MODERNS & POMOS

The Modern parent, Christian or not, is the cumulative product of a culture that for over two hundred years pushed Atheism from a nascent, revolutionary concept into customary norms in every developed area of life known to man. That two hundred year period, known as Modernism, resulted in an entire Western culture so philosophically and culturally entrenched in Atheism 1) that the Modern non-Christian either denied God’s existence or else marginalized His existence and 2) that the Modern Christian polarized reality into realms of sacred (God directly bears upon the religious) and secular (God does not directly bear upon the nonreligious ). It is critical to understand that the Christian was not free of all practical atheistic expressions merely because he was Christian. He was still Modern, and unaware of it, manifested atheistic tendencies with more vigor and zeal than his non-Christian counterpart.


The fundamental principle for understanding the broadest interpretation of Modern culture (and the Modern parent) is its aspiration to Atheism. Moderns (anyone born before 1989 or anyone with a substantive memory of life before1989) operate almost exclusively within the atheistic framework that what can be known can be known apart from God. For the non-Christian this means that God does not practically figure into any part of the world. For the Christian this means that, though God "figures" into the world, the world can still be understood and appreciated apart from Him. This concept, I argue throughout my entire book, is the focal point to which the Modern ignorantly seeks to orient his Post-modern child.


The Post-modern (anyone born after 1989 or anyone with no substantive memory of life before 1989) is culturally oriented to Polytheism—not Atheism. It is critical to grasp this point if one is to understand the distinction between the Modern parent and his Post-modern child. The Post-modern affirms the existence of deity so that both the non-Christian and the Christian Post-modern believe that deity theoretically and practically figures into the world. On the basis of belief in spirituality, there is no difference between the Post-modern Christian and non-Christian. In other words, religion is no longer a separate conversation from regular (read “secular”) life.


The Post-modern holds to the polytheistic aspiration that what can be known cannot be known apart from deity. This is even true for the Post-modern who calls himself an atheist. The Modern atheist said that there was no God for anyone—end of the discussion. The Post-modern atheist says that though there is no God for himself, there might be God for someone else. Herein is a culturally nuanced rift as divergent as any opposite.


I provide the year 1989 as a general marker for the generational shift from Modern to the Post-modern culture for the following reasons.


1) The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was an indication of the beginning of the end of Communism. Communism was the political form of Atheism and the most comprehensive attempt by that revolutionary spirit to de-Christianize the Free West. Therefore, the death of Communism was the death of the dominating world spirit of Atheism. This does not mean that Atheism and its cultural expressions were dead in 1989. What it does mean is that optimism in Communism had peaked and was rapidly on the decline while being replaced by another dominant worldview.


2) The fall of Communism did not just happen because of politically democratic influences like Ronald Reagan or Gorbachev. Rather, it was attributed to the sum of the moral motives and actions of the "little" people on both sides of the Iron Curtain. History makes it clear that the common masses of non-governmental institutions behind the Iron Curtain were largely responsible for the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on the East German side in June 1989, for the overthrow of Ceaucescu in Romania on Christmas Day 1989, for the freeing of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in 1989 & 1990, for the beginnings of revolution in Yugoslavia in 1989, and for the democratic push in the Soviet Union the same year.


Gorbachev formally disarmed the Soviet Union in 1991, but his political decision was entirely preceded by an uncharacteristically democratic revolt behind the Iron Curtain. The common people did not just happen to suddenly revolt against the political form of Communism. They were revolting against the philosophy of Atheism, the engine of the Communist political system. Communism no longer resonated with the majority of people. The revolt against Communism indicated a definite shift from the dominating world spirit of Atheism to a world spirit of faith, however ambiguous and varied that faith has expressed itself these last two decades.


3) The generic interpretation of End Times prophecy was completely wrapped up in the outcome of the Cold War (c. 1945-1991). Most Christians now reject the once popular theological consensus (or at the least they are ambivalent to it). Before the European reforms in the late 1980’s, it was largely believed (with slight variations) that the Cold War would climax with the Rapture, followed by rise of Anti-Christ within the European Common Market, seven years of Great Tribulation, the rule of Christ on earth for 1,000 years, the Battle of Armageddon and finally Heaven. Or some similar order.


