Motherhood Through a Materialist Lens

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MqvIddYMMEk

This video 'short' appeared on the NPR website promoting a podcast. The clip is only about a minute long but the implications are sweeping and eternal. Materialism is a religion and its becoming pervasive in society as its implications are being worked out and applied. It is creating a new world and a new kind of person.

It is insinuated that motherhood and the maternal instinct are myths and parental attachment, devotion, and affection are reduced to chemical reactions and responses. Things like love or even the values we would instill in our children are simply names we give to things that don't actually exist but rather describe our responses to chemical processes. Though not stated, it should be plain to all that such 'feelings' could be simulated and reproduced by means of a pill. It is indeed a brave new world.

Obviously the family itself is a concept that is already questioned and subject to redefinition. But the host in her utter lost-ness doesn't seem to realize as she speaks of 'non-gestational parents' that the concept of 'parent' itself has no meaning under such an understanding. Nor really does the concept of village. How does one define that? It's completely subjective. This is a great irony as the materialist worldview seeks to objectify all thought and subject it to data-driven 'facts' - in actuality it succumbs to complete subjectivity as we've seen with issues such as gender.

The Christian response to all of this has been to return to the supposed glory days of Christendom - itself an erroneous and actually heretical paradigm that subverts New Testament teaching. And so faithful Christians find themselves in an unhappy situation - having to oppose these powerful currents in society.

In other quarters we see a re-embrace of Thomism as a response to Ockham - who receives the blame for all of this as today's Materialism is viewed as Nominalism gone to seed. There's an element of truth to that and yet Thomism (while comprehensive) is no solution. An impressive philosophical system to be sure, it's not a Biblical paradigm either.

Few Materialists are principled and in reality no one can really and truly live out the implications of the system. People intuitively know better and yet whatever transcendence they retain is affected by it and watered down. On a practical level, in their day to day thinking and reasoning, Materialism dominates them and such poorly reasoned (and frankly insane) approaches to questions such as motherhood are shaped by it. And this sort of godless thinking has also deeply affected the Church. How often do I hear 'conservative' Christians talk about the latest research on the development of teenager's brains when discussing parenting, boundaries, and issues like culpability? This would be but one of a myriad of areas where once again such materialist thinking (as demonstrated in the video clip) is affecting Christian thought.

The sweeping embrace of feminism by the Christian community has led to not only the extreme examples of gender confusion that dominate the news cycle, but even parenting as we've seen the Mr. Mom paradigm become widely accepted. In my own congregation we now have a man being put forward as deacon who is a stay-at-home dad and thus completely unqualified for the office.

Most of the Western Church (and increasingly the Global Church) are confused on these points. There is a response to it but unfortunately it's coming from quarters that not only champion Christendom but also strongly assert the most extreme forms of Dominionist Theology. Questions like the nature of motherhood and feminism are addressed to be sure but within the Dominionist framework, and as such are less about obedience to Christ and Spirit-wrought revelation (Scripture) and more about power paradigms, outbreeding the pagans, and preparing for the day in which the Church is able to take over society. Along the way the New Testament's ethical teachings about everything from money to violence are abandoned. Concepts like victory and obedience are re-defined as well -as is the Kingdom itself. The end result is the end justifies the means - as long as the Church 'wins'. Of course if that's defined in a way different from Scripture such a victory is in fact the hallmark of disobedience, apostasy, and thus defeat.

The path is narrow - as described in the gospels. We are surrounded by enemies and great peril on all sides. We are surrounded by false religion and Materialism is certainly that though its proponents scoff at the notion that it contains a religious component. They fail to understand their deification of an epistemological process and its interaction with an absolutized matter. It's a low and very base religion to be sure but it is one nonetheless resulting in a very evil set of ethics and the degradation of humanity. Its messianic hopes and eschatology give little hope and at best can result in some kind of dystopian nightmare.

That said, from the standpoint of the New Testament the so-called glory days of Christendom were also something of a dystopia and a future renewal would represent the same.

These days require clear and vigilant thinking. The path is lonely to say the least. It's so much easier and undoubtedly more attractive to jump on to the Dominionist bandwagon in order to combat the forces of Materialism. But if you stand back or better yet climb up onto the bulwarks of Mount Zion and gaze out over the fallen and cursed world you'll realize that the 'mountains' (or rival kingdoms) of Materialism and Dominionism are in fact just different sides of the same mountain - the one we call Babel, the City of Man and all his lost hopes and dreams.