Many legendary tales have been spun to instill hope, warn of danger, and clarify truth to mankind. One of these helpful fables came to us in the mid 1990’s. It was called Heavyweights.
This production of human creativity gave hope to us common folk by telling the story of how a small group of misfits fought the good fight and became conquerers for good. They made a plan, carried it out, and won back their territory, banishing evil. That territory was the fat camp where children could get active in a fun and welcoming environment. That evil was a man named Tony Perkis. He took over and subjected the campers to cruel and over the top fitness standards. The campers were miserable until they thought up a plan to put Tony on the run, and with some teamwork and determination, they succeeded.
Then however, a dark shadow from within appeared over their victory. They engaged in practices that were less becoming of the high ideals for which they had fought and suffered. Because of a desire to satiate their appetites, our heroes engaged in behaviors that actually regressed their character growth and threatened to make their noble feat worthless and merely temporary.
Progression or Regression?
Progression is a real thing in the world, and one that humanity experiences as individuals and societies. People grow, become more mature, more skilled, and better at navigating physical and emotional matters. Given the right impetus, cultures also mature over years and centuries. They create more opportunity for flourishing in a greater number of lives as this growth continues. We’ve definitely seen it in the western world. Nasty things like general ignorance, high infant mortality, slavery, and dangerous working conditions had been identified and mostly done away with. Just like is represented in Heavyweights, however, regression is a danger for both the man and his kind. It often comes for the individual when he is at a peak of personal success and for a culture when it’s at its hight.
To put it simply, we were going in good directions. We were at a place where, for the most part, the only people in poverty in much of the developed western world were there because of choice or disability. What most people would call good morals, but what the children of the creator would call God’s law, was taken seriously and even written into civil law. Granted, corruption of individuals was still present, but that won’t disappear until our inherent sin does.
Our example in Heavyweights shows that success and momentum in a good direction does not guarantee a continuation on that path. Nay, we have done the exact same thing as those previously heroic campers did when they gorged themselves in the openness of their hard won freedom. Our developed society in which good had been conquering bad steadily fell in a hole, twisted its ankle, turned around, and started walking on its hands.
The Desired Product
There was a time long ago when our society desired to intentionally mold good, strong people. It wasn’t that man or the collective of men actually had the ability to do this by their own power, but it was at least the desired product. When it happened, it was because these people surrendered to be tools in the hands of God, the redeemer of man. Now, however, self involved, soft people are the desired product of our policies and popular culture. The ingrown hair that is at the root of this blemish isn’t the actual failure to make the better product; it is the agreed upon desire for an inferior one.
The problem started in a more subtle way, though. There was a point when the desired product was still a better one. The issue at that time, however, was that materialism and idol worship made us too busy to labor in the time consuming process of raising up children in the way that they should go. Money had to be made and certain standards of living had to be attained. God’s calling was no longer the thing to pursue. Instead it became about making sure people have money and comfort. As a result, good, strong men were produced less and less until the grand majority lacked this strong goodness. Because of this, all we were left with were the legends of these men. But the men of those legends had been the result of the light of God. Even the stories of them had a slight remaining afterglow that seemed harshly bright against the darkness that took hold of the collective.
That was too much for us, because if there’s one thing that the darkness hates, it is the light (John 3:19-20). That afterglow was the last opportunity for the culture to say, “Hey! There is a light in that thing! Let’s trace it back to the source!” Instead, we squandered our discomfort, and decided that precisely because the light was uncomfortable it must be a bad thing. Now a confused, beauty-less, unfree agent is the desired product. And we can stand satisfied and say, “Now that kind of person doesn’t have very much of that pesky light.”
The Devil Is in the Definition
The problem here is definitions of words, particularly two very small words: good and bad. Important things arrange under the meanings of these two words, and then that helps people know if they ought or ought not to do such things. We are missing out on what is truthfully good, because those things have been systematically swept, a broom stroke at a time, under the rug labeled “bad.”
For the sake of illustration of how this has been done, imagine that a group of people saw a person who hated plants poor a deluge of water on a little bonsai tree. The type of plant doesn’t really matter, but I am partial to those little trees because of that great movie, The Karate Kid. Now imagine that the same group of people saw that plant hating person do that several times, day after day until the poor, waterboarded tree died from over hydration.
