Everyone should have a copybook of maxims. So I tell my students at the start of freshman year. “You will meet priceless bits of wit and wisdom in the next eight semesters—write them down and tap them often.” They hear it as bad advice, though. Don’t they have enough to do already?
But the young need these touchstones for just that reason, and so do the rest of us. The swirl of media never stops. I just counted on Wikipedia sixty-nine national sports TV networks in the United States, and that doesn’t include regional ones such as Fox Sports Arizona. Religion chalks up another twenty-seven television channels (Angel One, Hillsong . . .). Apart from local news in every metropolitan area, there are twenty-seven national news networks and twenty-two regional ones blasting images and commentary nonstop. These tallies don’t include radio, websites, Twitter, and Facebook.
The composed counsels of the wise help bring it under control. They provide a grounding service in the torrent of doxa and fabulae that hits as soon we wake up in the morning. Matthew Arnold characterized the expressions of the past in precisely these terms back in 1853, when the press of modernity was already being felt. As society grows more noisy and demanding, he said, “commerce with the ancients” produces “a steadying and composing effect.” It erects standards of beauty and insight that help us filter it all, interpreting what’s worth our attention and ignoring the rest.
When we read accounts of antireligious action such as Daniel Philpott’s tale of the Baptist florist in this issue (“Polite Persecution”), we grow unsteady and discomposed. I want to lash out. But then come the Lord’s words and the feeling changes. “If you were of the world, the world would love its own,” he tells the disciples; “but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
With that prediction, frustration turns to calm in the face of today’s hostility. Of course, the ACLU and the state of Washington are going to target a believer if her faith gets in the way. Tension with secular institutions is inevitable, however much we seek to avoid it. We can eliminate tension and become fully comfortable with the world’s mandates only by downgrading Jesus’s call. If we do not expect more conflicts in the future, our faith is slipping. John 15:19 doesn’t ease Ms. Stutzman’s trials, but it does firm up our conviction in the rightness of her dissent.