Cold-War-generation Christians typically believed themselves to be the chosen generation who would experience the initial climax of Biblical prophecy via a Rapture. Though the date was altered many times in the 20th century, those prophecies were finally mathematically predicted to happen by or around 1988 (40 years after Israel became a nation). Whatever the case, the Last Days and the climax of Communism were to be intimately entangled events. Since 2000, the Christian community has been reticent to project an actual date for the end of the world.

FOREWORD

During my last semester of college (1996) I sat in the classroom of an elementary school in Pensacola, Florida for fourteen weeks to complete an internship required of me to graduate. I was assigned to an observation post at the back of the classroom for twelve of those weeks to “learn” how to teach. Despite sincere and innovative attempts to please the teacher, I was subject to weekly, scathing criticism about my common interaction with the students and my irreverent view of discipline. Granted, I liked the students so I spoke with them outside teaching hours. This behavior, however, was viewed as delinquent. I later learned that it encouraged familiarity which we all know breeds contempt.

What was not on Teacher's radar was the wide range of dysfunction that lay behind the sweet white, brown and black faces she taught. None of that dysfunction mattered to her. Further, she did not care to see that these problems vied for the attention of their brains: students and family members embroiled in the effects of attempted murder, arson, chronic illness, emotional detachment disorder. Despite the full school days which regulated activity to the minute, no talking was allowed at lunch time, no free play allowed at recess, no unscripted talk during classes. Essentially no time lay within or outside the program to address concerns and interests fundamentally linked to the human condition. Oh, and it was a Christian school.

I spent those twelve weeks in a little, red chair writing an educational abstract called “The Structure of Non-reason" in addition to the copious observational notes I was required to take. In it I sought to describe the irony I saw before me: the perpetration of a religious ideology claiming world significance, dominance and influence, yet in no way, shape or form addressing the essential problems of moral conscience, psychology or physiology in its classrooms. The religious portion of the curriculum was relatively nonsensical, for it did not reconcile its tenets with the very problems the students were becoming. The students, I concluded, would be better off just learning information and bypassing all of the disjointed, religious parts. I was fascinated by the hubris and ignorance of the instiution and was intent to encapsulate the metamorphosis of the problem as it unfolded before my eyes.

On the left side of my open notebook I kept scrupulous observational notes such as “Children explain their answers on the board” and “Earnest is left-handed” and “The children laughed because the Midianites were killed.” On the right page I wrote “There’s this bit of non-reason that frees man up as autonomous in the created universe.” Twelve years later, I am ready to share my observations.

I originally wrote this book for parents, only to realize that the majority of parents who read my book or discussed with me the thoughts in my book thought it to be so much scholastic pontification. They could not wrap their modern brains around the nexus of what I was saying: a fundamental shift has occurred in the way people understand truth and that shift occurred as recently as 1989. Being free of their criticisms and increasingly marginalized sensibilities, I am writing my analysis of the strange amalgamation of post-Cold War youth I call POMOS.

I have specifically rewritten this book for those who have a legitimate professional interest in one of the largest sub-cultures alive in the West today, the POMO. These are children raised by Moderns (Christian or not) who raised them on a culture of science-vs-faith emphasizing traditional absolutes (like freedom) proven to be largely founded upon a relativistic concept of truth, sketchy social objectives (like freedom) supported by romantic religious platitudes, and a transient value system (like freedom) on the cusp of another cultural shift. I have worked with POMOS in my own school for ten years but have been aware of a strange, cultural transformation since 1989.

None of the illustrations I give you here are specifically attached to a parent or student of Stone Table (or its affiliates). Rather, they represent actual conversations and interactions I have had with hundreds of children and parents over the last twelve years of my educatonal career. Any actual illustrations I give do not have names attached to them and are altered enough to not be recognizable by such persons were they to read my manuscript. However, I would dare say that these Everyman examples will be uncomfortably recognizable across the wide spectrum I intend to describe.