Neal A. Maxwell wrote in his book ‘Sermons Not Spoken’: . . . As in centuries past, therefore, many mortals are disinterested in real religion, because they have been enveloped in irreligious secularism or have been disappointed or desolated by false religion. Many have simply become too busy in the work of the world.
In Isaiah’s remarkable prophesy contained in the first part of chapter 24 of his book, we read that “haughty people of the earth do languish” (Isaiah 24:5). One rendering of the words “haughty people” is the “upper class”. Languish connotes a drooping, a spiritlessness, a loss of animation. Significantly, Nephi also used the word droop in addressing his soul—“No longer droop in sin.” (2 Nephi 4:28)
Granted the seekers add up to “many” (Doctrine and Covenants 123:12). But most mortals are preoccupied with the cares and anxieties of the world.
In the above context one thinks, for instance, of the upper class such as was portrayed in the Public Broadcasting System’s Brideshead Revisited. At least some of the upper class of England were, in fact, a spent people. For them, life had lost its meaning; even their frivolity showed their boredom and their sense of emptiness.
Just how, over decades of time, the upper classes—the opinion molders, the influence makers—have interacted with and affected others in various societies would require the analysis of a gifted psychologist-historian. However, these reflections of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the “first whiff of secularism” in his native land and about the growing disbelief of the upper class in earlier Russia are one illustration:
- “Different parts of the world have followed different paths, but today they are all approaching the threshold of common ruin. In the past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. . . . Faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation. But in the seventeenth century . . . Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the nineteenth century. . . .By the time of the Revolution, faith virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; among the uneducated too, faith had declined. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God,: National Review, July 22,1983, pg 374.)
Secularism, the setting in which most Christians will live out their lives, is both a diversion from and a perversion of life’s true purpose. Hence the disappointment in the secular search for the meaning of life. Hence the drooping of the human spirit in which the conscious can come to be regarded as an intruder. Indeed, ennui, boredom, and humdrum hedonism are descriptive of those thus afflicted as this lamentation indicates:
- Are all men’s lives . . . broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, punctuated by screams, imbecilities. agonies and death? Who knows?. . . I don’t know. . . . Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody, yet everybody got the wrong thing. I don’t know. It’s beyond me. It’s all darkness. (Public Broadcasting System production of “The Good Soldier,” presented in early 1983.)
Thus, while we usually think of apostasy solely in terms of theological deviation, we often fail to see its connections to the everyday, human condition in which the consequences of that deviation are enormous. ~Neal A. Maxwell, ‘Sermons Not Spoken’, Bookcraft 1985, p. 68-71
continued. . .
