Rejecting Apathy

The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence…

1. from bondage to spiritual faith …
2. from spiritual faith to courage …
3. from courage to liberty …
4. from liberty to abundance …
5. from abundance to selfishness …
6. from selfishness to complacency …
7. from complacency to apathy …
8. from apathy to dependency …
9. from dependency back to bondage

This quote, attributed to Sir Alex Fraser Tyler (1742-1813) Scottish jurist and historian, contains sobering concepts. This question of where America is in the cycle should be extremely important for Christians.

Many Christians, once motivated by protecting the sanctity of life, religious freedom, and traditional marriage, seem inconsolable. We must not surrender to complacency, as if the fight is over and there’s nothing we can do about it. In fact, embracing this attitude is a certain prescription for disaster. Yes, things will get worse if we do that.

It becomes obvious to me that as we see our culture losing its moral footing, it’s because believers have failed to bring Christian truth to bear in society. We haven’t been, as Calvin put it, making the invisible kingdom visible.

So what stage are we in?
Reverts thinks we are entering the stage of apathy. And I hate to say it, but I agree. I think there is growing apathy among believers.

Apathy manifests itself in how people dress, how they talk, how they care for each other—and how concerned they are about the great issues of the day. It resembles what the Greeks called ἁκηδείᾱ (or in Latin: acedia), a languidness, a torpor, in which we stop caring about anything (carelessness - see footnotes 1 & 2 below).

Apathy inevitably leads to dependency. And once we become dependent on Big Brother, we are back in bondage. Can anybody really watch the dramatic growth of governmental power and not be alarmed? For the fact of the matter is that the more government acts as God, the less people depend on the one true God.

Have you contacted your congressmen and senators? Are you concerned about what’s happening in this country today? Things like:

• the elimination of the conscience clause for medical professionals
• embryonic stem cell research
• threats to religious liberties, or government making life-and-death decisions in health care?

If you’re not upset about those things, perhaps you’ve succumbed to apathy already. I can’t imagine anybody sitting at home, comfortably watching us slip into a state of dependency without getting outraged, and then without expressing that outrage.

If we value our liberties, if we believe in the most fundamental principles upon which our civilization is based, then we owe it to our God and to future generations to speak out.

Institutions aren’t going to change the course of America; but people working together have changed the course of the nation and will again. And what better network to fuel a movement than the Church? Rejecting apathy and trusting in God, firm in our belief in human dignity and our God-given liberties, the Church can ignite a fire in this country.

Do we get it? I pray that we do.


Organizations Fighting for the Family, Sanctity of Life, and Religious Freedom
Take Action: Contact Your Congressman
Take Action: Contact Your Senator

This is a "copy, paste and paraphrase" - including MY notes, paraphrasing, minor deletions, bulleting and bolding -- intended for my personal use in my personal notebook

SOURCES & Footnotes:

• Don Reeverts of the Denver Leadership Foundation
• Sir Alex Fraser Tyler
• Catholic Exchange August 8th, 2009 Written by Charles Colson
• In God We Trust

• note 1: A definition of sloth (one of the seven deadly sins) is -- spiritual or actual apathy, putting off what God asks you to do, or not doing it or anything at all.

  note 2: Acedia is a Latin word, from the Greek, ἁκηδείᾱ, meaning "carelessness".