Al Gore's tobacco road

Human Life Review, Fall 1997 by Murchison, William

What can the missing element be if not a theology of life? A spiritual theology as opposed to a purely physical one; a theology of soul to complement, sometimes to override, a theology of pure flesh and muscle.

Life that you can see and touch, indeed leave fingerprints upon; life stretchable, compressable, expandable-with such life secular society is wonderfully equipped to deal. Life fully formed; sweating on the treadmill, performing a hundred push-ups, signing an anti-cigarette petition, voting for Al Gore; above all, perhaps, engaged in acts of sexual fulfillment: here is what the expiring 20th century means by meaningful life.

The secularity and materialism of the century gleam in every pore. Materialism says, in essence, what counts is the present moment. What is here and now is the thing that matters: these muscles, these organs. The barely formed (as with fetuses), the gradually disintegrating (as with the seriously afflicted and the dying) reduce to spirit much more than body. In matters of pure spirit-a non-material commodity that no one can seewho can truly arbitrate? The owner, comes back the answer. Who else? The womb-landlady, vital and vigorous, as against her troublesome tenant. The pain-wracked, or simply bone-tired, sufferer as opposed to loved ones and doctors and priests concerned not just about pain but about matters that transcend pain.

Leave aside its unremarkable priggishness; the late 20th-century's concern with life, and its abhorrence of suffering, are badges of honor. By all rights we should rejoice to see these things. Some of us don't? That must be because the angle of vision is wrong. We see only in part.

The century's equation of life with physicality can be accounted for to some extent by the sheer blood-thirstiness and cruelty of life ever since August, 1914. A little concern for mere living and loving would not have come amiss at the Somme, or in the Ukraine in the 'Thirties, not to mention the death camps of the Third Reich and the peasant huts of the Chinese countryside, where the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, starved to death untold millions.

Against 20th century compassion has to be weighed, nevertheless, 20th century materialism-the materialism that prefigured and blessed these great crimes in the first place. The times are deeply de-spiritualized. The body as a public concern comes first. The soul rates as too theological a thing for statesmen to worry about. God's connection to the physical realm, on which He long held the patent (until in latter times it was wrested from Him and assigned to Random Material Forces), seems to stop with the imputed miracles of the Old and New Testaments. When did he last knock over a city with trumpets and shouting, or feed more people than McDonalds, huh?

Small wonder the unseen elements of Divinity (grace, spirit, souls, etc.) never cross the political radar screen anymore. As the 20th century of the Christian era nears its close, God is in high degree a backdrop to the things that physical men and women are doing physically, to and for other physical beings. To note that souls come clad in bodies would be to disturb the intellectual equilibrium. Good materialists would take offense. They might even vote the wrong way, upsetting thereby the whole purpose of talking to them in the first place. Better to keep quiet about such things, avoiding stands that could be construed as coming down on one side or the other of questions concerning the Divine Backdrop.