It should be known that these people have had to sit through units in government funded schools that have taught unendingly about the crimes of over-hydration that have been perpetrated against plants all over the world for centuries. Also, a small part of that group (the ones who can afford it) are now majoring in Over-Hydration Studies at either a local college or prestigious university, being lectured by someone who was a victim of having his bonsai tree drowned as a kid. All the time, these people have had billion dollar companies dumping media in front of them that is all centered around contrived and embellished reports about the systematic over-hyrdration of bonsai trees that is currently plaguing our tender society.
Eventually, the result is that this group determines for themselves and teaches others that water is tremendously problematic for plants and very, very evil. It must be done away with. That is how a good and necessary thing like water becomes egregious in the eye of the public. The deadly result is that the plants suffer, all the good things that came from them like oxygen and food are withheld from our society, and we regress.
What We’ve Lost
The difficulty here will be creating a list of “for examples” without it turning into a parade down several pages and causing the important ruby to be lost in the mud. So instead of going into depth, here are just a few at face value.
The easy one is masculinity. It is the thing that has protected our ancestors from wolves and our nations from invaders. It is now so attacked in our culture that it is has resulted in low testosterone levels, which the wolves and the invaders love. Another is the traditional roles for men and women. If God said that man and woman together as one package made up of two parts is what is “very good,” then it would stand to reason that mixing these two different colors of paint into one uniform gray is not quite as valuable.
Let’s keep going with the easy ones. In times before, motherhood was in the “good” category; you know since it is how people become alive and all that. It is now described by evangelists for pro-choice-ism as being a dangerous health condition (https://youtu.be/Xr7MKSLEvuc). We could go on more and talk about the erosion of independence and the desire of leftist factions to reinstate segregation, but I believe the point has been made as far as the low hanging fruit goes.
What about colonialism. Obviously there is a great portion of it that must be condemned, but should we have thrown out the whole baby with the bath water on this one? No. The organized effort to hunt down tribal slave operations and stop them was part of the english run colonies. When talking with a native of Ghana and revealing my ignorance of the continent of Africa, I asked him if there was political violence and unrest in his home country. His answer was bluntly, “No. It was a British colony, so it is safe.” This man’s “lived experience” seems to suggest that some positive impacts from colonialism exist. As far as the nuance that must accompany such a statement goes, please stay tuned until the conclusion of this post.
What I’m saying is this. It is not beyond the realm of possibility or probability for people or the human race to regress at times rather than progress. It happens in our fictions because it happens in our reality. The proposition that positive progression is a law that just happens as people move forward in time is a myth in line with the myth of worldview neutrality. Our division as a people, record heights of anxiety and depression, and our forgetting of natural facts such as the difference between men and women are the neon signs that points to this regression happening now. Simply, this is the display of the difference between the true religion of Christianity and the false religion of secularism. Our progression happened through Christendom, and then we prostituted ourselves out to humanistic, materialistic secularism. Due to that, we can now see the regressive undoing of ourselves.
More Than Conquerers
One of those good words that has had a label of “bad” taped over it is the word “conquer.” We are taught from a young age that conquerers are and were the most vile of villains. However, Paul told us that we are more than conquerers (Romans 8:37). Jesus told us that we were to go and attack the gates of Hell and plunder it as christians in his name and through his power (Matthew 16:18). We were to conquer this world which used to be ruled by Satan for Christ (John 12:31). Some of the results of centuries of laboring in this endeavor were good working conditions, less hunger, equality of the races, lower infant mortality rates, longer life expectancies, and so on and so forth. But because a loud group of people call them the bad guys, the ones who are “more than conquerers” have resigned to being conquered by an insidious world view of late. It’s time to throw off those shackles and start conquering again, for the glory of our savior and the good of people.
That is why the age of chivalry is the theme that drives us here at the Academy. It is a symbol of a time, imperfect as it may or may not have been, when men passionately hoisted the burden of building something better in the world of man. We must recall that spirit, putting on shining armor, because the accuser and his army of regressive “progressives” will launch volleys of darts in the form of derogative labels when they see us conquering evil for good. It will be necessary to remember that they love to change definitions. That way, when they call us bigots we can smile earnestly and say, “Thank you.” We are in a society that is like a bunch of fat kids gorging themselves, on their way to diabetes and a destructive life. Now it’s time to be like Pat in Heavyweights and lead them back on course.