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Change the World!

In 1941, after the start of World War II, but before the United States was involved, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen wrote a book titled, A Declaration of Dependence: Trusting God Amidst Totalitarianism, Paganism, and War.

Let’s consider what had been going on that led up to Archbishop Sheen’s book.

The Twentieth Century was host to two world wars. The First World War was naively named “The War to End All Wars”. The League of Nations was founded in 1920 to prevent future wars.

In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler, which ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Germany in an attempt to avoid war. Hitler later seized the rest of Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland in September 1939, leading to the outbreak of World War II.

Sheen starts:

The spirit of revolution has three characteristic notes. It is: (1) irrational, (2) violent, (3) atheistic.

Sheen was writing about what he saw going on in the world and how it got that way. The first thing needed to get a revolution going is to do away with reasoned thought. Sheen explained one of the consequences of modern irrationality is the glorification of the myth.

[I]n our own country, the irrational takes on the form of gullibility, a naive simplicity to believe everything that is said about anyone, particularly the worst. A critical reason never subjects the story or the myth to analysis; it might be untrue, but it certainly is worth repeating. Thus do we contribute our share to myth, as the spirit of the modern world casts itself before the false god of the irrational, exalts power over truth, the deed over the Word; apotheosizes immediacy, glorifies the uncriticized and uncriticizable self-affirmation, and furthers, whether it knows it or not, a revolution whose end is chaos.

The next step is violence.

The second characteristic note of the modern world is violence. And it is important to note that violence follows from irrationality. When a man loses his reason, he becomes violent, because reason is the faculty that gives us purposes, goals, ends, and ideals. The loss of purpose is the beginning of the violence.

There has always been violence in the world. However, in the United States there has been an understanding of the difference between violence that is justified and violence that is unjustified. We have gone to war to defend our freedom and the freedom of others. We have established a system of government and laws to protect against violence. In the last few years we have seen great acts of violence which would have been condemned during my parents’ lifetime. Today we see such riots described as “mostly peaceful protests.”

[V]iolence of other days ended either with the attainment of a purpose, or by exhaustion, or by a return to the past. But today, since violence is secondary to an ideology, it never ends. It is used to maintain a new aristocracy in power—not the aristocracy of blood, or ideas, or wealth, but the new elite of power.

Finally, the atheism Sheen references is not the atheism that outright denies the existence of God. Rather, it is an atheism that:

is of two kinds: either of the intellect or the will. When the intellect abandons God, it creates an idol or a god of its own…. When the will abandons God, atheism becomes arbitrary self-will or the will to power.

Modern organized atheism is not individual but social; not mentally but physically violent, not unbelief but belief. It is a social enthronement of human pride and human power usurping the rights of God. It may seem odd to hear it defined as belief, but such it is. Modern atheism does not deny God, it believes in Him! It does not deny Christ, it believes in Him!

Does this sound like what we have going on in the United States? Public discourse is virtually non-existent. The majority of the news media tend to present one side of political opinion. They appear to suppress stories that don’t agree with their political bias and promote stories that favor their political bias. They do not appear to promote a positive image of God if they talk of Him at all.

I think this is a phenomenon that has grown in the last ten to twenty years. Looking back over my lifetime I can see signs of why this is happening.

I grew up in the fifties and sixties. I remember in the early sixties my mom reading the newspaper in the morning as she, like most mothers, was a housewife whose job was taking care of her family and home. She read about clashes on the Left Bank of Paris between students and police. This was unheard of in the United States up to that time.

The protests were reported to be an expression of a generational revolt against the conservatism and traditional values of post-war society. This eventually led to a larger protest in France in 1968.

Racism was still a major public policy in the South. Schools, restaurants, public transportation, were segregated, either in part or in totally separate facilities. It was not long before stories of race riots started making the news in the South. These later spread to the North.

Toward the middle of the sixties college campuses began to have protests against the war in Viet Nam. The peaceful protests soon became riots on campuses. This campus unrest, as it was often called, hit its lowest point in 1970 when four unarmed students were killed and nine other unarmed students were wounded by the Ohio State National Guard on the campus of Kent State University.

During this time there were a series of assassinations starting with the shooting on John Kennedy in 1963 and then Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

Certainly, violence was becoming more widespread in the sixties.

The seventies introduced the development of the idea that a woman has a right to an abortion and the Supreme Court issued a decision stating she did. In the eighties same sex relationships started to become common, first in areas like San Francisco, and later all across the country. Laws were passed giving same sex couples the right to marry. They were allowed to adopt children or even have children using invitro fertilization using surrogate mothers or sperm donors.

More recently has come the argument that people can choose their gender to be other than their gender when they were born. States have passed laws granting people the right to choose their gender even if they are not adults. Not only can they choose their gender they can have “gender reassignment surgery and therapies”.

To top things off, in the United States, we have recently seen an uptick in attempted assassinations, shootings of children and an actual assassination.

Last year we saw two attempts to assassinate the former President of the United States as he was running for reelection. In late August, we saw the shooting deaths and injuries of children attending Mass in Minneapolis. In early September, we saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk, an Evangelical Christian, at a college in Utah.

Looking at this one might be justified in believing all hope has been lost. Evil has triumphed.

Not so fast. Something remarkable happened after the death of Charlie Kirk. Quickly there were reports of significant requests to open new chapters for Turning Point USA, the non-profit organization Charlie founded. The Guardian reported that there were between 900 college chapters and 1,200 college chapters prior to the assassination. On September 16, six days after Charlie’s assassination, Turning Point USA reported it had received more than 54,000 requests from high school or college students across the country to either begin a chapter or join an existing one.

Charlie’s memorial service was held in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. The service was reportedly attended by over 90,000 people. Many thousands more stayed outside during the service. It was broadcast by many networks. At that service, Charlie’s widow, Erika Kirk, publicly forgave Charlie’s killer.

The message of the love of God and the need to forgive others, as Jesus forgave those who killed Him, was spread to millions worldwide, many of whom may never have heard those words before.

I think it is important to look for the good that is happening in our lives today. Our nation is greatly divided on many issues. I think Archbishop Sheen’s statement, “the irrational takes on the form of gullibility, a naive simplicity to believe everything that is said about anyone, particularly the worst,” is clearly reflected in the rhetoric of those who accuse others of being fascists and dictators. Such strong words can lead to strong and unwanted responses.

Words of forgiveness are also very strong and can bring great healing to our fractured society. The way to confront modern atheism and the increased violence is the same as it has been for 2000 years. St. Francis of Assisi has been credited with saying, “Preach the gospel at all times and, if necessary, use words.”

Live the gospel.