Hello, friends!
Thanks for making the choice to fill up your inbox with one more email when I have in no way earned this position. I hope to make it worth your while.
It gets lighter as it goes along.
The Part Where There’s an Essay:
Thought Trends in 2021
Recently I’ve been trying to put into words the thought trends that I see influencing the evangelical Christian church in 2021. There are more, not fewer, than this. As a writing exercise and to encourage dialogue, I’ve attempted to keep the definitions brief.
To be clear, I’ve seen each of these in my conversations with my various communities. They are not pulled from internet interactions with strangers. They are in play in the minds of my friends, family, and myself. Here's the first one, a greatest hit from your friend and mine, Jack.
Temporal Provincialism
CS Lewis used this term on the eve of WWII to describe a tendency in the people around him at the time. A provincial person is one who thinks chiefly of their “province” -- the place where they live -- and nowhere else. Someone who has never traveled, or given a passing thought to, the lives or needs of people elsewhere, is thinking provincially.
Everyone in every age is subject to temporal provincialism: we think we’re smarter than people of other generations. I sometimes call this chronological snobbery. We unwittingly think that people of other times fell prey to sickness, war, or tragedy because they didn’t know as much as we do -- an appalling statement when you look at it. In the process, we forget that we are susceptible to sickness, war, or tragedy. We convince ourselves that it can’t happen to us.
Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve observed disbelief at the fact that something like this could be happening to Americans in the Year of our Lord 2021. Of course, it’s hard to believe that you’re living through a pandemic -- something that you read about in history books. When covid-19 was first rearing its head here in the United States, I believed that it would be contained to the Seattle area, where the first outbreak made the news. I held a vague belief that “stuff like that doesn’t happen here.”
The most destructive step of this provincialism is the next one: the outright rejection of reality. “Something must be going on...” I've heard believers speculate. Hospitals are padding the numbers for profit. It’s not really that bad. Because people in the year 2021 are smarter than pandemics -- or so the underlying logic says. So we don’t need to take any further action. We’re smarter than that. It can’t really be happening.
The cure for temporal provincialism is, in part, to read history. Since we’re in a pandemic, you might start with the Spanish Flu pandemic. You will quickly see that it lasted two years. This should quickly dispel protests of “something must be going on; when is it going to end?!” What is going on is: there is a pandemic; there has been one in the past; there will be one in the future; it has lasted at least this long before, sometimes it has lasted longer.
The second cure is said more succinctly: humility. To assume that we are somehow above or beyond suffering incurred by humans in other generations is fundamentally proud.
For the Anglophiles
(Will this be a recurring feature of this newsletter? It’s possible. I have a lot of material.)
Tomorrow (November 5th) is Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Gunpowder Night. It’s the remembrance of when the English Parliament was almost blown sky-high. A few years ago, Richard Hammond (of Top Gear fame) did a reenactment of what might have happened if The Gunpowder Plot succeeded. I have no idea if it’s accurate, but if you like casual history mixed up with loud noises (this happens to be my family’s sweet spot), here’s an hour of enjoyment.
Reads & Listens of the Week
“America is confronting two powerful illiberal movements, and where you stand on their relative threats can depend greatly on where you live.” David French writes on Norman Rockwell, Trump’s wall, and illiberalism.
An interview with Andrew Peterson about his newest book.
Reply-All had an interesting episode this week about how a TikTok trend actually went viral. Spoiler: it was the people scared of the trend who made it go viral.
From the BBC: Why Mandatory Vaccination is Nothing New
Closer to Home
This week on the blog I published an article about a few friends who had babies in 2020. It took a special kind of grit and grace to do that.
If you’ve begun shopping for the holidays, here’s a gift guide I put together a few years ago.
“To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvelous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.” — Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet