What's Wrong with Roddenberry

        Like many of my generation, I was raised on the television series Star Trek, weekly watching Captain Kirk, Spock, and McCoy “boldly go where no man has gone before”.  (A later feminist canon would excise the offending word, and they would boldly go “where no one has gone before”.) I was therefore all the happier to watch the latest Star Trek film Into Darkness.  It was a good enough film and no bad way to blow a few hours on a rainy afternoon.  I enjoyed the examples of homage paid to the original series and was not surprised to see the name of Gene Roddenberry featured prominently in the credits, although he died in 1991.

The world created by Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry was a wonderful one, in which all the nations on earth united to form one harmonious society, with all races and peoples living in peace and prosperity.  War, hatred, crime, and poverty were things of the past.  White Americans worked side by side with Afro-americans, and Russians, and Chinese, and Scots in a single prosperous and progressive community, where no task remained but to venture into the final frontier to seek out new life and new civilizations.   Humans even lived harmoniously with aliens, such as Vulcans (and in the next generation, with Klingons).  Roddenberry deliberately offered this world as a shining vision of what mankind could be and eventually would be. 

This vision shone all the more brightly in 1966 when the original series premiered.  It came into the lives and living rooms of a nation torn by racial violence, and divided by politics and views of the Vietnamese conflict, a nation locked into the Cold War against the U.S.S.R and Communism, and thus it offered welcome relief.  One day not too far away mankind would finally unite and live in peace, and all war, tyranny, and poverty would be things of the past. 

As would be religion.  Roddenberry made no secret that in his shining vision of the future everyone would be atheist, and that the world would be immeasurably better off for it.  Accordingly there was no chaplain on board the Enterprise.  The idea was that religion was one of the things that mankind would inevitably outgrow, and leave behind in the dust-pile of history, along with war and poverty.  Mankind was evolving, and if religion once formed a part of that evolutionary process, it would be outgrown soon enough.  It was only a matter of time, and if we just waited long enough, this shining and glorious future would be ours.

As anyone can see, we are still waiting, and the glorious future of harmony and peace envisioned by Roddenberry seems no nearer now than it was in 1966.  Indeed, at time of writing, it might even be further away, since even after the fall of Communism a new Cold War with Russia seems to loom.  The Middle East remains in upheaval and turmoil, and the gap between the rich and the other 99% grows ever greater.  So, what seems to be the problem?  What’s wrong with Roddenberry’s vision?

It appears clear enough for anyone not totally blinded by the dogmatic ideology of secularism that more than the passage of time is required to bring peace to the human race.  Murder and war remain abiding characteristics of the human race and constants in human history.  War is what we do, and it has been a part of the human story for as long as that story has been told.  If war was simply an unfortunate feature of our passing evolutionary development and something which we eventually outgrow, we would expect that the number and ferocity of wars would lessen somewhat as time progressed.  As a matter of sorry fact, it has not lessened.  Rather, it seems to be actually increasing.  Roddenberry was simply wrong in imagining that mankind would naturally outgrow war and hatred and enter the shining future as a part of evolutionary progress.   It is clear now that time alone will not banish hatred from the human heart.

What will?  In a word, Christ.  The hearts we have are hard and fatally diseased.  What we need is a new heart, a heart of flesh to replace our heart of stone (Ezek. 36:26).  We don’t need more time to evolve; what we need is a new birth, one by water and the Spirit, and a new nature.  Without it, we are doomed to keep on repeating the same pattern of hatred and war that has characterized our species until now, and to be locked into the vicious and endless circle of mutual vengeance.  The Church calls this teaching “original or ancestral sin”, and it teaches, not that we were born guilty, but that we were born into a world of spiritual entropy and mortality, a world where we are drawn always down, a world where selfishness comes easy and virtue comes with difficulty.  It is odd that some people have contradicted this teaching.  As Chesterton once remarked, the Church’s teaching on original sin is the only one of its dogmas that can actually be proved.  And it doesn’t take long to prove it; any book narrating human history provides plenty of examples.  

