A GRATEFUL READER writes:

The latest issue of Touchstone magazine includes many excellent articles on the root problems of the Sexual Revolution. Anthony Esolen in his article “Mission Impossible” writes about how difficult it is to evangelize slaves to technology who know no tradition:

We are now among people who are better and worse than savages. They are, in most places, and for the time being, less likely to break the crockery, as Chesterton put it, than were the savages of old. They will cut babies to pieces in the womb, more than a million a year, but only rarely out of it; and they will be roused to the height of righteous wrath should they see someone leave a dog in a hot car in the summer. They watch filth all the time and let it soak their souls, but they will not roll in mud, because it is not good for the complexion. They judge by the flights of feeling and mass sentiment. They know what sluts are: women whose sexual immorality is a degree or two more degraded or more consistent than theirs. They are the more ruthless and severe in their condemnations as they are incapable of telling exactly what is to be condemned and why.

Because they have no sense of sin, they have no mercy. They speak of tolerance, yet they are the touchiest sensitive-plants ever to sprout upon earth. There are no sins; and every sinner deserves to be destroyed.

What must the missionary do with such a people? He will not be teaching letters to an illiterate people with their old and venerable legends and poetry. His charges will know how to read a page, but will have no poetry.  He will not be teaching a catechism to a people with strong but sometimes mistaken moral customs. He will be teaching a catechism to a people who take their moral cues from an idiot box. He will not be teaching Indians that one wife is enough. He will be teaching addled submarital illuminati what it means even to have a wife.

Far be it from me to give up the mission! I write these things to make clear what that mission is.

— Comments —-

Alan M. writes:

A mission field where all of the plants are hot house flowers, have no roots, and bear no fruit.

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