"the greatest bulwark we have against slipping into the cultural groupthink"

It's called The Church, to the chagrin of too many, including me there for far too long:

I’ve mentioned before on these pages Christian Smith’s insightful study on American spirituality, Soul Searching:  The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.  Central to Smith’s provocative findings is the claim that we have a de facto cultural creed, which he calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.  Be nice.  Be healthy.  Feel good.  Dogma’s not important.  Just be nice.  We all believe basically the same things anyway.

I would argue that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism plays more or less the same role in our culture as state Christianity did in Kierkegaard’s Denmark.  And it poses the same sort of threat to the challenging and robust Christianity of the Gospels as did the Danish state Lutheranism of Kierkegaard’s day.

And I’d further argue that the greatest bulwark we have against slipping into the cultural groupthink that Kierkegaard despised is precisely the institution that the nature of his project forces him at times to criticize—the Church.  Not the Danish state church, of course.  The problem with state churches is that they inevitably become accessories of one particular culture; they become the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

If the Church is to provide us with the radical freedom from the Zeitgeist that the Gospel demands, it must be, well, catholic.  This means that in addition to being multi-cultural and multi-ethnic (in the literal and not the merely politically correct sense), it must not become too tied to any particular moment in time, especially the present moment.  Chesterton once referred to tradition as “the democracy of the dead,” and our Tradition is the Holy Spirit’s way of ensuring that the Church remains truly catholic, that it does not simply float along on the fashionable currents of the day like driftwood in a stream.

This means that the Church will find itself in tension with every culture and every age, as it does in our own culture and in our own age.  But, as we should know from reading Kierkegaard, when this tension disappears—when Christianity becomes a garment we wear lightly without much cost or sweat—we have probably left the message of the Gospels somewhere behind.

That is brutal honesty.

Lord have mercy.

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[Locutisprime]

News Flash! The nation has already slipped into 'cultural groupthink.'

What we need is a way out...