Opportunity Knocks

Now is our moment.

Now. Not in ten years time, not in twenty years time. But now. The West in all its glitzy self-confidence is imploding before our very eyes. And this represents a fantastic opportunity for the Gospel.

It is not bin Laden who has rocked Western confidence. On the whole, bin Laden has done the opposite - he has made us more self-righteous, more certain that Western democracy is the one true path. No, even though much of the world thinks that the West is materialistic, morally bankrupt and sexually depraved, we, on the whole, do not have ears to hear the criticism, nor hearts attuned to the misery we inflict, never mind an inclination to alleviate the misery that, yes, some national leaders inflict on their own people. It is misery nevertheless. And none of the G8 nations is giving the level of international aid that they promised.

No, the West is in trouble not because of any external threat. The West is in trouble because there is a vacuum at its core. The West is now beginning to reap the whirlwind of its flight from God, and its disdain for the very idea of truth.

Few events illustrate the bitter fruit of that disdain for absolute truth better than the circumstances surrounding the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. What is startling is not that two very large companies could be run in such an appalling way; what is startling is not the internal culture of Enron which bred fear and greed in gargantuan proportions; what is startling is not that some highly placed individuals were lying. No, what is startling is that their auditors behaved with such dishonesty. Auditors have only one thing to sell: their honesty. Without honesty, they are out of business. As Andersens, Enron's auditors, may well soon be.

How then could a business that trades in honesty so easily forfeit its key asset? Presumably because there was no deeply felt personal commitment to honesty. Indeed, for decades, business schools didn't even have ethics courses. That might not have mattered when everyone shared the basic view that truth existed, and that lying was wrong, but it matters very much when people have been educated not to believe in the possibility of 'truth', and when lying is increasingly perceived to be bad only if you get caught.

Business needs Trust

A while back, the University of Westminster conducted a survey among UK Board Directors, and discovered the saddening, but not surprising, discovery that the majority of Board Directors said that they would do something unethical if they thought they could get away with it. They had no inner conviction about right or wrong; they were simply concerned with managing risk. Truthfulness does not matter. What matters is results. Now this may work for some individuals for some of the time, but it doesn't work for business as a whole, and it certainly doesn't work for big business. Here's why: big business needs investors. And investors make judgments about their investment decisions on the basis of audited accounts. If you can't trust the numbers, you have no basis for making an investment - you might as well buy a lottery ticket. And if people don't invest, business can't invest, and won't expand.

Although some individual businesses can thrive with dishonest policies, business as a whole cannot. And nor can societies. Trust is the basic building block of all relationships. And trust is in very short supply. And this explains why President Bush is so worried by the collapse of those businesses, and why he has pushed through much tighter legislation.

So what is the connection between the decline in truthfulness and the flight from God? And why is this such an opportunity for the Gospel?

The Theory: Part 1

When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe anything.

Look around. People are not uninterested in 'spirituality,' in the transcendent, in the occult, in magic, in crystals and hugging trees, and a host of new age variations on old Eastern themes. No, people will believe anything. Including the insight that "Life has enough embarrassing moments," so "don't let your mobile be one of them." Imagine that: your reputation in tatters because your mobile is the wrong model. Happiness used to be a cigar called Hamlet; now it's a mobile called Nokia 8310.

The Theory: Part 2

When people stop believing in absolute truth, societies have no legitimate basis for ethical decision-making, and people become less truthful.

Well, look at Britain. As we have moved away from our Judeo-Christian heritage, as we have rejected as a culture the idea that there might be one way, one truth and one life, so too we have seen an astonishing decline in trust in our major institutions, in our leaders, in our employers and indeed in one another.

At the same time, we have seen a huge rise in the pressure to lie and to spin. And the more you lie, the easier it is to lie. As Paul makes clear in Romans, the first step on the road to moral degradation is the suppression of the truth (Romans 1:18ff), and the progressive suppression of the truth leads to the progressive dulling of the conscience. The results are clear: the wages of spin is the death of trust. And without trust, relationships, businesses, societies just don't work.

Now, liberal moral philosophers have been running around for a century trying to construct a set of ethical principles, without reference to absolute truth. Which is like trying to construct a skyscraper without foundations. It can't be done. Because if there is no agreed starting point which underpins your ethical framework, you are simply constructing one individual person's view of a moral framework. And who is to say that it is better or worse than the next person's? How can it be criticised? Without some external point of reference, it can't be. As Annie Lenox sang in 'Sweet Dreams', "Who am I to disagree?" So truth becomes relative. Here's my truth, show me yours. It's true for you. But not for me. Which of course is illogical. The cup is either empty or it isn't. Jesus either died on the Cross or he didn't. And when there is no truth, there is no basis for morality. As Rowling's Voldemort put it, "There is no good or evil, only power."

Now the problem for the atheists and the agnostics and the liberals about the current decline in trust and truthfulness in Western democracy is that the Western human beings are not flourishing as a result of the flight from God and the disdain for truth - they are increasingly alienated, isolated, depressed and weary. Furthermore, Western society as a whole has now reached a point where it desperately needs a shared ethical framework. However, the atheists, agnostics and liberals have failed to provide one.

If you get rid of God, you shatter truth, and trust crumbles. And when trust crumbles, capitalism doesn't work. So here's a surprise: capitalism needs God. Thankfully, God doesn't need capitalism, though he may well be prepared to work with it.

The Time is Now

So, why is 'now' a great time for the Gospel?

Because when a culture cannot answer its own questions, it is much more likely to be open to alternatives. The West has for decades basked in self-satisfied, self-confidence. Never mind the social data, just look at the economy: capitalism works. We don't need God. But now the West is beginning to realise that without a God of truth, the economy may not work, Capitalism will founder. As Charles Coulson puts it:

"The lesson of history is that capitalism (or any other economic system, for that matter) is only beneficent when it is subject to moral restraints derived ultimately form religious truth."

The West needs a God of truth.

Furthermore, Western liberals promised that kicking God out of the public arena would not only deliver prosperity, but happiness. It hasn't. The yearning for something more remains. This is the opportunity. Paul recognised a similar opportunity as he walked round Athens:

"For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you" (Acts 17:23).

Paul's close observation of Athenian culture recognised that, despite all the gods the Athenians had, there was something missing. And that yearning for something else was expressed in the altar to the unknown god, the god who had, according to their own history, rescued them when no other could. This was Paul's opportunity. He saw the culture's dissatisfaction with itself, the need it could not satisfy, the truth that had escaped it. And he demonstrated that the Gospel of the resurrected Christ was indeed the answer to that need.

It is not just Enron that is bankrupt. So is Western liberalism. It can still put on a good show, but the writing is on the Wall Street TV monitors.

They don't have the answer.

The Church has got to recover confidence in our God as the Creator, the One who knows best what His world needs. God is truth. And although we must recognise that many contemporary people are suspicious of anyone who claims to know the truth, that should only make us think carefully about how we make our case. It shouldn't deter us from living it and arguing it. Christ is the cornerstone, and you can't build a healthy society without Him.

And now is the time to proclaim it.

Mark Greene

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