Only When They Feel the Heat

As long as people don’t get burned, they aren’t going to change anything that really matters. This is why privacy advocates will remain voices in the wilderness. The Big Tech privacy rapists have figured out how to remove the immediacy of threat from the evil they do. People in general prefer to settle into a familiar pattern and focus on things that they notice. They aren’t ignorant of what Big Tech is doing; they just care more about other things. It’s a price they are willing to pay.

On the one hand, the ancient Roman satirical principle about “bread and circuses” is an overstatement. The consumers aren’t quite that debased. On the other hand, you simply cannot awaken those consumers to the very real truth that the system is designed to plunder them and make them like it. Not enough people are getting burned where they can feel it.

This is what we run into when we promote Radix Fidem. The first problem is that it demands you isolate yourself from most everyone you know and care about. Jesus noted the challenge of faith in Matthew 10:34-38. That business of taking up your cross didn’t catch on until the words had been robbed of their meaning, so that it became a mere inconvenience instead of a death warrant. People will remain attached to this world until something awakens them spiritually. For us, the single biggest difficulty is this vast smothering false perception of what Jesus actually said.

So we wait on something that strikes people like a personal apocalypse. If it’s a general apocalypse, it may not do us much good. It becomes just another excuse to keep people preoccupied by false politics. What we need is something that raises the general pain level just enough to shake loose those who are already sensitive; it teaches them just how serious the problem really is.

Christ’s teachings were not wildly successful in the sense that Pentecost was actually a pretty small yield given just how big the population of Jerusalem was at that time. It drew only those disaffected by their treatment at the hands of Jewish religious authorities. And it met even more resistance in the synagogues of the Diaspora. But where it really grew was among the pagans, particularly those who were familiar with Jewish religion and found something in it that touched them. They rightly resisted the full extent of legalistic demands, but knew there was something in there that called their names.

Our problem today is almost the opposite: Western Christianity has made it all too easy to get inside without genuine faith. Thus, we await the conditions that will shock them loose from their comfort zone. People who aren’t hungering and thirsting won’t come to the Lord’s table. Right now there just aren’t that many. But while that’s not a very big population in most discrete locales, it’s quite a large portion of the population spread thinly across the West. That’s a lot of souls, and we should pray the Lord allows us to reach them.