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| Jon
Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus
minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal
and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's
third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines,
and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity
Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays,
and Fridays. | | Where
were we? |
|
Taking
up where we left off last
Friday, I have a new wild theory or what Herb Caen used to call a "sodden
thought." I've long questioned how it is that socialism—even Communism—is
so popular in relatively "religious" countries like Italy, Greece, and more recently,
Spain, considering that "welfarism leads to totalitarianism," as was established
here last time. And also as proposed then, totalitarianism is ever competing in
the life of the faithful with devotion to their higher God. If Christ is your
Lord, there's no room for another lord like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Caesar. So
being God-fearing would seem to rule out supporting any political platform that
promises temporal security of the welfare sort. My new "sodden
thought" is a possible answer to those nagging questions. And it's related to
an earlier train of thought I mentioned in this forum. I said I suspected that
those Americans who feared the Russian people would not be able to endure the
hardships of an economy far lower and slower than that in the west, were wrong.
The Russians are not only accustomed to suffering hardships under 70 years of
Bolshevism, Stalin, Khrushchev, and the rest, but they are even philosophically
predisposed to put up with a higher level of hardship than to us in the west seems
reasonable. It's because of the severe ascesis
that Russian Orthodoxy advocated and its faithful practiced for many centuries
before the Bolsheviks took over. Getting by without comforts can be an entry to
godliness by making those in dire straits call out for salvation. It encourages
them to pray more, and praying more, they believe, is the highest calling of the
Christian life. My new insight—or guess, if it's not
a genuine insight—is that many of the believing Christians in places like
Italy, Greece, Spain (and Ireland), are not all that averse to deprivation, and
a tolerable amount of hardship. In fact, I'm betting that enough of them welcome
such a lifestyle that they're willing to put up with the socialist and Communist
parties in their midst and even in some cases vote for them, partly because they
know such utopians are sure to make things tougher. Consumerism as practiced in
the United States, they've been given to think, is our downfall, and they don't
want to follow us down that path to perdition. Though "consumerism"
and our hyper-individualism can keep us off the straight and narrow path to salvation
(and in general we certainly do not pray as much or as unselfishly as we should),
I don't believe these human weaknesses are anywhere as perverse as voting for
socialistic parties and their policies of stealing from the haves to funnel a
fraction of their take to those who have not. But that's not today's topic, and
it's irrelevant to the fact that in many other parts of the world, this is how
we are regarded. At one point—when I added Ireland to the list of countries
willing to suffer more than we would—I almost added Poland, too. But I doubt
that the Poles would vote for a socialist or Communist government now; I think
that through the teachings of the late Great John Paul II, they now "get
it." And I really don't think Ireland would go socialist or Communist; it's
closer to the American and British Democrats in political and economic philosophy.
As far back as when Dostoyevsky was writing what was then
the world's best literature—a century and a half ago—the Russian Orthodox
had this attitude toward America and its Protestant culture. They were wrong then,
and now when fully half of the Orthodox in America are converts from that hated
Protestantism, and most of them aren't condemning their Protestant roots, maybe
there's a glimmer of hope that these attitudes can change. But it will be a long
time coming and, speaking in strictly temporal terms, in all that time the "religiousness"
of places like Spain, Greece, Italy...Russia...will be giving way to more and
more secularism and the socialists will continue gaining. Webmaster
Jon Kennedy A
complete index of Jon Kennedy's Jonals for 2001 - 2005 |
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