Sleepless in Chapel Hill, or...

...Conflicted Over Misguided Meta-Narratives. But that sounded too preachy as a title.

On the one hand, I agree with C.S. Lewis that, like in math, there is only one correct answer, but some answers are much closer to correct than others. So Deism, for example, is closer to correct than hedonism. The "results" for the individual and society are vastly improved the closer people get to the correct answer. So a society full of deists, with some understanding of a higher power and the moral law, will be much better off than a society full of hedonists who are only looking for the next 'feel good' moment.

On the other hand, being in the Bible belt again reminds me of the unique challenges of trying to do ministry in a culture that is overly-innoculated with religious talk, much of it putting itself forward as Christian. One of the most refreshing things about my experience working with college students in Richmond, VA, at Virginia Commonwealth University (the fraying edge of the Bible belt, and VCU particularly attracted a more artsy crowd that was more overtly hostile to Christianity) was the lack of Christian pretense. Christians were glad to be Christians and those who weren't didn't try to pretend that they were. It made things from a ministry perspective much cleaner. We knew what we were about. But the social and moral fabric of the community on the whole was much more thin. Certainly not to say that all students here at UNC are upstanding citizens, but even the vestiges of churched-ness has some mitigating effect on some students behavior.

So the "God and Country" meta-narrative of Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" propelled people to supreme sacrifice and selflessness and I'm freely expressing my opinion on this blog because of their deaths--even if at points "God" and "Country" were conflated, confused, or simply fused into the same thing. Again, from a ministry perspective the work in this environment might be more challenging because it's nearly impossible to distinguish true faith from nationalistic pride. The "Consumerism" meta-narrative yields tragic-terrible fruit in our country and in people's lives, but the call to repent and believe is a more resoundlingly clear and distinctive call against the grain of muddled me-ism.