By Gary Potter

2018 SBC Conference

Theme: Saving America

Mr. Potter argues that modern civilization is not collapsing in a dramatic invasion, but is rotting from within as “barbarians” who reject Christian civilization already occupy the city. He contrasts the virtues, hierarchy, beauty, and religious culture of historic Christendom with today’s egalitarianism, rights-talk, legalism, materialism, and above all a pervasive cowardice that marks the “beginning of the end.” Using examples like Joshua Bell ignored in a subway and Beyonce’s vulgar performance in the Louvre, he shows how contemporary people are indifferent to true beauty and instead embrace a debased popular culture, including many Catholics who live no differently from the secular world. He defines art as the skillful making of what is beautiful and wise, a “portal to the divine” that forms our minds and thus our souls, and insists that Christians have a duty not only to avoid degrading art but to seek out, support, and promote what is rare and excellent as part of forming a Christian culture. He concludes that only when Christians courageously live according to what they profess—choosing the “narrow way” and preferring higher goods to vulgar entertainments—can the nation be converted, the land sanctified, and the reign of modernity brought to an end.

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