by Herbert Schlossberg
Those now living in a post-Christian world can find the New Testament especially meaningful because it was written in a pre-Christian world. We are in a position to read it with more comprehension, perhaps, than any generation of Western Christians in a millennium and a half. We can gain from it some of the peculiar understandings that Africans and Asians in the last few generations have been able to derive: the understanding of subversives in an alien culture. The invitation spoken at the inception of the Christian church has more meaning for us than many millions of our predecessors: "Save yourselves from this crooked generation" (Acts 2:40).
The repeated New Testament call for separation demands that we refuse to think and act like those around us. Mass media have turned what otherwise would be a vast heterogeneous collection of subcultures into a homogeneous unity. Just as life in a small village squeezes its inhabitants into a common mold, so the pressures of the global village require a singular conformity. The drive for respectability, the concern not to be thought odd, makes us vulnerable to the errors of fashion, of snobbery, of servility, of hypocrisy.
Models to which one is expected to conform derive from particular visions of reality. In the Brave New World, the Bible and other Christian literature are declared to be pornographic, a monument to [Aldous] Huxley's extraordinary artistic vision. Once you believe that sensual happiness is ultimate, the literature that insists on truth for its own sake, on moral responsibility, and on renunciation of self for the sake of others must be seen as abnormal and subversive of your view of reality and, hence, normality. The main characteristic of the Savage in the novel, the trait that distinguishes him from his society and makes him fit only to be kept as a specimen in a zoo, is that he has a Christian conscience.
Society's most important institutions serve the socializing function, making people better balanced and adjusted to the way things are. And that is why they are so dangerous. All education is of necessity value-laden, and the public school is the most powerful of these institutions of conformity. Its goal is to instill society's norms and to discredit deviant ideas. The best elements of the Christian school movement—often dismissed as an expression of racism by the humanist defenders of the status quo—is a determined No! by parents to the homogenization of American life, a recognition that the model to which their children are intended to be conformed has become evil...
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