In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they become still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose that the world will be destroyed--amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is a joke. (Kierkegaard, Either/Or I 15)I recently saw some street-corner preachers, holding signs warning people about hell. A few people engaged with them, others just took pictures or laughed. They were clowns.
But really the position of those of us with a more sophisticated Christianity trying to warn the world that Soylent Green is people isn't that different. We're like the clown not only because we appear absurd--warning of doom in the richest society in history--but because, like the clown, our role in the story has been assigned to us and it precludes our warnings being taken seriously. The story is that we're progressing out of the oppression of Christianity. When the Christian warns people where this is going, he may actually be lucky to be brushed off as a clown. The story doesn't have him wearing clown suit, but a Hitler costume. When we tries to speak out, he just ends up reinforcing the story of victimhood that necessitates the further advancement of the cultural left. Is Hitler saying that Planned Parenthood is bad? That just proves that we need to redouble our efforts against Hitler.
I'm not really sure how we get out of the clown suit, much less the Hitler costume.
