A Novelist Speaks of Cultural Prejudice

Mere Anarchy

Larry Waiwode used to be a celebrated novelist and literary figure in the US.  Now, not so much.  By the time he was writing and published his third novel (Poppa John) his Christian faith became more apparent.  Suddenly, he was not so attractive to critics and the literati.  In a later piece, Acts, he explains how he came to embrace the Lord Jesus Christ:

For me, a writer aware of how much more complex each book becomes with each sentence added, it was the clarity of the patterns and structure in Scripture and their ability to intermesh with one another through as many levels as I could imagine that convinced me that the Bible couldn't be the creation of a man or any number of men, and was certainly not the product of separate men divided by centuries, but was of another world: supernatural.  I was forced to admit under no pressure but the pressure of the text itself that it could be only what it claimed it was, the Word of God. [Cited by the author in the essay entitled, "Using Words, a Continual Spiritual Exercise," Words for Readers and Writers: Spirit Pooled Dialogues, (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2013),  p.51].

In the same essay, "Using Words . . ." he explains that he never had to make a convoluted leap of faith.  Such an idea belongs to the irrational school of philosophy (Kant, Kierkegaard).  Rather, "[t]he Word chooses and calls its listeners--'Those with ears to hear, let them hear!' . . . ."  Clearly, the Word called Waiwode, and its call could not be gainsaid.

Waiwode goes on to charge the West with a burgeoning anti-Christianism:

More Christians were martyred in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen added together.  Ponder that.  Christians are discriminated against by universities and intellectual gatekeepers, even on the daily news, where anybody who takes the Scriptures seriously, whether Baptist or Greek Orthodox or Catholic, is a right-wing fundamentalist.  A state religion reigns and its purpose seems to be to banish or at the minimum denigrate Christianity.  (Waiwode, "Using Words . . . ", op cit. p. 53)

This anti-Christianism necessarily amounts to a rejection of the past, of our heritage.  In that culture rejection, the centre of Western civilization produced by the Christian faith, cannot hold.

You don't have to be a seminarian or law student to understand that Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy are the basis of common law; that the religious leader Oliver Cromwell enacted the first anti-discrimination laws that opened England to Jews; or that the commandments of the Pentateuch--including prohibitions against murder, slavery, rape, kidnapping, and the abuse of women, to list a few--are the basis of what most of us today consider inviolable human rights. (Ibid.)

Take way the Scriptures and reject the Lord Jesus Christ and there is absolutely nothing firm upon which to ground human rights.  There are only sky hooks upon which to hand one's passing prejudices. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
W. B. Yeats