I am re-reading T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach this week. It has stood the test of time well and has fired me up once again. If you still haven’t read it, stop what you’re doing. Order it now and read it as soon as it arrives. You can finish it in one day. It will be well worth your gold and your time.

Today I ran across a quote that Gordon pulls from a book by David Denby written in 1996. It is more applicable now than it was either when it was written or when Gordon quoted it. Denby begins with a complaint that the culture-ideologues on all sides do not know what they are talking about when it comes to the Western canon and culture. This is because they fail to recognize that almost none of the students arriving on campus, regardless of their ethnic background, religious training, or sexual orientation have any connection to the past. They do not read deeply even if they occasionally skim articles for information. He says:

It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite of white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way the academic left supposes. For there is only one “hegemonic discourse” in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can’t begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead (T. Gordon David, Why Johnny Can’t Preach, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009 quoting David Denby, Great Books, New York: Touchstone, 1996 on page 57).

Maybe 25 years ago High Schools were trying to compete. But now, I’d guess that there aren’t even 50 High Schools nationwide that aren’t full accomplices to and enablers of the hegemony of popular culture. The media today carries a far bigger stick to enforce its will than it used to, but so also the undergrads that Denby was writing about are now the teachers and administrators. They are full-blown, if unwitting and utterly unaware, victims and sycophants of the actual oppressive hegemonic discourse which is destroying the minds of our people. They spoon this out to their students with an air of superiority and confidence that used to be seen only in the bureaucracies of the most totalitarian regimes. Colonel Klink seems genuinely open-minded in comparison.

As David points out, this is not simply a problem for our members who send their children to public schools. This is the culture we all live in and have been infected by. Gottesdienst, with its blog and Facebook page, is no exception. We need to wake up and reassess. I do not think we can save our country, but perhaps with God’s grace we can turn from the idolatry of images and a remnant of the Church can be saved.

I do not mean that we should swear off all media in every form, but we must severely limit our media consumption. We must warn our members about the dangers of the media. And we must, we absolutely must, read books, starting with the Bible. We need to read the Bible and the Confessions and Theology from pages in physical books. We need to do it so slowly, deeply, paying close attention to structure and nuance and detail. And while we do that, while the hegemony of BLM, LGBT, Cancel Culture, Google, and Facebook tightens its grip, let us rejoice and revel in what God has given us in books even as we pray fervently for Jesus to come back and bring us home and deliver us from these most evil days.