I have an Atlas Obscura desk calendar. Each day, it showcases a different location around the world: sometimes a natural wonder (such as Hierve el Agua, a massive rock formation in Mexico that resembles a waterfall), sometimes unique wildlife (such as the blue ghost fireflies of North Carolina), sometimes human art (such as the House of Mirrors, a private house decorated entirely in mirror mosaics by Italian-Kuwaiti artist Lidia al-Qattan, or Decebalus’s head, a 140-foot-tall mountainside carving of 1st century Romanian king), sometimes just odd bits of local culture (such as a Manhattan collection of items salvaged from trash, kept in the second floor of a garbage truck garage). Each day offers a little glimpse into the variety, beauty, creativity, weirdness, and wonder of earth and its inhabitants.
 |
| Photo by Quentin Melson |
The Georgia Guidestones are not, to my knowledge, part of my Atlas Obscura desk calendar, but they easily could be. Built in 1980 by a pseudonymous “Robert C. Christian,” representing an anonymous and mysterious group, they’ve been called “America’s Stonehenge.” They consisted of six granite slabs, weighing a total of 237,746 pounds, and are believed to have been intended as a message to survivors of a nuclear war. They were intended as a compass, calendar, and clock and contained the following guidelines in seven different languages:
- Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
- Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
- Unite humanity with a living new language.
- Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
- Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
- Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
- Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
- Balance personal rights with social duties.
- Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
- Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.
Since their unveiling, they became a tourist attraction (drawing roughly 20,000 annual visitors) and the target of significant speculation (including a documentary) as to their purpose and their anonymous creators’ motivation. They’ve also become the subject of various conspiracy theories; maintaining a world population under 500 million could perhaps be tractable after a nuclear holocaust, but ”guiding reproduction“ evokes dark memories of eugenics and racism, and Christians such as Kandiss Taylor, 2022 Georgia Republican candidate for governor, have alleged that they’re Satanic and related to the New World Order.
On July 6, an unknown perpetrator set a bomb that destroyed one of the six slabs and heavily damaged the capstone. The remaining Guidestones were dismantled for safety reasons. The motives of the attacker are unknown, but it’s likely that they were spurred by the accusations of Satanism and New World Order.
I feel that the world is a bit poorer for their loss. I am, of course, opposed to Satanism, and I do believe that there are malign spiritual forces active in the world. But I believe that Satan is rarely so obvious as to engrave his guidelines on tourist-attraction granite; the consumerism, tribalism, and pressures to compromise one’s ethics and beliefs that permeate modern American society are much greater threats for most of us than eugenics. And, if the Guidestones were intended to promote the New World Order - if they were part of a conspiracy of global elites to establish a totalitarian world government, as understood by some interpretations of the Book of Revelation - then any effort we might make to stop God’s prophecy seems rather misguided. I might even go further and, rather than opposing them, respond with “Maranatha!” (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20); I’m not exactly looking forward to the end-times tribulations as understood by many Christians, but I’m very much looking forward to Christ’s return, and it seems that we may have to pass through the one to get to the other.
These particular conspiracy theories are pretty easy to dismiss. But there’s a deeper consideration here. There’s a strain of Christianity that’s especially attentive and alert to spiritual forces of darkness, to sinister hidden motives, to political or social actions that seem innocuous but may be the first steps toward an evil end. And we should be on guard against such things (1 Pe 5:8, Eph 6:12, 1 Cor 10:19-20, etc.). As James Sire writes in The Universe Next Door,
The New Age has reopened a door closed since Christianity drove out the demons from the woods, desacralized the natural world and generally took a dim view of excessive interest in the affairs of Satan’s kingdom of fallen angels. Now they are back, knocking on university dorm room doors, sneaking around psychology laboratories and chilling the spines of Ouija players. Modern folk have fled from grandfather’s clockwork universe to great-grandfather’s chamber of gothic horrors… While spirit activity has been constant in areas where Christianity has barely penetrated, it has been little reported in the West from the time of Jesus. Christ is said to have driven the spirits from field and stream, and when Christianity permeates a society the spirit world seems to disappear or go into hiding. It is only in the last few decades that the spirits of the woods and rivers, the air and the darkness have been invited back by those who have rejected the claims of Christianity and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (p. 166, 168, 3rd ed.)
There’s a lot to unpack and evaluate there, and the topic of how we interpret and understand spiritual activity in Bible times and ours is far too involved to get into here. But this sort of “direct,” explicit spiritual activity is not, I think, the greatest risk in modern America. Modern culture instead seems to de-spiritualize, depersonalize, and homogenize everything. We’ve gone from family-owned stores where proprietors and shoppers knew each other, to store chains where we interact with minimum-wage workers whose upper management have done their best to make them interchangeable, to (post-pandemic) curbside pickup and deliveries, as if even the minimal interaction of the check-out line is too inconvenient. We can travel two thousand miles cross country—an unthinkable distance in earlier history—and eat at restaurants and stay at hotels barely different than where we left. Internet and cable TV news lets us obsess over words and pictures from people in other states and cities who we’ll never interact with, while the decline of local news means we often know more about current events in Ukraine than in our own communities. So many facets of our existence—our interactions online, our viewing and reading habits, our purchases—are quantized and aggregated and turned into grist for corporations’ efforts to optimize their efficiency and profits. Social media collapses the distances between people—everyone’s talking to each other all the time, with little space to be alone or to be different or to agree to disagree. Our culture wars further collapse the distances and distinct spheres that people used to operate in; Yuval Levin observes,
Our culture war plainly lacks boundaries. Every realm of our lives has become one of its battlefields. Not only in politics but also in schools and universities, in corporate America, in our places of worship and places of work, in civil society and in our private lives, online and in person, there is often just no getting away from that intense, divisive, and rigidly partisan struggle.
It may sound like I’m bemoaning the decline of Western civilization or pining for a lost past. That isn’t my intent. There are many wonderful benefits of our modern economy, technologies, and conveniences; our culture has improved in some areas even as it struggles in others; past times and cultures have dealt with their own sins and struggles; and, as Christians, this world is not our home regardless.
But, precisely because every culture deals with its own sins and struggles, I want to be aware of this one. I want to celebrate the creative, the quirky, the weird. I want to be reminded of the variety and uniqueness of other people, countries, environments, and cultures. I like pausing my workday of developing and debugging software code to read a bit of whimsy or wonder from the Atlas Obscura calendar on my desk. I like living in a world where people can use their God-given gifts, abilities, and resources to create Internet sites and optimize check-out lines but also carve 140-foot statues of Romanian kings and erect mysterious monoliths in Georgia. And sometimes the results may seem wasteful or weird or questionable, but we can question the bad while still thanking God for the good.
No comments:
Post a Comment