Predicting the ‘Coming Persecution’

Patrick Deneen makes a prediction on “The Coming Persecution” worth considering:

Those Christians and other religious believers who resist the spirit of the age will be persecuted—not by being thrown to lions in the Coliseum, but by judicial, administrative, and legal marginalization. They will lose many of the institutions that they built to help the poor, the marginalized, the weak, and the disinherited. But finding themselves in the new imperium will call out new forms of living the Christian witness. They will live in the favelas, providing care for body and soul that cannot not be provided by either the state or the market. Like the early Church, they will live in a distinct way from the way of the empire, and their way of life will draw those who perhaps didn’t realize that this was what Christianity was, all along. When the liberal ideology collapses—as it will—the Church will remain, the gates of Hell not prevailing against it.

This is perhaps not a harsher prognosis than many are used to hearing. Details of life in the favelas, however—derived from Tyler Cowen’s own forecast in Average is Over—put a finer tip on the nature of coming hardships. As it happens, loss of life and limb are still somehow easier to reconcile than the destruction of “many of the institutions” that Christians have erected, and that society presently enjoys. It’s arguable that if our recent foray into evangelism vis-à-vis the extraordinary synod is any indication, an aversion to ‘spiritual shift’ will cause far greater tumult than even a pretty bad bloodletting.