Lost and Found: Rediscovering Christian Truth

by Kenneth Francis (December 2019)

In recent years, I’ve observed that most young people appear to be spiritually lost. They seem to be more in tune with the material world and all that technology and quick-fix pleasures have to offer, but spiritually, I had my doubts till recently when there appeared to be a slight positive shift in Western contemporary culture, which I’ll come to later.

Last month in Gript magazine, Ben Scallan wrote: “For decades, Western celebrity culture has been in a state of absolute moral decay. Hollywood and the mainstream music industry are centered around greed, entitlement, sexual debauchery and drugs. Often the figures in our society that we aspire to be like are more lost and depressed than we are. The blind are leading the blind, and we wonder why young people feel such hopelessness and nihilism.”

But there’s far worse things happening today than Gaga’s vegan friend puking all over her. In a recent YouTube video clip, a mock DIY abortion took place on the counter of a New York bar, as the locals cheered along with the vile act that was splattered in fake blood and the ripping out of a doll fetus from a prosthetic belly.

And at an event last Halloween, 46-year-old model Heidi Klum dressed up as a grotesque, humanoid cyborg alien at an annual bash in, once again, New York City. With false blood and fake body entrails all over her grotesque, flesh-coloured body-suit, she was joined with her husband and friend, who were also wearing weird fake bloodstained costumes.

In Crisis Magazine last Halloween, Sean Fitzpatrick wrote: “The secular Halloween agenda is bent on the disfigurement of folklore figures, turning the mysterious into the mutilated. This deformity focuses on purely physical nature—both the scary and the seductive—leaving out any hint of the spiritual and devaluing those physical things that participate closely in the sacred.”

But back to the reasons why so many people are spiritually lost. For the atheist, there is no *ULTIMATE hope or meaning in life. (*excuse my CAPS, as this word usually falls on deaf ears and closed eyes when read or heard by atheists who either don’t want there to be a God or who don’t understand theology). On such a worldview, all meaning is transient, short-lived, and constantly pauses with the desire for more temporary meaning or pleasure till death.

But back to that seemingly positive shift in the culture. According to The Stream’s Tom Gilson, quoting Glenn T. Stanton, author of The Myth of the Dying Church, Christianity is growing fast around the world. The typical Christian (if there is such a thing) no longer goes to church in South Carolina but in Guangdong, Lagos, Buenos Aires, or in smaller towns or villages in the Global South.

Gilson says Stanton quotes authors John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge, in their 2009 book God is Back: “Today an unsettling worry nags at Western liberals: what if secular Europe (and for that matter secular Harvard and secular Manhattan) is the odd one out? They are right to be worried. It now seems that it is the American model [of Christianity] that is spreading around the world: religion and modernity are going hand in hand, not just in China but throughout much of Asia, Africa, Arabia and Latin America.”

Then there’s the surprising evangelism of the rapper Kayne West, who has millions of young fans (29.4m on twitter). I must admit, it’s quite incredible that West’s new album, Jesus is King, is Number 1 in Los Angeles and beyond. Who would’ve ever thought that such a title, after 2,000 years of persecution and infiltration to destroy Christianity, would reach the top of the music industry charts in 2019?

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