It’s not surprising that people are often making comparisons between our culture and that of the Ancient Romans.  Our culture was so heavily based on the Greek and Roman world, then baptized by Christianity, that even despite our best efforts to throw away the past there are many connections still present.  Most Universities still have some shreds of a well balanced curriculum in place.  You know those classes everyone is always complaining about because they will never ‘use’ them in the ‘real world’.  Well these people don’t know much about any world real or not.  A major theme in the comparisons is that of their decline.  The parallels are uncanny.  And it’s not just Rome the formula for a people in decline has been followed many times before.  People forget God, become obsessed with sports and sex.  Which results in unwanted children who are sacrificed on alters or disposed of in abortion clinics.  I have heard it since I was a child that the obsession with violence on TV was just like that of the Romans in the Colosseum.  But was it really?

One major difference I see is that we live in light of what the Romans did.  We have learned something from them, or half learned it.  It is not entirely our fault, our culture has taken up the narrative of liars like Gibbon to the point that we don’t even know there is another side.  But what is there we respond too.  We see what they did and try to avoid it, or part of it.  Often our learning just takes the form of avoiding the symptoms.  As if a completely morally corrupt people could have been spared if only they had stopped going to the Colosseum.  No the fact is they went to the Colosseum and did everything they did because they were morally corrupt.  We are like the small child who has been told of the consequences of eating too many cookies and then stubbornly denies that they are in fact sick after having eaten said cookies.  We want to spit in the face of God but we think we have figured out a way to avoid the consequences this time. Oh we kill our babies in a special clinic behind closed doors, by trained ‘professionals’, so that makes it ok.

Violence isn’t really that pervasive in our culture, incorrect violence animated by evil hearts is too pervasive.  Most times and places were far more violent than America today.  Oh so we have depictions of wars on TV, most men through history actually participated in fighting of some kind.  It was a kill or be killed world, even for the civilized Greeks and Romans.  The violent hand of justice was regularly exercised, and rightly so, in every town square.  Those people planted hemp to execute wise justice, we plant it to feed or foolishness.  They were more violent we are more immoral.

But today we live in a world where it is easy to pretend that death does not exist, even the murder of your own child.  This won’t prevent us from following the path to destruction that Rome followed.  Nor will suppressing violent video games.   In fact I believe these are symptoms of another moral fault, cowardice.  It’s having someone else execute violence for us.  Since Victorian England, the west has so tried to sanitize everything and prevent any harsh reality from creeping into corrupt our children that we have become a people of wimps.  The old Christendom in Europe is far worse, but America is not far behind.  There are daily stories about the harsh realities of bullying.  Seriously?  Try having the people in the next village regularly raid your village?  Try experiencing hordes of Moorish Muhammedans invading your entire continent for 300 years.  We can’t keep score in sports for fear of hurting someone’s feelings.  Teachers are told to use purple pens because red is too offensive. There are daily stories about children being punished for holding their finger up like a gun. And on and on the coddling goes, as does the march of evil, because these people certainly aren’t being equipped to stand up and do anything about it.

The apostle amongst the ruins. Panini.

I had to learn this lesson, and I think too late.  I grew up in a culture where passivity was thought to be morality.  Isn’t it more humble?  No, it’s just a good way to have good taken over by the natural course of things which is evil.  It’s a good way to ensure that His will does not happen on earth as it is in heaven. And evangelical Left Behind theology also contributes to it.  Why fight to make anything more true, good or beautiful, when it is all going to burn anyway?  In fact let’s light the fire so Jesus will come back sooner.  That actually sounds like every praise song I have ever heard.

I had a bit of an advantage because I was always strange and grew to not really care what people thought of me, in the constant barrage of criticism.  Courage get’s easier every time you exercise it.  And boy do we need that today.  We Christians stand on the truth of God, and as we act on it despite the bullying from the world, we become more faithful.  The solution is not an end of violence or, closing our borders, or civic education, or not being up in all the conspiracy theories.  The only solution is repentance.  That other stuff is just the means that God uses to allow stiff necked people to wipe themselves off the earth.  It is a little different every time, but it is a lot the same.

A Christian perspective on the fall of Rome might paint the picture a little differently.  The Church out Romand the Romans.  The Romans couldn’t compete with real civic virtue as practiced by Jesus the Christ working in his body the Church.  Christians really ministered to the poor, sick, and abandoned children.  They really were ideal citizens, the highest Roman virtue.  And the old world of Rome just looked like a joke, in light of the new world of the Gospel light shining on every area of life.  We need to get out there and shine that light again, instead of just trying to avoid the symptoms, or sitting back and waiting for the escape hatch of the fictitious rapture.