Tidings of Great Joy

A few weeks ago I attended, for the second year in a row, a performance of Christmas music by the Slavic Chorale, an ensemble of singers and musicians living in the Sacramento area. And just like last time, witnessing this concert was to be immersed in a culture of unwavering faith and extraordinary vitality.

The significance of this congregation thriving in California’s capital city, forming an unassailable island in a sea of secular progressivism, offers hope to the rest of us. Their community is growing instead of dying. Their culture is intact instead of fragmented. Their joy transcends political turmoil instead of being overwhelmed or manipulated by it.

The most poignant example of Christian joy transcending the terror and temptations of the world was the fact that nearly everyone in this community were from either Ukraine or Russia. As the horrific war afflicting their intimate relatives enters its fourth year, these first- and second-generation immigrants displayed almost heartbreaking courage—the courage to embrace their faith and each other despite senseless tragedy. In an arrangement of the song “Peace on Earth” by the Christian group Casting Crowns, they sang:

“And in despair I bowed my head. There is no peace on earth I said. For hate is strong and mocks the song. Of peace on earth, good will toward men.”

This acknowledgment, sung by people whose friends and relatives thousands of miles away are enduring death and destruction we can scarcely imagine, was followed immediately by this refrain:

“Then rang the bells more loud and deep, God is not dead, nor doth he sleep. The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good will to men.”

For people living with war, not as a historical memory or an abstract concept, but in a moment when so many of their loved ones are suffering and dying right now, over there, singing this song carries a message of almost unbearable intensity. God is not dead. Despite the horrors we endure, love wins.

Watching these expressions of faith from the performers and within this congregation brought forth more than just an awestruck respect for their unity and belief. It reminded me of who we once were, even here in California, before secular progressivism rose to dominate our culture and our politics. I was born in the final years of the so-called baby boom and, as a child, was old enough to remember the years before America turned a corner.

My upbringing was Methodist, and in my church sanctuary, the most popular hymn was Onward Christian Soldiers. The entire congregation sang it, week after week, without a shred of irony, with an innocent faith in its fundamental message of resolve to struggle against sin and wickedness.

Up until a few years ago, when my parents were still alive, we would visit them and take them to that same church on Sundays. Apart from the name on the sign and the buildings on the property, the church today is unrecognizable. The congregation is fragmented into roughly four parts. There are Koreans, who hold their services in a separate chapel, and then in the main sanctuary, there are Nigerian immigrants, gay couples, a small minority of elderly white people whose children have mostly fled to other states, and an equally small minority of white progressives who attend the church because it has shifted to the far left.

On one occasion, I remember sitting in a service with my father when the pastor, a woman wearing a rainbow sash that was most definitely not meant as a reference to Genesis 9:12-17, called for the small children to be brought into the main sanctuary. There were less than a dozen of them. Once they sat before her in front of the altar, she explained to them how they could have two mothers, or two fathers, or a mother and a father. My own father, aged 90 at the time and coping with the recent loss of his wife of more than 60 years, could scarcely believe his ears.

The point here isn’t to digress in order to render a moral judgment on gay marriage. Only to point out the incredible contrast between who we were and who we are. What boundaries are left for these liberal Methodists who assert, with an intolerance for dissent that belies their self-righteousness, not merely that love is love, but that it’s their religious obligation to teach five-year-olds about gay marriage? Shall they invite drag queens to perform for the children? Why not? Or shall they tell the children that they can choose to be boys instead of girls, or girls instead of boys? At what point might even these progressive Methodists recognize that their perpetually escalating “tolerance” has set them adrift?

One tradition that still lives at this Methodist church is to serve coffee and cookies after Sunday service. But in that courtyard, under the same giant silver maple tree that shaded us a half-century ago, there is no unity. The Koreans cluster in one corner, the Nigerians in another, and finally, also grouped by themselves, the whites, gay couples, young progressives, and legacy elders with their canes and walkers. There are almost no children. Drowning in tolerance, grasping for relevance, fragmented and demographically doomed; that is the state of the church where I was baptized.

The street where I grew up, in what we now call Silicon Valley, was once awash in kids. Homes in the 1960s sold for roughly three times the average single breadwinner’s annual income. Affordable and abundant, they sold like hotcakes, and moms stayed home. Babies were born, and after school, the street was filled with outdoor play. Every family had at least two children; many had three, and four or more were not uncommon. Many a bedroom had bunk beds. Nobody thought it was unusual to raise three or four children in a 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom home, one for the girls, one for the boys, and one for mom and dad.

Today that street is empty, and it isn’t because the kids are all sequestered indoors and glued to screens, although that would be bad enough. It’s because there aren’t any kids. Nobody is having them anymore. For no good reason, homes in the valley now cost 15-20 times the average single breadwinner’s annual income. Everybody works. And in any event, children cause “climate change.” Even for those few who can afford it, California’s new and nihilistic “climate change” religion provides moral cover for childless hedonism.

By contrast, the vitality of the congregation listening to the Slavic Chorale last week was not only evident in their faith and unity. It was evident simply by virtue of the disruptive children throughout the crowd. Infants, children, and teenagers numbered nearly half of the total attendees. The crying of babies, the irrepressible exuberance of so many youth, all of them dressed in their Sunday best, this too was music to my ears, sadly now unfamiliar but so very welcome.

These are the reasons it felt like coming home for me to attend this Christmas concert, even though I couldn’t understand the words the conductor spoke between the songs. The spirit and the tone of those words were not foreign. They felt familiar, and they triggered memories. And I knew this is the society I’d rather live in than what prevails outside the walls of that church, the secular, divided culture we’ve allowed to descend upon us and dominate our lives. There is something greater than ourselves. There is a God. We are forgiven. Love is stronger.

Last week I glimpsed a living reminder of the California where I grew up. It’s still here. It’s still alive, in this congregation that defies the darkness of the world. They are not alone.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Edward Ring

Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.

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