There is a saying that one man’s hero is another man’s traitor. In the battle of ideas, one man’s apologist is another man’s propagandist. But how can you tell the difference? In the world of ideas, what sounds good on paper may not work in practice. So the right interpretation of the world, both spiritual and physical, matters immensely in the pattern you choose for living, because action reveals the person, and action is often driven by belief. If the wrong ideas and interpretation is adopted, then the wrong compass for finding meaning is selected. Consider how important the compass is. A rocket headed to Mars that is off course even by one degree will miss the target and become space junk. At close range, the mistake of one degree won’t seem to matter, but over a long distance, the error becomes more obvious. So the ideas you subscribe to are important, but even moreso, the hero you choose to follow matters most of all, especially if that hero is one that never misses the mark (because he created the mark and everything else).

For example,The Communist Manifesto sounds like a good idea on paper, but in practice, in the real world, we all witnessed a century of unthinkable slaughter over that little book. The degree of error may have appeared small, but from the revolution in Russia to the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was the undeniable bloodbath. I remember reading that little book in 1996 and thinking that it made a lot of sense. What shocks me about that is that I was reading the book after millions of people, possibly as many as 100 million, had been killed worldwide because of that book. Yet somehow it still sounded good on paper. The body count was still tallying up, but the words on paper made me forget the very bloody history that had occurred partially in my own lifetime. After I shook my brain awake from the spell, I realized that words on paper do not translate to real-world applications. Not all good ideas are good ideas.

The interpretation game can be a dangerous one, especially today, and unless we act as gatekeepers of our thoughts, we allow others to steer us. Clearly, as children we take what our teachers and parents tell us to be a fact, for why on earth would they mislead a child? Today, media has unmatched power in entering our minds and conjuring thoughts, far more than parents or teachers. Unless you grew up in an Amish community, you have been blasted from birth by a continuous firehose from advertising and argument, all the way from Sesame Street to Stranger Things. This is not some conspiracy theory, this is what we are all aware of but accept as part of modern life. There is deliberate implantation of ideas in our brains, and for the most part we seem to enjoy it. We are passive to it, opening up our minds like house showings. Most families have multiple TVs, laptops, smartphones, radios, and home assistants listening and guiding on what to listen to or what to watch next. We certainly go along with it. There is minimal protest. (If you have four hours to kill, watch the old BBC Documentary called The Century of the Self. Be prepared to pause for reflection on how your life has played out, as past choices may appear under a different light.)

A massive flood of inputs is aimed at our minds, making noise and distracting us. This is exactly the goal, because the noise keeps us gyrating and moving and distracted. In silence, the biggest questions roar back to life. When these real questions about meaning and purpose arise, that’s bad for business. For me, the Covid lockdown opened up the silence, so I could hear, finally, those questions in full.

We live by narratives and if we don’t choose the narrative, the noise chooses for us. The interpretations that we assent to often become our real-world practices, and thereby have real-world consequences. But what we accept as our chosen interpretation is not always what is best for our lives. In our worldly minds, we feel wired for competition. Every sporting event and reality show and drama is presented as a contest. We love to take sides. In victory we can gloat, and in loss we can paint ourselves as a victim. Even when things are going well, we like to complain. If anyone doubts this, consider that America in 2023 is the most technologically advanced and wealthy country in human history, yet millions are depressed and worried about the future. To quote Junior Soprano, we are “…like the old woman with a Virginia ham under her arm, crying the blues cuz she has no bread.”

The choice of which worldview to use as a interpretative decoder ring for life is not my main focus here, but I wanted to mention it because our American academic and business leaders have shifted their worldview over the past centuries, moving away from ideas founded on Judeo-Christian thought toward liberalism, socialism, and utilitarianism while keeping the profit motive much intact. This has happened gradually but in recent decades has reached a tipping point where the old ideas of a living God are being sidelined, along with the related ideas of spirits and sins. All are being boxed up for long-term storage. In the coming decades, what this means is that the new radicals will be Christians, so Europe and America will have gone full circle. The pesky Christians will once again be marginalized, at least for a little while.

Moving Christianity out of the public sphere has already led to a very different America. Perhaps being Christian had become too easy, because it was never meant to be. When Jesus talked about the narrow gate, it didn’t sound like he meant taking the exit ramp to hit the McDonald’s Drive-Thru. “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Mt 7:13-14) Then later he deciphers it for us, saying, “I am the gate!” on John’s Gospel and we all know what gate he had to go through for eternal life, which was abject suffering on the Cross.

The term Christian has been too easy to throw around, and too easy to be abused. Wearing a cross is a fashion symbol while the commandments are optional. One of the main reasons I fell away was the hypocrisy that I saw, and the lack of conviction and contrition among believers. The salespeople who were selling this product called Christianity made it appear ridiculous. But over time, thanks be to God, I realized that everything that I thought was Christianity was just Protestantism and liberalism dressed up as “the Way” of Christ.

The coming future will test the mettle of Christians because we will be living in a world similar to the day before Jesus was crucified. Christians will be outcasts and increasingly persecuted. Real persecution will happen again, and not the “persecutions” that we hear about annually like the marginalization of Christ and Christmas. This will be the kind where people lose their job for adhering to the statement of the Nicene Creed and declaring obvious truths, like saying that marriage is between one man and one woman.

