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Yet as we yearn for and yak about a return to righteousness, a final caveat: “Nietzsche warned it is impossible to believe in a religion without believing in a God because, he said, only a God can give you the essential instructions, which are `Thou shalt’ and `Thou shalt not.’ “
Amen, Rev. Wolfe, amen.