Needless to say, a lot changes between your 10th trip around the sun and your 20th. Happy Meals don't bring the promised happiness anymore. Eating at McDonalds turns into a last ditch effort to satisfy hunger. And, while it might be a "natural" phenomenon to find most people in their adolescent years and early twenties trying to distance themselves from things that just aren't "cool," I've noticed something: it's not just a post-adolescent issue any longer. It's a cultural issue.
We live in a culture suspicious of the common. I say suspicious, because it's not only passe to shop at WalMart or buy a Happy Meal for your kids, we're convinced by pop culture that it's downright dangerous. What restaurant does your mind think about when you hear this: Do you know what they put in that stuff? Or what store do you think about when you hear this: Do you know how much they pay their employees and where they get their products? Without debating the merits of fried food or clothes made in China, it's fairly clear that we're supplied with reasons to be suspicious of things that aren't "specialty" or stores that help us "live our lives." Exposing the practices at your local Burger King will land a spot in the headlines - showing up and doing the same at Qdoba? Not so much.
All of this goes back to a revolution in our cultural thought that took place a couple hundred years back during "the Enlightenment." The Enlightenment was helpful in some respects, encouraging a more robust use of our minds. For the Christian, a sadly neglected venue for worship is the life of the mind. The Great Commandment includes love of God by way of our thinking and the challenges of the Enlightenment served as a catalyst (even if it was in response to some arrogant worldviews) for the church to engage our thinking for the glory of God. However, the cultural fallout from the Enlightenment was not so positive. At its core, the Enlightenment championed a philosophy that was even too radical for pagan Greece and can be summed up by way of Protagoras' statement: "Man is the measure of all things." That concept drove Enlightenment thinking and still drives popular thought about the self in relation to the world to this day. What you feel, what you think, what you sense about the world around you is, in the final analysis, what matters most. Objectivity and subjectivity are blurred together and we are left to ourselves to decide not only matters of right and wrong, but matters of truth and falsehood.
So how has the Enlightenment affected our view of things common? Here's my take on it: the cultural move to (ultimately) de-objectivize everything has cheated people out of the sense of uniqueness we ought to have as beings created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Instead of finding an identity outside of ourselves, we've been told that our identity is up to us to either realize or construct for ourselves. Instead of understanding we were created for the purpose of glorifying God, we've been told that we are chance accidents, a collection of cells that could just as well have ended up arranged as a prairie dog. Instead of understanding our work as a calling, we've been told it's there to pay the bills so we can spend the rest of our time trying to figure out or live out who we are. It's a wholesale cheapening of human existence - and if that's all we are, who wants to be or be associated with something common?
When I became a dad, I renewed my license to stop at McDonalds and buy Chicken McNuggets. And you know what? I still like them. Particularly with the barbecue sauce served in the containers with foil that, if you're not careful, will end up adhering to surfaces via the residual sauce. So there's some food for thought today. It's not deep and weighty theology. But it's been on my mind lately. Let me finish by saying: you can eat a Happy Meal to the glory of God. I should be back in a day or two with more from Studies in the Sermon on the Mount.
To God Alone Be the Glory,
-Chris
