Proclaiming Truth in a Post-Liberal World

Thoughts after the Pusey House conference

Pusey House Oxford has become quite a frequent host for conferences and colloquiums in addition to its usual frequent lectures each term. You may find many of these and more on their youtube channel. Among these was a conference last year on the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea. The increase in activity (and attendance), which encompasses far more than conferences and lectures, from when I first visited Pusey House in 2007 to now is remarkable. Dr. George Westhaver, Principal since 2013, does not get enough credit for this. I will add that the sort of people who tolerate this substack should be sure to check out their schedule if one is visiting Oxford.

The latest Pusey House conference last week was Christian Revival: Our Post-Liberal Hope. Speakers included Mary Harrington (who has helpfully posted her address), Iain McGilchrist, and Rod Dreher. Dreher posted a report just after the conference.

I concur with him that the Rev’d Fergus Butler-Gallie was on fire! I’ve only viewed part of the conference but was fortunate to hear his brief address almost live. I may have to revisit it and St. Wolfstan’s “The Sermon of the Wolf to the English” one day.

The conference has me thinking (Always a dangerous activity.) about how best to witness to Truth in this post-liberal world.

Now I am skipping the question whether we are in a post-liberal world. Perhaps I should not. But a look at the increasing polarization in politics and religion certainly indicates something has changed. In the U. S., compare the Bush-Clinton-Bush years with the Obama-Trump-Puppet-Trump years. We agree on much less; disagree much more disagreeably; and we are much less content with what the political establishment and the world is serving us.

But much/most of the organized church hasn’t got the memo. For example, U. S. Roman Catholic bishops still push legal and illegal immigration as if today’s invaders from around the world are just like those hard-working Mexicans who crossed the border in Grandpa’s time to do jobs few citizens wanted. And those bishops and the woke in evangelical churches just don’t care that your average guy in the pew doesn’t like being invaded anymore . . . or they think that guy is a racist to be browbeaten. The whole Church of Treason operation, which includes Protestant groups like World Relief and has big money from governments, NGOs, and cartels involved, is a big con job masquerading as “social justice.” People don’t like being conned, either.

Bigger picture, both Roman and Protestant churches continue to act as the way to reach the world is to be like the world, to soft-pedal hard orthodox doctrine and to be therapeutic and winsome. Instead of the church of the ages, many churches try to be The Church of What’s Happening Now.

At least in evangelical churches, that apparently worked well in the 90’s with the megachurch movement. But today people are fed up with the world. They deplore what’s happening now. And watering down and obscuring the truth about it with the winsome sweet nothings of Moral Therapeutic Deism from the pulpit has become a joke. When mixed with the usual multiculturalist nostrums, it is a worse joke. It’s the religious equivalent of running a Clinton or a Bush for political office today — utterly clueless, not knowing what time it is, not fooling anybody anymore, and headed for defeat.

And don’t get me started on those still trying to push various forms of wokeness as Christian.

People today are hungry for spiritual truth that is much more true and transcendent than the globalist slop the world is trying to feed us.

Unfortunately, many people are looking for truth in all the wrong places. At the Pusey House conference, Rod Dreher told of a student who informed him that the main competition against Christianity is no longer secularism but the occult. Gen Z especially gets that the material world is not enough; so they are exploring the spiritual world, and, being young, they often are not very discriminating about which sort of spirits they are checking out.

On his part, Satan is glad to appear as “an angel of light.” (2 Corinth. 11:14) “Lucifer” does mean “the Morning Star” after all. And, though I am not the sort to look for demons under the bed, I suspect he is taking the opportunity to be more open in so luring people. Without breaking confidences, I personally know of Gen Z men being tempted to follow the Deceiver under the guise of Lucifer.

Pastel pieties and therapeutic ted talks homogenized with the world cannot compete with that and do not satisfy. On his part, Satan may be evil but he is clever. He sees bankrupt secularism and faux Christianity have presented him with an opportunity. He is getting bolder in presenting his lies. Are we getting bolder about presenting the Truth? There is a reason those churches who are proclaiming the Truth in word and worship without timidity and apology are doing better than those who are not.

The way the Church should always compete and contend is speaking the truth of God “with boldness”. (Acts 4: 29, 31) That goes double in this Post-Liberal World in which the comfortable secularist consensus of the turn of the century not only does not comfort anymore but provokes contempt. Mimicking the world was never the way for the church to go although it might have appeared to work in the megachurch movement for a time.

People have tried a secularist globalist multicultural world. They are rejecting it and rightly so — which I guess is a shorthand description of Post-Liberalism. The Church needs to get a clue also and, instead of appeasing the world, get boldly to “contending for the Faith once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3)

That’s what the church should be doing anyway.