An article in the Washington Post on the Pope’s visit to D.C. Tuesday includes a quotation that frames a larger issue perfectly. According to Michael Sean Winters, “The Latin American church still generates culture, unlike the American church. It generates art, myth, the things that help people sustain relationships.”

A Christianity that generates culture! That is what is so lacking in America today. It isn’t an issue of ruling the culture, or of exercising power over anyone. And I’m not saying at all that culture, as such, is in any way what the church’s mission should be. But a vital Christianity, one that shapes people’s thinking and living, has always had cultural side-effects.

Today in America, the church tends to be either reactionary (opposing certain elements of the culture) or conformist (aping whatever the culture does in a usually futile attempt to be culturally relevant). It is generally not, however, generating culture.

Christianity played a role in the development of Western civilization, from its art to its great ideas, that it simply doesn’t play anymore. The culture that Christians generated varied greatly over time and through history. To take examples from English literature, Christianity inspired writers as varied as Dante, Milton, the Metaphysical poets, Coleridge, Hopkins, and even the modernist T. S. Eliot. Christianity generated the invention of the university, universal literacy, the rule of law, non-classical drama, human rights, and on and on.

Perhaps Christians today, though, are laying the foundation for generating culture again. Many are building strong families, which are the basis of every culture. Many Christians are building an educational infrastructure that can bear important cultural fruit. We will know we are generating culture again when Christian artists do not just follow styles but invent new ones that even non-Christians follow; when Christians formulate ideas that shape our larger institutions; when Christianity has a fruitful presence in society once again.

On the other hand, it may indeed be that Christianity is entering a time of cultural marginalization or even persecution. Even in such a time of suffering and testing, Christianity must be vital enough to affect how its adherents think and live. The solution is never to conform to a hostile culture, which would mean the disappearance, or the swallowing up of the church, or its being changed to a mere cultural religion.

The Republicans have one hope in the next election: The Democrats’ Achilles heel. Namely, that liberals are SO condescending to typical, normal Americans. That does not wear well for typical, normal voters. Consider what Barack Obama says, as recorded here:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

So THAT’S why we small town yokels are religious. And THAT’S why we “cling to guns” and have problems with illegal immigration. Nothing about beliefs or principles. We are economically depressed and so are in need of Obama’s government programs. Then we wouldn’t have to be religious or like guns anymore.

Obama is saying now he didn’t mean to come across that way. But what is more worrisome is the glimpse of a worldview that the statement reveals. It reflects that old leftist ideology that Obama has up till now done such a good job of trying to transcend, the Marxist and neo-Marxist notion that accounts for beliefs, institutions, and habits of mind as nothing more than covers for economic oppression.

Athletes are getting stronger all the time, thanks to scientific conditioning, and records keep falling. But the velocity of a baseball thrown really, really hard has not changed all that much since Walter Johnson’s days. 100 m.p.h., and maybe as much as 3 m.p.h. more, is as fast as anyone can throw it.

According to this article, that is close to the human limit. Muscles can indeed get bigger and stronger, which is why athletes can run, swim, and jump better than ever before. But throwing a baseball has to do not only with muscles but with ligaments and tendons. Those do not get stronger as muscles do, no matter how many steroids you take. Powerful muscle exertion can snap, tear, and over stretch them like rubber bands. The article says that throwing a ball 110 m.p.h. would be about the very most a human arm could take.

Well, the official record is 103, so there is room for a new flamethrower to throw even harder, before he blows out his arm.

The separation of church and states, as it is currently construed, forbids public schools or other institutions getting taxpayer money from teaching Christianity, performing Christian rites, or conducting Christian prayers. That ruling, though, is not always being applied, though, when it comes to Islam in our public, tax-supported schools. An Islamic school in Minnesota is a charter school, meaning it receives taxpayer money. Various “multicultural” curricula involve role-playing that forces students to act Muslim, which, in Islamic terms, is unseparable from BEING Muslim. Read this and click its links: Sharia in the schools: Monitoring the American madrassa.

Notice how in many leftist circles multi-culturalism trumps everything, including other liberal concerns (feminism, secularism, gay rights).