I’m reading “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman. It’s depressing. In part because he’s right and in equal measure because he’s horribly, totally wrong. So far the book is an assault of Americanism – the religion, and an embracing of the need to believe in the older, truer, pagan gods. Kali, Odin, Anansi. At one point the protagonist, Shadow, is approached by a new, American god, TV, and rejects it in favor of the old gods. He realizes that the reason that he prefers the old gods is because they’re straightforward, honest, and true. They don’t speak in cliches like the new gods. It’s the battle of the roadside attraction vs. the shopping mall.

That’s all well and good, as far as it goes. In a sense Gaiman has a great insight and is close to the truth, but he lands just short and winds up far from it in the end. America has it’s new gods, self, TV, sex, information, government, the list goes on. They are hollow, empty, revolting. It goes to show the depths man that man sinks to when he ‘kills God.’ Everyone believes in something. You know all those saccharine kids movies where ‘you just have to believe’? They’re a total crock. Everyone believes. The question is: In what?

Gaiman says the older things are truer and nobler. Cheap? Yes. Old and poor? Definitely. But far preferable to the rotten new gods. In a sense he’s right, the pagan gods have greater elements of truth, better explanations (or at least more satisfying ones), and they call for self sacrifice and service of something higher than yourself. On the other hand, all the new gods are really just manifestations of one god, Self. The new gods are gods with no explanations, no need for them, no need for thought. They are the gods of mindless self-indulgence. They are the gods of drive thru coffee and plastic, the gods of consumers, urging their worshipers to consume even more. But the old gods are no different really in the end. The result is the same. Or is it? The end is the same in both cases except for one crucial detail. The old gods gave us self-satisfaction and the same sin, but as service to something higher, in this they are braver than the new gods, the old gods were brave enough to allow consciousness of the eternal and a desire for transcendence. The new gods have thoroughly and mercilessly destroyed that. Now is the end point. There is no eternal, there is no need to transcend. God has set eternity in the hearts of men so we would ask questions. The old gods used this, they stole it and answered the questions in a way. The new gods silence the voice in our heads. There are no questions, no answers. It is as C.S. Lewis foretold in ‘The Screwtape Letters’, it is easier to damn a numb man, one who thinks he’s fine, one who is comfortable. That is what the church dies in America and lives in China. WE ARE COMFORTABLE.

Man always creates gods that are less than himself because you cannot create something greater than yourself. In so doing man becomes less because man always becomes more and more like his gods. Man’s gods are always just extensions of what’s in the heart of man so man becomes less and less and more and more mannish each time he creates new gods. These new American gods might just be the death of man…

But the new gods aren’t entirely successful, they can’t kill the voice, just muffle it. So when it gets too loud, they pull a fast one and anesthetize it. They give us ’spirituality’, a watered down nothing that sates what’s left of our God-consciousness. And we go as sheep to the slaughter. In masses we go, happy to be damned.

So, in response Gaiman summons a vision of a counter-culture of the old gods. Except that the old gods aren’t a fix, just another demonic smokescreen. The human idea of counter-culture is a joke. It’s all the same in the end, just different names, different faces, all the same mannish ideas. The only view that offers something truly different, that’s really counter to all human culture is the Way. The true Christ-likeness of the apostles, the denial of the world and the focus on the eternal. Christianity in the mainstream has become just another anesthetic on the whole. You have the old god of orthodoxy, the form of godliness and the half-answers of ritual. And you have the new god of the Emergent Church, a culture of ’spirituality’ and ‘faith’ that just sates our consciousness into the sleep of the comfortable damned. I’m not saying that there aren’t true believers in either of those camps, I’m telling the truth about the majority of what I’ve seen. What we need here is the True God of the Bible and a real relationship with Him. Your Standard American Christian is as much a lost sheep as anyone else. What we need isn’t Christianity as a religion, politics as a tool, or any other human method that promises to fix the problem. We need nothing apart form a return to the Way. A return to true relationship and maybe even apostolic poverty, who know? God.

The church in China is alive because it isn’t easy to be Christian, you can’t be a comfortable Christian. You have to have the truth to have the courage to even claim the name of Christ there. In America it’s easy to claim the name of Christ and call yourself a Christian, but very hard to live like it. It’s a subtle but definite line. Let’s make sure we’re on the right side of it. The side of God, not gods. To quote Tolkien:

The board is set, the pieces are moving. Now we come to it, the great battle of our time. -Gandal