Christianity Today has an interesting interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff in which Kristoff, no friend of orthodox Christianity, shares his thoughts on how the evangelical wing of Christianity has evolved over the last couple of decades. Surprisingly, perhaps, he's very sympathetic, probably because he sees evangelicals as allies in some of the causes to which he is committed.
At one point, however, he makes this rather patronizing statement, which is as gratuitous as it is misleading:
Christianity has certainly been growing since the early 1980s. But in the past there's been a certain stigma attached to it among some intellectual quarters, because often the Christians have been peasants. It struck me that in the last few years there have been more intellectuals in the cities converting to Christianity.
If Kristoff thinks that the phenomenon of urban intellectuals converting to Christianity is something that's just been happening over the last few years he simply hasn't been paying attention. Christians, unwittingly following the advice of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (d. 1937), have been making their long march through the institutions of our culture at least since the sixties. Perhaps what Kristof means is that having begun this process decades ago Christian intellectuals have only recently begun to arrive at the pinnacles of their professions and begun to be noticed by observers such as himself.
Even so, there's much left to do and it seems that there's little time in which to do it. As the culture unravels in its lemming-like pursuit of hedonistic gratification, consumerism and materialism can enough people with a clear vision of what a culture should be move into positions of influence soon enough to forestall what George Will has called our "slide into the sewer"? One hopes ... and prays. If not, given our current trajectory, what will our children's and grandchildren's world be like?
We need to keep marching, and maybe even pick up the pace a little.
