Not all television is bad.
Yesterday, I wrote about a dark and unpleasant future. [Read “What Should We Do Next?"] I wrote about the possibility of rapid social decay into civil war or oppression of Christians, Jews, and political conservatives. Essentially, the downfall of Western Civilization.
Some people would expect me to recommend that we all prepare for combat. I don’t. I do recommend people prepare for hardship. (I’ll write about how in the future.) But my aim is not to win a civil war with guns and battles. Instead, it’s to win souls for paradise.
You might find something useful in the Netflix series “A.D. Kingdom and Empire.” The series chronicles the lives of the first Christians after Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. The show reminds us that our faith began as an outlawed heresy against both Rome and Judea.
While the series contains, I’m sure, many factual and scriptural errors, it’s an excellent account of people remaining true to their faith and to a higher calling in the face of oppression.
I am not spiritually ready for that scenario. But bad times don’t wait for Bill Hennessy to be ready. Or for anyone else. They come. They’ve come before and will likely come again precisely because they’ve come before. Rome, the Nazis, the Soviet Union. Many other terrible times in between.
In a sense, we’re luck that it’s been so long. The Soviet Union fell almost 30 years ago. Millennials don’t remember the Cold War. Boomers don’t remember World War II.
As I’ve written before, we are in the Crisis Era of our seculum. It began in 2007 or 2008 with the financial crisis, and it will last about 20 years. It will end with the greatest trial of all, a climax that will finally end the Post-World War II era and give birth to the next seculum.
[Read “Predicting the Climax” and “Slouching Toward the Climax” for more information.]
We really can’t control the climax. We can only prepare and control how we respond.
For myself, I will try to respond the way those first Christians and their Stoic contemporaries responded to the horrors of the Roman Empire. Many future blogs will focus on the methods of that preparation.
You are welcome to join me, because happiness love company.