Not all Christians believe the world is getting worse. But those who hold to what is called “premillennialism” do, and they tend to dominate the evangelical conversation in North America. (In premillennialism, the expectation is that the world will get worse and worse overall until Christ enters history and establishes his peaceable milllennial kingdom.)
Premillennial evangelicals tend to be rather selective in identifying putative evidence that the world is getting worse. For example, they focus on issues like gay marriage and transgender washrooms. My concern here is not to debate the morality of gay marriage or transgender washrooms. Rather, my point is that even if you do believe that these things are morally errant, it would be absurd to think isolated examples like those are sufficient to establish an overall trajectory of societal decay.
As a seminary professor for the last fifteen years, I regularly encounter this pessimistic perspective in my students. I continue to be dismayed at how many Christians blithely assume things are getting worse. But I’ve found one simple way to shake up their perspective: I borrow a famous thought experiment from philosopher John Rawls in which Rawls proposes a way to envision the just society.
Here’s how my version goes: imagine that you are about to be born, but you do not know what gender, ethnicity, or socio-economic status you will have when born. Nor do you know whether you will have a physical or mental disability. With that in… [Read more…] about Dear Christian, the world isn't getting worse. In fact, it's probably getting better.
