Bernard Zylstra lists five ways that modernity has impacted society in “Modernity and the American Empire.” I would like to see how these negative effects can be utilized as five starting points for a counter-revolution.
The first impact is secularity. Rather than upholding traditional ethics, seeing freedom as acting in accordance to God’s will, people claimed that “to be free is to act in accordance with rules established by the human will” (3). Re-converting everyone to Christianity is not realistic. Instead, the counter-revolution should focus on what the founding fathers saw as extremely important in a pluralist society: coexistence and cooperation. Elisha Williams stressed this in his pamphlet in Conneticut in 1744: “Every man has an equal right to follow the dictates of his own conscience in the affairs of religion” (Dreisbach, 178), and every man ought to be able “to speak his sentiments openly concerning such matters as
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This has two components. The first is that people seek value and worth and contentment in material goods. Modernity encourages people to seek “the acquisition of material bliss” (6) in order to discover meaning and worth. But these things do not bring joy. A large part of the counter-revolution ought to focus on providing a meaningful alternative to the accumulation of stuff. Thinking of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, since many humans now find themselves in a unique position of material security, we are free to devote our lives to higher things such as love or religion. One could simply demonstrate the benefits of human relationships and interaction (examples: family dinners, having a conversation face to face with a friend instead of over text, etc.). Living a life that shows that joy does not come from stuff, but from other people (which is ultimately joy from God) would already be extremely counter-cultural in our consumeristic