The Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:
Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the “pursuit of happiness” a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make dally concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”. Templeton Prize Lecture, 10 May 1983 (London).
Most of us have never been in a landslide. I know I haven’t. So I needed to look up “how to survive a landslide“. There are only three options:
- Run at a right angle and try to get to the outside of it
- Get to the rooftop
- Cover yourself with something strong
Solzhenitsyn said there was a “landslide of concessions” being made in the West (in 1983!). Those concessions to godlessness or “secularism” as it is more politely known have only multiplied since then. The tremors are unmistakable
The Trees are Tilting
One of the warning signs for a coming landslide is that that trees tilt. Normally, the stability of the ground is able to uphold tall trees, utility poles and any other high structures. When a landslide is going to come the earth beneath the trees shifts and the trees begin to tilt.
Living in a commuter community you can expect that the tremors of change in the cities may take a long time to reach you. But I’ve found that the trees are tilting. An example of this is how I was informed that the public library in my ultra-conservative town is hosting the drag queen storytimes for children.
I cite this, simply to note that in every sphere of public life, reaching beyond the dense urban centres to the family-laden enclaves of the suburbs, an ideology is being promoted that undermines biological nature and the responsibility to protect children from sexualized grooming.
The modest mandate of the public library (to lend books) inflates with ideological purposes foreign to it. So we have to conclude that manipulation of the foundations is sweeping through. The trees are tilting.
Alarmism and Anti-Alarmism
In any natural disaster, whether it’s impending or engulfing you, there is a temptation to panic. Fear of a landslide can cause people to think irrationally. They may see the cracks in the foundations or hear the rumblings, but instead of staying calm and using the time that they have to make a wise plan of action, they shout and scream and rail against the coming landslide. This is the alarmist response. It wastes precious time and energy decrying reality, not dealing with it.
The anti-alarmist impulse can paralyze a person. Since the landslide is so large, and so horrible, a person simple escapes into a false reality. We know that one of the great challenges during wildfire disasters is convincing people to leave their homes. Often, they have let themselves have escapist fantasies that the danger is not that bad, and the alarmists are exaggerating. What they don’t realize is that the danger is real, and their ignorance of it puts them in danger too.
If we take the categories of alarmist and anti-alarmist, they can helpfully clarify how many people are responding to the landslide. For example, there are Christians who see the landslide coming, but their response is to angrily decry it without giving too much thought to how to respond wisely. Their alarmism is not constructive. Their alarm scales up in its confirmation bias as the landslide gets bigger and bigger, but the only positive conclusion they offer is “I told you so”.
Likewise, the anti-alarmist impulse is prevalent among Christians. This has happened among pastors I know. Recently, after hearing a talk on the landslide issues of our day– sexuality and ethics, a pastor confessed that he had been intentionally ignoring the landslide all around him. He was afraid to bring up the reality of how bad things really were. And he was also afraid that his anti-alarmist church would view his attempts at pointing to the landslide as so much hysteria.
So we have to recognize that both the alarmist and anti-alarmist impulses are either misdirected or escapist. For Christians, when parachurch ministries engage in polemics for entertainment, they are merely alarmists who distract from constructive preparations by cleverly shouting the obvious. At the same time, evangelical denominations and institutions tend to be anti-alarmist in bent. They are so quick to tsk-tsk the alarmists, that act blissfully unaware of the landslide, and trust their own self-righteousness as a clever enough solution to any disaster that may come. Sadly they are hopelessly deluded.
Failed Emergency Plans
Not everyone has responded to the landslide in thoughtless ways. Yet many of the emergency responses people have had are flawed or failed.
When you think about a landslide, one failed emergency response might be to run away from the landslide, thinking that if you can just stay ahead of the landslide you’ll be okay.
When it comes to our modern-day, the two groups who are gripped by the “keep ahead of the landslide” plan are the Boomer generation and the corporations (and their politicians of course). Both of these groups (with lots of overlap between them), have successfully run ahead of the landslide up until now. They have been alarmed at the rumblings, but have had false confidence in their ability to outrun it.
If the landslide undermines monogamous male-female marriage, then Boomers and corporations will start with accepting divorce, then move to a series of what Solzhenitzn called, “concessions”, such as co-habitation, then abortion, then intentional childlessness, then gay relationships, then gay marriages, and then gender-fluid ‘unions’. At each point, the Boomers and the corporations have been swift enough to run ahead just enough.
But you can’t outrun a landslide.
This is why noted lesbian activist, the former tennis star Martina Navratilova is being overwhelmed by the transgender movement. She thought she could run ahead of the landslide, but her lesbianism is no longer enough. Her panic is expressed when she hastily offers obeisance and apology toward the trans movement lest she be consumed. Examples are accruing, but a common theme is how Boomers or corporations have successfully run ahead of the landslide, but now are getting completely run over.
Another failed emergency plan is the person who runs toward the landslide, like a child can run into a small wave and hop over its height. This is typified in the bombastic culture warrior who assumes that the good old days are just beyond the shifting ground under his feet. The nostalgia for lost pasts drives a person to irrationally seek to run into the slide, thinking that they have the ability to withstand the wave or to keep their heads above it and exit on the far side relatively unscathed.
The hubris of this approach appeals to many people and might be exemplified the most in the populist movements of Trumpism, Brexit and others around the world. Often the idea is that if a person can only muster up enough resistance to the wave, that person will be able to stand against it and prevail.