Roddenberry was right in wanting a better world than the one we have now; he was wrong in thinking that it would come of its own accord.  There is only one hope for the human race and for peace, and only one place where opposites can be united, where the lion lies down with the lamb, the Russian with the American, the black with the white.  That place is the Church of God, where dividing walls have been torn down and divisions transcended, where there is no longer division between Greek or Jew (or possibly between human and Vulcan).  Instead, God has created one new man, with a single new nature (Col. 3:11, Eph. 2:15).   With Christ alone we can boldly go into the future—and not because of our technological superiority, but because the future belongs to Him.

 

The Changing Stream

         I am, as those who know me well will attest, almost pathologically nostalgic, so that if someone created a 12-step programme to cure nostalgia, I would certainly count as a candidate.  Perhaps that is why I googled the name of Linda Meissner.   Meissner was a young farm girl from Iowa who dropped out of her Assemblies of God college in Missouri and eventually found her way out west to Seattle in the late ‘60s, where she became a part of the early Jesus People Movement there.  She gathered a group of intense young converts, calling them the Jesus People Army, and was instrumental in creating in the Seattle area the same sort of Jesus coffeehouse and communes that by then were beginning to dot southern California.  She was, in fact, riding the crest of a coming wave.  She worked with such Jesus People heavy-weights as Duane Pederson and Jack Sparks in that movement. 

        

[Photo: In the center, Linda Meissner]

The Jesus People Movement, liked all movements, has moved, and exists now only in history books and yellowing newspaper clippings.  Duane Pederson and Jack Sparks also moved on.  But not so Linda Meissner.  When my nostalgic snooping on google caught up with her, I found her on You-tube, still thumping the same Jesus People drum.  In her “Official Presentation Video”, she tells us that “In  2011 I heard the word of the Lord saying, ‘Linda, you are to go once again…’ God has given me a great vision!  The Jesus People Army is not dead!  It’s just sleeping.  But Jesus says, ‘Arise! There will be a great army of youth going forth with the good news.’  I plan to raise up another Catacomb coffeehouse in the city of Seattle.  I’m expecting God to do great things!”  The point of the video, of course, and of her website, is to solicit help in pulling this off.

[Photo:  Linda Meissner today]

 Linda’s current plan (read: delusion) is very saddening to see, though I suppose anyone who regularly googles out of nostalgia should expect it.  The success of the Jesus People was based, sociologically-speaking, on the convergence of the openness of the youth in the late ‘60s and the boldness of evangelical Christians in capitalizing upon it.  In those heady and psychedelic days, one could gather a crowd on a beach simply by playing the guitar and singing songs about Jesus, and one then preached to the crowd, Bible in hand, and many would come to accept the Lord.  Anyone trying to repeat the experiment today will attest that such openness from America’s youth has vanished, along with the novelty of long-haired young people talking boldly about asking Jesus into your heart.  The Jesus People succeeded at least in part because of its novelty, and novelty is by definition a fleeting thing.  The wonderful wave that was the Jesus Movement has long since returned to the sea.  Duane Pederson and Jack Sparks had the sense to realize this, and they continued to follow the Lord along other paths, eventually becoming priests in the Orthodox Church.

            Linda’s lesson for us is that, as the proverb has it, one cannot step into the same stream twice.  The water in the stream moves on, and if one were to step into the stream again, it would be into a different stream.  Nostalgia is okay as an occasional pastime for aging clergy, but it is fatal if it becomes the foundation for a way of life.  Each day when we rise from our beds, we look into a new stream, for each day has new opportunities for service, new things to learn, and new people to meet who need God’s love.  The things we did and learned in the past were never meant to be the walls in which we live, but the foundation on which we continue to build.  Memory makes a great comforter, but a poor master.  It is good to share common memories with friends and family, and rejoice in what God has done.  We pour the wine and remember and drink to the grace of God.  But after the cup has been drained, it is time to move on.  New work will make for more memories, and we look ever forward.  This is an especially important lesson for those of us approaching what are euphemistically called “the golden years”.  We should never stop working for God, or accepting new assignments for the Kingdom.  We can, I suppose, write our memoirs, if we think anyone will be fool enough to read them.  But more important is what we write in our day-timers and desk-calendars.  Each day God gives us a new stream.  Let us step into it boldly and with joy.  Anyone who has been part of the Jesus People would understand.

What's With Russia?

