Ken Myers: Cultural heart attack

Ken Myers, author of All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes, is the longtime host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, a bimonthly audio magazine that examines issues in contemporary culture from a framework shaped by Christian conviction.

Four years ago you suffered a heart attack that, doctors say, only 4 percent of sufferers survive. Since the Patrick Henry College students here, like all 20-year-olds, see themselves as immortal, could you talk a bit about that close encounter with mortality? I was 58, in pretty good health, never had high cholesterol. I’d been doing some exercising, was moderately overweight but not horribly so, and I would not have known I was having a heart attack had it not been for the Mayo Clinic website that I happened on, and thought, “Gee, I’m having a heart attack.”

It’s good to do research. I called 911. EMTs put me in the ambulance, called for a helicopter right away, and before the helicopter could arrive, my heart stopped—once in the ambulance, twice in the hospital. I woke up about 11 or 12 hours later in the hospital. My first thought was, “That was a strange dream.” Doctors were concerned about the possibility of significant brain damage and were talking about a four- to six-month recovery time, but the short story is, within 72 hours I was at Whole Foods buying some iced tea on my way home from the hospital.

At least semi-miraculous. It really affected my theology in that I believe prayers are answered before they’re prayed because I’ve met hundreds of people who were praying for me on that day. They were praying after the things that actually saved my life. It was the most dramatic event of my life, and I slept through it. My wife and daughter did not sleep through it. Every now and then we talk about what they were going through, because I have all the benefits of this great miracle in my life and they had all the suffering leading up to it.

I don’t have a good transition to the heart attack our culture has had, so I’ll just ask: Is it fatal? A lot of Christians recognize the disorder in the culture and want to do something about it. The usual response is to do something political—but politics is always downstream of culture. Same-sex marriage, for instance, is expressive of a cultural disorder.

How do we criticize it? One problem: We believe in nothingness—that is, we believe that anterior to our choosing, to our wills, there’s nothing to guide our wills. So sheer willing, the sovereignty of the individual itself, is the ultimate reality. In the vocabulary of sexual preference, like that of the pro-choice movement, choosing is the ultimate reality, and nothing guides our choosing.

‘The word secular used to mean temporal, not theology-free. Only in the 20th century does secular mean a space that is free from theology.’

Justice Anthony Kennedy has made that the leading axiom of American politics. The essence of American freedom, yes. But the Christian account is that love and beauty are the foundational realities. In a lot of postmodern thought the assumption is that violence and chaos are the ultimate foundational realities.

Does the decline of American culture date from the days of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? Roger Scruton, who has written a lot about dance and music, says in modern social dancing people tend to dance at one another instead of with one another. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced with each other, not at each other. Music, all of the arts, are expressions of the underlying imaginative picture of reality. In regard to popular music now, if you ask people why they like this band or this song, they’ll often say, it’s so raw and authentic. Then you ask them what’s good about being raw, unless it’s sushi, and what do they mean by authenticity? You tease that out and you find that it’s unrefined, it’s untrained, and it’s instinctual. So what it means to be human is to be more like my dog.

How do you assess our current cultural response to radical Islam? Ever since 9/11 the dominant response has been: These attacks are evidence that we need to keep religion private. That as soon as religion and politics mix, bad things happen, so we need to further privatize religion. But the idea that religion needs to be kept private already presupposes something about the idea of religion.

A separation of religion and politics. The separation idea is an invention of modernity. The word secular used to mean temporal, not theology-free. Only in the 20th century does secular mean a space that is free from theology: God or the gods have nothing to do with this space. Christians need to understand that as long as we accept the conventional distinction of religious and standard, the deck will always be stacked against us. The marginalization and privatizing of Christian conviction will become more and more severe. I’m grateful for people trying to defend religious liberty, but it’s a stopgap measure. It tacitly assents to the definition of religion that is part of what got us into this mess in the first place.

Is generalizing about “religion” part of the problem? Christians need to stop using the word “religion.” There is no such thing as religion. The typical response to Islamic violence is: This is what religion does when it gets public. But Amish people are not blowing up buildings or shooting people. When you hear about suicide bombers, you don’t say, “It could’ve been a Methodist!” Somebody once did research to find out what all the things called religion have in common, and found out the only thing was the use of candles. But publicly, we’re told we can’t say there’s a great difference between Christian teaching and Muslim teaching.

Why does a sovereign God allow Islam? Peter Leithart after 9/11 suggested speculatively that serious Muslims (the title of the essay was “Islam: Mirror of Christendom”) never got the memo that in the Enlightenment religion must be privatized. We think that’s because they’re more primitive: They need a Reformation and an Enlightenment so they’ll realize religion needs to be privatized. Leithart suggested that Islam is a rebuke to the Western church for allowing the faith of the King of kings and Lord of lords to become privatized and marginalized. It’s a rebuke from a faith that doesn’t have a Trinity or an Incarnation or grace as we understand it. It seems to me it’s not surprising that it will issue more acts of violence than orthodox Christianity.

Beliefs have consequences. That’s not to let Christianity off the hook, by any means, but Christianity has substantive teachings about the nature of God, the nature of God’s relationship to creation, the fact that intra-Trinitarian love is the fundamental reality. This is an opportunity for Christians to say, “We’re not going to live with this generic religion label anymore.” That label is not clarifying; it’s not helpful; it’s not true.