But since the landslide is more than a small political wave that laps the beaches of our day, resistance to it is futile. It is a wave of a zeitgeist that is deep and broad that can’t be hopped over, you’ll only be crushed.
What to Do in Disaster
There is no sense wasting breath decrying the landslide endlessly, or acting as if it’s all much ado about nothing. It won’t help to try to stay a few paces ahead of it, nor can you run at it with your fist raised in foolish rage. So what to do?
As the wiki informed me, you can run at 90 degrees from it, get to the rooftops and wait it out, or you can hide under something strong and hope you don’t get crushed or suffocated.
The 90 Degree Run
The first option seems to be the best. Evacuate the area of the landslide with a realistic view of its scope and danger. Run at 90 degrees and try to get somewhere in your life, your church, your society where you can have peace and rest again.
This first option recognizes that things will never be the same again in landslide’s path. This might be the most frightening dread of all for people. When they realize that they must leave everything behind and get away, they become displaced refugees, socially, ideologically, and even perhaps physically.
I spoke with someone who was contemplating leaving his country because of the landslide of social and political changes that are happening. He said that his great-grandparents left their country to come to a better one. Why wouldn’t he consider uprooting and moving too?
Yet even if a person remains in their country, in the same society, they have to make radical decisions about their lives. The 90 degree run must take place in the church they join, the job they do, the schooling they give, and the priorities they hold.
History is full of people who had to make these 90 degree runs. From the earliest days of the Christian church, persecution resulted in martyrdoms, yes, but also in radical flight. The Christians left their homes and in the case of the Jewish Christians, their societal networks, in order to reform them in new ways and new places. Whether it was refugees moving to Calvin’s Geneva, the Huegenot flight from France, or the Pilgrims departure to the Americas, there have been many people who have made radical choices to try to get to the outside of the landslide.
The Rooftop
The second option in a landslide is to get to the rooftop. If you’ve ever seen pictures of people who have been caught in a landslide, the survivors remain on their roofs for long periods of time, while all that is around them lies devastated by floods and mud.
In the landslide of our time, there are people who know there isn’t time to get out. They are trapped. They have either ignored the warning signs, or they have acted irrationally and are now caught.
People who are caught in our landslide are those who tried to ‘manage’ what Albert Mohler has called, “the sexual revolution”. Often people who are caught are those who are Boomers with career capital tied to institutions that are already engulfed in the landslide.
If your salary or pension is tied to one of those “tilting trees” then you likely will be hesitant to flee until it’s too late. However, some people will realize the danger, and all they can do is cut ties with their previous security (salary, pension, career status), and try to survive.
Survival on the rooftop, like all survival will involve a great restriction of life to the bare essentials. The Christian believer will become focussed locally, on their own growth in Christ, their family’s training in the faith, their local church’s order and faithfulness, and a sustainable vocation that meets their basic needs.
Like anyone who is in this position, the rooftop survivor of the landslide is not in a position to flourish. But they can survive. What they need to prepare for is to take enough provisions with them so that they can last through the initial devastation, and also the enduring aftermath. This is similar to what Rod Dreher has advocated as The Benedict Option.
It can be difficult for comfortable Western Christians to imagine a society in the aftermath of the landslide. But history is the best guide. Whether the biblical history of Israel and its fall, or the collapse of the Roman Empire, or more recently, the capitulations under Nazism or the landslide of the Russian Revolution. In each case, the aftermath of the landslide was utterly different than life before it swept through. Christians must use the wisdom of history, and the recognition of the common, fallen nature of mankind, to anticipate the possibility of a landslide that defaces all we have known in our lifetime. Getting to the rooftop might be an option that is still available to us.
Hide Under Something Strong
The most desperate measure is still better than none at all. For the person in a landslide, they might be completely caught off guard. They might be totally unaware of how engulfing the landslide will be. And when it comes, they are swallowed up.
In those brief moments, a person may be able to hide under something strong. Maybe they can have just enough of an air pocket to keep from suffocating. Maybe they can have just enough protection to keep from being crushed. But their hope is that someone else will find them and rescue them.
Thankfully, the gospel message is the strongest shield that anyone can hide under. In our cultural moment, we already see how people who have been engulfed by the landslide have found rescue from the only One who could possibly do so, Jesus Christ. Who are the survivors? The formerly gay, or trans or racists, or exploiters or adulterers. Or as Paul put it:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God.
1 Cor 6:10-11 NAS
Already in gospel-shielded churches, there are people entering who had been swept up in the landslide, who had only survived its devastating perversions by a miracle, the miracle of faith in Christ.
Constructing an Emergency Disaster Plan
If you hear the rumblings, feel the tremors and see the cracking foundations, you may still have time to act wisely and make realistic plans to survive and hopefully thrive.
A constructive plan will involve the following:
- Seeking after the Triune God, according to the Word of God.
- Catechizing yourself and your family with the Scripture, theology and song.
- Investing in the local church and it’s biblically mandated mission. Support biblical soundness in pastors, and promoting the training of new pastors.
- Believe in God as Creator, and the nature which he has assigned to mankind.
- Uphold the unity and distinction of male and female created in the image of God.
- Preserve and promote fathers in families.
- Protect and prioritize mothers in families.
- Untether yourself from institutions or structures that have given you security, but are being engulfed by the landslide.
- Develop parallel networks for trade and service which are not dependent on the infrastructure that may be wiped away by the landslide.
- Pray for miracles of deliverance from the landslide, and in its aftermath.
May God have mercy on us all.