             Of late Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin have been in the news.  Putin recently signed into a law a new decree banning “homosexual propaganda”, effectively outlawing Gay Pride parades and other forms of public endorsement of homosexual lifestyle.  Also banned is the adoption of children by gay parents.  Homosexuality itself, which was decriminalized in Russia only since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, remains decriminalized.  Nonetheless, to say the least, people in the west are concerned over what appears to them to be unwarranted repression of homosexuals in Russia and unconscionable suppression of free speech.   What are we Orthodox in North America to think of all this?  Are there any lessons that we can draw from what is happening so far away in a country with a very different history and outlook than our own?

            Inevitably, most of the people weighing in on the debate from America approach the events from the perspective of rights—the right of free speech, the right of gay couples to adopt children if they should choose, etc.  American framing much of this debate in terms of rights is inevitable, I suggest, because that is the lens through which America sees the world.  It is part of the bold and grand experiment that is American democracy, and it is a new way of looking at things.  (Note:  not a bad way necessarily, just a new way.)  American democracy is the New World step-child of the Enlightenment and French democracy, which itself was born in the blood of the French Revolution, and exulting in “liberty, equality, fraternity”, even if these noble goals were pursued for a while through the guillotine.  America is arguably greater and certainly more globally influential than France, and so when one thinks of democracy it is usual for people to think of America as the land of the free, not France.  Somewhat ironically, thanks to American power in the world, the lingua franca is now American English.  But the global influence of America should not blind us to the historical fact that American-style democracy is still comparatively new in world history, and for many people outside the U.S. the jury is still out on the question of whether or not the American preoccupation with rights is as workable as many people in America think it is.  At least that seems to be the perspective of some in Russia, including Putin.

            But if protecting individual rights (including the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) is not the main task of a government, what is?  Older governments, including the government of what is now called Byzantium, would have replied, “justice”, including as one of its main components, the promotion of virtue.  That is, rulers were concerned to discover what was just and virtuous behaviour and then to outlaw unjust and unvirtuous behaviour.  Obviously since rulers were fallen, they often made a mess of it, like all men make a mess of everything.  But attaining virtue remained the goal.  The question for them was not, “What are my rights as a citizen?”, but rather, “How should I live as a citizen?”  The focus was on the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice.

            I am not saying of course that there is no overlap between the two approaches to law, or no commonality between the ancient way of looking at society and our modern one.  And I am as happy as anyone else living in the west to have the freedom to speak (or blog, like I am now) and not fear the policeman’s knock on my door.   But I am aware that our modern American way is not universal or of any great antiquity. 

            I am not Russian, have never been to Russia, and know all too few Russians.  (The ones I do know are wonderful, and I wish I knew more of them.)  But my guess is that Russia looks westward across the wide sea into the New World and sees not so much a shimmering example of freedom as it does a rising tide of immorality.  In the New World (let’s include my own Canada here too), homosexuality is rapidly becoming normalized everywhere and is the new status quo.  This is an astonishing and rapid revolution, especially when one considers that just a few years ago (at least in Canada) it was still a criminal offense to be a homosexual, and that Gay Pride parades were unthinkable, much less gay marriage, or gay and lesbian clergy.   Within a few decades things have changed dramatically and are continuing to change.  I predict that by the time my toddler grandchildren are able to vote gay marriage will be universal and normal throughout North America, and that speaking publically against homosexuality will have become a crime.  It is this rising tide and this cultural revolution that Russia sees, and which it wishes to avoid.  Whether passing such laws is the best way to go about avoiding it is another question.  But I suspect that since Russia has been heir to Byzantium longer than they have been heir to western democracy, they see our North American situation more in terms of clear and present danger than they do in terms of clearly threatened rights.

            So, what is the best way forward for us here in North America?  I do not think that taking the Russian approach of banning these things by law makes any sense here.  We are too preoccupied by “rights”, and anyway the homosexual genie is now out of the cultural bottle so that turning back the clock is not an option even if it were the right thing to do.  I suggest therefore that whatever we do in North America about our laws, we also recognize that the gay cultural revolution has in fact taken place, and that we tell our children, grandchildren, and catechumens that Orthodox Christians must now live counter-culturally.  It is not as if this commitment to counter-cultural living is a new thing.  It was the norm when we lived as a minority in the pagan Roman Empire.  We survived just fine then; we can survive just fine now, but we need to face up to the present reality.  Christendom has sunk like Atlantis.  We who wish to be saved are in the Ark.