What is most interesting is that ideas that came from Christ are being used among all the competing ideologies. Ideas of equal dignity, social justice, charity, serving the poor, and loving one another have been co-opted by humanists, atheists, socialists, and modernists. The only difference is that Christ has been removed from the picture, as if he were just some rich uncle who passed away and left us his best stuff. This leads directly to the second main difference, which is that there is no longer such a thing as sin. There are just oppressed and oppressors. The only sin left is that of the ‘oppressor.’ A trade has been made: Original Sin for Pandora’s Box. With Original Sin, we pin the blame for society’s ills on our own personal built-in flaws; with Pandora’s Box we get to blame someone else.

Not every Christian interpretation of the Bible is a good one. Fundamentalism and Young Earth Creationism may sound good on paper to some people, but anyone with even a mild understanding of science knows intuitively that the idea of a 6,000-year-old planet is flat-out silly. On the flip side, there are those who remove all spirits and miracles from the Bible, like Thomas Jefferson, and end up with nothing but Moral Therapeutic Deism. In both of these cases, too much is amputated, as one cuts out reason and the other cuts out the spirit. Then there is the justice vs. mercy spectrum. Some see God as the angry father who seems over-eager to punish us for every error. Others see a God that just affirms sin, or stranger still, a God that denies sin even exists. Wherever you see a Pride flag outside of a Church, you see a re-enactment of Henry VIII’s re-invention of Christ happening, as sin is being formed to fit the sinner, not the sinner formed to Christ. In either case, these are definitely bad interpretations. There is justice and there is mercy. But there is never only justice or only mercy. There is one way back and that is to repent and believe the Gospel. It is Christ and his Church that must conform to my desires, it is I who must change and conform to Christ and his Church.

As for me, I side with St. Augustine, who said, “Any interpretation of a biblical passage that militates against the love of God and neighbor is necessarily a bad interpretation.” (WOF Bible, 21) Love of God and neighbor is “the ultimate criterion for correct biblical reading.” But then I align with St. Augustine on most things, because he weaves justice and mercy, faith and reason, and in his world faith has a slight edge over reason that makes all the difference. This means that the interpretation of loving someone is where the interpreters have a field day, because most people today see love as simply affirming everyone’s favorite sin. But Jesus never affirms anyone’s sin. That’s because he’s against it. For all those who just see Jesus as a “nice teacher,” he sure talked about hell a lot, and even if he spent time with sinners, I don’t see the sinners continuing to sin. They are converted, because they all repent and believe the Gospel.

But how do we know who to listen to? Who can interpret? Who has the right to do so? How can we trust any interpretation? How can anyone know what is the right interpretation? How can anyone know anything?

This leads right into the rabbit hole of that branch of philosophy known as epistemology, and as far as interpretation goes, and what to believe, you can really get lost, especially in someone else’s thoughts. The reason we end up relying on ourselves and our own experiences as the final authority is because it seems like our head is the only fortress left, the last temple. This is true, but the problem with that is we’ve let too many spies into the fortress, and we’ve invited a circus into that holy place.

The pursuit of truth becomes paralyzing. There are more subjects to study than flavors of ice cream. Philology and archaeology and history and philosophy and psychology, to name just a few. No one can understand all of these subjects, or not deeply, and especially not if you keep a job or have a family. We give up and open the gate.

No wonder people flee from religion. The conflicting messages from the media and the faithful become too much. As for the Bible and Christianity, it’s too hard to understand. Given that I have a day job and commitments, it’s impossible to chase all of these things down. There is too much to sift through. Who can fully understand the Trinity or fathom the Virgin Birth? What about the resurrection of the body? Even among Christians, these mean vastly different things. There are too many arguments and ways of looking at these things.

When every ideology and religion and denomination is trying to pull us in this or that direction, Netflix seems so much easier. Facebook and Hulu don’t push anything on us, right? We just want to make it easy. Disney and the NFL make it easy, and fun, because they just provide entertainment for us. Then we don’t have to think about all of this stuff. It’s easier to just ignore it all. I just want to be entertained and passively watch the screens in front of me. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Can’t I just let someone else do all the interpreting? They aren’t trying to shape me or change me. Right?

Right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, no.

While there are many people and organizations who will gladly “volunteer” the right interpretation and the correct narrative of life for you, what is easiest is not best. What is best, what is true, cannot be passively received from a TV or phone. It requires some effort. Anyone who has tried to lose ten pounds or learn a foreign language or master a musical instrument the “easy way” knows that it doesn’t work.

Nearly everyone is willing to sell their worldview to you, if you let them. The best salesperson is the one who sells you something you don’t need, and then you thank her for it. Likewise, the greatest evangelists are those who don’t appear to be evangelizing at all.

The more you sit back and let the images pass before your eyes, the more you are shaped and formed to an interpretation chosen by people who have plans for you, and they are most likely in an office building in New York or Los Angeles, and certainly not anywhere near an upper room in Jerusalem.

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